Ralph Angel stepped into the room. He looked around, brushed dust off the lampshade, and drummed his fingers on the headboard. Charley expected him to say something about the way she’d maintained the room, but he didn’t.
Instead, he laughed nervously. “Weird, you know. Never thought I’d be back here again.” He drifted over to the dresser, lifted Micah’s T-shirt off The Cane Cutter. “Something tells me you didn’t get this at Walmart.”
“It belonged to Dad.”
Ralph Angel nodded, and again, Charley waited for him to say something about her being spoiled. But he lifted the shirt higher and studied the piece more closely, ran his finger along the cane knife, traced the pant fold. He stared into the figure’s deeply carved eyes, then turned it around to examine the back, handling it with respect, even reverence.
“Micah said you talk to it.”
“Micah said that?” Charley wondered what other personal tics and idiosyncrasies, what small moments, forgotten or overlooked, Micah had innocently revealed.
Ralph Angel gently turned The Cane Cutter around. “Kids. Boy, I tell you, nothing gets past them.” He shook his head. “And, man, don’t promise you’re going to do something and then not do it. They never let you off the hook.”
Charley recalled the recent promises she’d made to Micah: that she’d have her own room in the house they’d own one day, where she’d be free to hang her favorite posters and paint the walls any color she chose, because it would be their house and not some rental; that she’d help Micah find kids to play with and her afternoons would be filled with endless games of Capture the Flag and Kick the Can, because everyone wanted to know a kid from California. Charley thought of those promises and all the others she’d made to lure Micah into coming, and felt sick at how few she’d delivered on.
“On our way down here,” Ralph Angel was saying, “I promised Blue I’d buy him a toy, some Power Ranger thing he saw at a rest stop. I thought he’d forget, but he must have asked me about that thing ten times. Probably stopped at twenty rest stops before I found it.”
Ralph Angel’s eyes met Charley’s and she smiled in agreement. “Kids.” An easy calm settled in the space between them.
“Kinda funny when you think about the two of us,” Ralph Angel said. “We got the same daddy. My wife dies, your husband dies, and here we are, come to roost in the same house. To say we spent so many years apart, we’re just alike.”
Charley gave Ralph Angel a smile, but she felt a chill ripple across her skin. “Funny,” she said, and thought he was almost right — almost but not quite. She wasn’t perfect, far from it, but she’d never taken money from her father and lied to him about it. She’d never used drugs or pushed an old woman down. Were they minor infractions? Perhaps. And she believed everyone deserved a second chance, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to her brother than he was letting her see.
Ralph Angel absentmindedly pulled the dresser’s top drawer open a fraction, then seemed to remember whose room it was now and closed it. “Anyway, I just wanted to say thanks again for taking Blue with you this afternoon. He’s still talking about it.”
“It was just a sno-cone,” Charley said.
“Not to him.”
Charley nodded, understanding all that Ralph Angel couldn’t bring himself to say. “My pleasure.”
Ralph Angel re-covered The Cane Cutter and slid it back into position. He glanced around the room as though he were seeing it for the last time. “Well, I ought to let you get back to your reading. I just wanted to say thanks.”
“No problem.”
Ralph Angel turned to leave, and was over the threshold, pulling the door behind him, when he paused. “There was one more thing I wanted to ask.” He leaned against the doorjamb. “You said you’d think about us partnering up on the farm.”
“Well, like I said, I already have a partner.” Two, Charley thought, and prayed Ralph Angel never found out about Alison.
“Yeah, you said that before.”
“And there’s not much—”
“To administer. You said that, too. But I’ve been thinking.” Ralph Angel stepped back into the room and straightened the lampshade. “You’ve got to need help with something. I could drive a tractor, run errands. It wouldn’t be permanent. Just till, you know, we figured out an arrangement.”
“An arrangement?”
“For cutting me in on the action.”
“What action?” Charley thought of the long hours she, Denton, and Alison spent in the fields, the black mold she scrubbed off the refrigerator shelves, the bird shit she chiseled off the shop windows. Tedious, boring work. And then there were the bills. Between the unpaid invoices and Denton’s ever-growing list of parts and supplies, they were barely scraping by. Denton and Alison had agreed to take smaller draws till the harvest, but Charley still had to pay them something. As for herself, she’d budgeted sixty dollars a week for gas and her share of Miss Honey’s food bill, but she still felt like they were eating more than their share. Charley looked at her brother in the glow of the bedside lamp and knew Ralph Angel was desperate; she could see it on his face. She knew that in her brother’s eyes, she was seated at a grand banquet and that all he was asking for, begging for, was a morsel off her plate. But she had nothing to offer. Nothing to spare.
“I can barely afford to buy gas,” Charley said. “If I can’t afford that, I can’t afford to pay you, and you can’t work for free. If I could hire you now with the promise of paying you after the harvest, I would, but I’m not sure there’ll be any profit. Hell, I’ll not sure there will be any cane to harvest.” Still, he was her brother — her disinherited brother. She reached for her purse and pulled her last twenty from her wallet. “It’s all I have. I’m sorry.” As she held out the money, Charley thought of the old black veteran who peddled newspapers outside her neighborhood market back in Los Angeles — not a fancy market, but still a decent one, with its crates of freshly picked produce, and bulk bins of grain, and cuts of meat laid between sheets of butcher paper. All day, every day, he stood there, politely, in his dirty veteran’s cap, with his pulpy, smudged newspapers in one hand and frayed American flag in the other. She always thanked him as she bought a paper, slipped him an extra dollar. And sometimes she didn’t buy a paper at all, just gave him the money. “It’s all I have,” she’d say.
Ralph Angel took the money. But rather than put it in his pocket, he let the bill hang limply between his fingers. “Twenty dollars,” he said. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this?”
“I’d give you more if I had it,” Charley said, and it was true. If Ernest had left her any unrestricted cash she’d have gladly shared it. For a moment, she thought about explaining the trust: that every expense had to be backed up with receipts; that if she made one false move she’d lose everything.
“Jesus, Charley. I thought we had an understanding.”
Charley blinked. “What are you talking about? What understanding?”
“I gave you that damn chemistry set.”
It took her a moment to realize what he was talking about. “But—” Charley counted back through the years. “That was ages ago. I was just a kid.”
“I’m your brother, Charley. Your big brother. Your only brother. We’re supposed to look out for each other.” Ralph Angel stepped deeper into the room and began to pace the floor in front of the dresser. Back and forth, back and forth, slowly, with his hands on his hips. “You know, I’ve tried to be patient. I’ve tried to be nice about it, give you space. But I’m starting to think you’re giving me the runaround.”