“The Chattanooga Christmas Angels Pageant and Winter Spectacular,” she mumbled.
“What’s that?” Courtney asked.
“Hm?” Miranda said, forgetting for a moment that Courtney was there. “Oh, the Chattanooga Christmas Angels Pageant and Winter Spectacular. It’s one of the biggest pageants of the year. It’s in Chattanooga, Tennessee, around Christmas.” She took the crown off a shelf and handed it to Courtney. “Bailey won Little Miss Snow Angel when she was four and a half, the youngest in the history of the pageant. Historically it’s been very lucky for our family. I think Brixton might do well there.”
She picked up her phone and started making a list of what she would need: pictures, makeup consulting, hairpieces, three different custom-made outfits. Girls up to a year old didn’t compete in talent, but she could try to teach her a bit of a song, “Happy Birthday” or “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” or something. Brixton was only four days old, but the pageant was two whole months away, and Miranda could do a
lot
in two months.
“If you need some help, I’m available,” Courtney was surprised to hear herself say. She wasn’t entirely sure if it was a genuine gesture or a part of her plan. It just felt like the next thing to say, so she went with it.
Miranda put her hand over her heart. “That so sweet, but you’ve got so much going on: school and the house and the baby … The next few months are not going to be easy for you.”
Courtney nodded. “I know, but … I was thinking of dropping out of school anyway and just getting my GED. I really don’t want to be one of those girls walking down the hall trying to hide my belly in a big sweatshirt. Everyone thinks those girls are sluts, and I’m not a slut. I’m pretty smart. I’ve got a B average, so I won’t have any trouble if I ever want to, like, go to college or something. You can get Brixton ready for Chattanooga and I can be your assistant. It’ll be fun!”
Miranda’s eyes filled with tears. For the first time, she knew the true purpose of this room. It was never meant to be a sanctuary for her husband, or even a trophy room for her daughter. This room was meant to be the place where Miranda Miller met an angel.
Ray awoke in bed unable to open his eyes. They were puffy and tender like fresh blisters. He pried them open with his fingers and winced at the light streaming in from a bedside window. His drug-induced half sleep would have been a welcome respite had it not been riddled with nightmares he sadly recognized as scenes from his actual life.
“Mawanduh!” Ray tried calling, but he choked on a mouthful of fresh gauze. He gingerly started pulling it out, but the drugs had dulled his agility, and he scratched an empty tooth socket, sending fiery pain rippling through his skin as if every hair on his body was hooked up to a car battery.
“Owhh … fugh,” he moaned, and wiped his watering eyes on the already blood-smeared pillowcase.
Waiting dutifully on his nightstand was an open bottle of Vicodin and a glass of water. He sighed happily then shook six pills into his hand and delicately placed them in the back of his throat.
Across the room, Ray’s bloody suit hung limply over the back of a chair. Miranda had thrown out the snowman tie after forcibly prying it away from Junior, who wanted to wear it to church. The letter from Marvin peeked from the inside pocket of the jacket, mocking him. Ray wanted to read it, but on top of everything else, did he really need a dead man calling him an asshole? Suppressing a wave of nausea, he tried again to call for Miranda, but his stitched lips weren’t capable of forming anything that sounded like words. Instead, he let out a long, animalistic groan and hoped someone heard him.
Moments later Courtney entered wearing a bathrobe, her hair still wet from the shower. “Do you need something, Ray?”
Ray quickly sat up, ignoring his racing heartbeat he could now feel in the most swollen parts of his face.
“Whah suh fog er ou doeeg her?!”
Putting her finger near his lips, but careful not to touch them because they were gross, Courtney whispered, “Shh. I’m going to take care of you. And then, when you’re better, you’re going to take care of me.”
“Wheow iz Mawanduh?”
“She took the kids to the grocery. Joan is asleep in the living room and I just took a shower.” She let her robe fall open a little, revealing just enough to give Ray an unwanted erection. “I’m all clean.”
“Yew canno sta hewe! I fowbed it!”
Mocking him, she leaned in close. “Do you? Do you fowbed it? Well, I don’t think you’re in a position to fowbed anything.” She whispered, “I can’t lose my house, Ray. I don’t have anywhere else to go. Besides, how are you and me supposed to raise a family together without a house?”
Ray forced his eyes open wide and tried to sound authoritative. “Listhen to muh vewy cawfuwy. We wiww wuk it owt, but yew muss go now. I’ww caw yew in a dah ow two and we’w have wunch. Go ho now!”
Courtney cackled, startling Joan from her nap in the living room. Thinking a critter might have snuck in the house—and forgetting completely that Courtney was even there—Joan climbed out of the La-Z-Boy to investigate.
Taking a step back, Courtney let her robe fall open completely. Ray was powerless. Looking away from her perfect teenage breasts would have been as impossible as looking away from a pair of perfect teenage breasts.
“Do you want to feel the baby?” she asked.
Ray shook his head. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
Ray nodded, “Yeff. Ah’m suwe.”
“I think you do,” Courtney said, placing his hand gently on her stomach, still warm and damp from the shower. With the back of her other hand, she lightly stroked her nipples and stared Ray in the eye. Slowly, Courtney moved his hand down, over her pierced navel to her freshly razor-burned pubis. Ray closed his eyes and felt his stomach float like he was in a car going too fast over a hill.
“Do you like this?”
Ray nodded.
“Well, remember it,” she said, pushing his hand away and tightly closing her robe. “Because that’s the last time you’ll see it until I have my house back.” She leaned in close and whispered, “You owe me, Ray. I don’t want to tell Miranda about us, but I will if I have to. You need to make this right. It’s what’s best for everyone.”
What else could he say? Courtney owned him, at least for now. Conceding defeat, Ray nodded. “Okay.”
He rolled over away from her and cursed himself for not running to Florida when he’d had the chance.
It was the first time Courtney had consciously used sex to get what she wanted, and she found it oddly empowering.
That was so easy,
she thought as she breezed down the hallway toward the kitchen.
I wonder what fat girls do to get what
they
want?
From the door of the darkened bathroom, Joan stepped out into the hall, her eyes filled with the burden of unwanted knowledge. Distance and age prevented Joan from hearing what was
said
between Ray and Courtney, but there was absolutely no mistaking what had just happened. Courtney had tried to seduce him.
Joan’s broken heart went out to Ray. Even in his pained, semiconscious state, he was able to thwart the advances of an aggressive, young, naked woman.
“What a good man he is,” Joan whispered.
With Miranda out of the house, the responsibility of keeping order fell to Joan, and she did not take that responsibility lightly. She rolled a
Star
magazine into a baton and started toward the kitchen to literally beat the devil out of the young woman, but something stopped her. There must be a reason this harlot had come into her life so unexpectedly, and before Joan confronted her she needed to know what the girl’s purpose was. Then, in a moment of perfect clarity, she knew the answer. Ray’s “accident” in the cemetery wasn’t an accident at all. It was Jesus.
You’re right, Joan,
she heard Him say.
I am responsible, but don’t say anything yet. I’m going to need your help with this, but there’s a lot I still need to figure out. Just be ready and stay vigilant. You’re my champion, Joan. Remember that.
Joan nodded and crossed to the bed where Ray had slipped into a blissful Vicodin coma. The room was a mess, as usual. Miranda had always been a slob, and despite Joan’s best efforts, nothing much had changed. Mounds of clothes dotted the floor, and Joan nearly tripped over Miranda’s breast pump while reaching for a pile of towels. Noticing Ray’s bloody suit (but not Marvin’s note), she shoved the lot into a dry-cleaning bag and tossed it in the closet.
What would Miranda do without me?
she thought, taking a seat on the edge of the bed and gently stroking her son-in-law’s graying hair.
“Don’t you worry about a thing, Ray. We’re working on a plan to save you, Jesus and me. That girl will be out of our lives soon enough. You just rest up. You’re going to need your strength.”
Joan leaned back and peered down the length of the house into the kitchen, where Courtney was trying to figure out how to use the cappuccino machine.
“Who in the world does that girl think she is?”
It’s a problem, Joan, but all problems have solutions.
Giving Ray’s hand a final squeeze, Joan went and lowered herself back into the La-Z-Boy and patiently waited for instruction from her Lord.
The next few weeks were easier than Ray had expected due in large part to Joan’s (and Jesus’s) tireless efforts to keep Courtney out of the house. Any woman who would attempt to sexually assault an incapacitated married man must be a she-demon, and Joan was not going to sit idly by and let some she-demon destroy her family. She was a warrior and wasn’t afraid to fight. Traps were set, but Courtney proved to be a wily one. When Joan sent Courtney to run a series of errands, she immediately contacted the Board of Education to send a truancy officer to arrest the girl. Much to her disappointment, the school system had not employed a truancy officer in nearly two decades. In fact, it had taken her three calls to locate someone at the Board of Education who even knew what a truancy officer was.
“So, am I to understand that you just allow children to skip school whenever they choose?” Joan asked the insufferably pleasant woman on the other end of the phone. “Don’t you realize that your failure to educate this girl is threatening the safety of my family?”
“I understand your frustration, ma’am, but there is just no money in the budget for things like that anymore. It’s really sad. Last year we had to sell our piano to buy a photocopier. So we don’t even have music classes anymore.”
“Music classes are not going to send this child back to the fiery pit of hell.”
“Well, I reckon not.” The woman sighed. “But it’s still a shame, don’t you think? I really miss our winter musical.”
Joan hung up the phone and said a prayer for America.
Keeping Courtney away from Ray and Miranda was difficult, and since she was hired as a babysitter, keeping her away from the kids was impossible. Joan, however, was steadfast in her mission and volunteered to take on as much child care as possible. Taking care of four children isn’t easy for anyone, but for an arthritic sixty-year-old it was downright punishing. Joan’s knees had become so brittle that every other step crunched like she was walking through a forest on a late-autumn day. But, like Jesus, she accepted the pain because, like Jesus, she knew her suffering would be rewarded.
Ray, however, did not believe his pain came with a reward; his just hurt. After two days in bed, he finally made his way into the kitchen only to find his wife and girlfriend making breakfast while wearing identical pajamas he’d given them each as a gift. They were buy-one-get-one-free at Dillard’s, and Ray remembered thinking when he bought them,
Why not? They’ll never meet each other.
Miranda thought their matching outfits was providence. “This just proves that she belongs with our family!”
Courtney, however, wore a scowl that made Ray think he probably shouldn’t eat the eggs she put in front of him. An hour later, he was at the hospital reporting for work. Since his face was still a terrifying purple mass, he was relegated to the nurses’ lounge, where he popped an abundance of pills and filled out charts. It was mind-numbing work, but he was happy to have it. In fact, the monotony kept him from thinking about how he hadn’t slept longer than an hour since face-planting in the cemetery. The added stress of having to “save” Courtney’s house and Brixton’s late-night feedings had given Ray a bout of insomnia so severe he considered believing in God just so he could pray for death. His stress was exacerbated by a puckering anxiety he felt every time Miranda called him.
Is this it?
He thought.
Is this the call that starts, “I know everything”?
To settle his nerves, Ray began supplementing his pills with a steady intake of cough syrup with codeine, and while successful in dulling his anxiety (and everything else), it also made him constipated, which did little to improve his overall mood.
When the day finally came for Ray to permanently replace his missing teeth, he decided against it, hoping Courtney would find him so physically repellant she’d lose interest and move on to ruining someone else’s life. It was a desperate, wishful ploy, but with so little hope left in his life, Ray clung to wishes like bottles of cough syrup with codeine.
But there was another reason Ray chose not to replace his teeth. Working in the medical field, Ray had never before been treated like an idiot, and he found people’s new perception of him to be endlessly entertaining. Coworkers he’d known for years spoke slower, as if he was now incapable of following simple instructions. Women stole glances at his mouth the way men stole glances at cleavage. One guy at a gas station asked if he could bum a dip. Ray was truly fascinated by people’s assumptions, especially the ones made by his hospice patients. Bonnie Eskridge insisted he play something on his banjo, and after demanding Ray not smile at him anymore, Bernard Hale asked that he be replaced with another nurse, declaring that no educated man would “walk around looking like an ignorant Mexican.”