The Late Child (2 page)

When Harmony got to the line in the letter that told her Pepper was dead, she stopped reading the letter and stuffed it in a glass. She had been home from her job at the recycling plant in north Las Vegas maybe five minutes, just long enough to drink a glass of iced tea. The sides of the glass were still wet—moisture soon began to soak through the yellow paper the letter was written on. Harmony watched this process with a little bit of hope: maybe this terrible information would just soak away and not be true.

Harmony felt like pouring more iced tea into the glass to make the soaking happen more quickly. Just yesterday she had complained to the kids at the recycling plant that she never got any interesting mail. Day after day her mailbox would be stuffed with flyers from supermarkets or department stores, informing her of big savings she could realize if she acted quickly. If something else happened to show up in her mailbox it was usually just a bill she couldn't afford to pay, or an ugly letter from a collection agency, telling her she better pay the bill anyway, even if she was down to around eight dollars in her checking account, the amount that always seemed to be there when she got worried enough to check her balance.

Now, though—if the words in the letter were true—a bill had come that she could never pay. The only feeling she had immediately was that she didn't want the letter so close to her, so she opened the screen and pitched the glass out in the yard. Her apartment was first-floor; the glass didn't break when she threw it out. It rolled up against a little green cactus and stopped. The letter was still in it, yellow as ever.

Jimmy Bangor, Harmony's boyfriend, happened to be coming into the little patio of the apartment building just when Harmony pitched the glass with the letter in it out the window. Jimmy Bangor was a man not much troubled by curiosity—he took life as it came, as he was fond of saying—but the fact that Harmony, the
most stable girlfriend he had ever had, had just thrown a perfectly good glass out the window of their apartment did catch his big brown eyes. Jimmy was a parking lot attendant at Caesars; he spent many long days squeezing himself into tiny cars that were definitely not the kind of cars high rollers drove when
they
showed up in Las Vegas.

Harmony and Jimmy had been a couple for nearly six months—Jimmy had never seen her throw a glass out the window before. It occurred to him that he might have witnessed a freak accident of some kind: the glass might have just popped out of Harmony's hand somehow, and come to rest against the little green cactus in their tiny yard. Why there was a piece of yellow paper stuffed in the glass was beyond Jimmy's ken, but he picked up the glass anyway. It didn't appear to have suffered from dropping out the window; there were no chips in the rim that he could see.

Jimmy could just make out Harmony, through the window, waving at him—he had no idea what the waving meant. He smiled at her anyway, which was easy to do: Harmony was by far the sweetest woman Jimmy Bangor had ever had to come home to.

“I don't want that glass in here, Jimmy, please put it back in the yard,” Harmony said, before Jimmy even got both feet inside the apartment. Harmony's voice shook, and she wasn't smiling, which made Jimmy feel a little hurt. One thing he and Harmony had agreed on from the first was that the least a woman owed her man was a welcoming smile when he got home from work in the evening—although, since they lived in Las Vegas, men such as Jimmy Bangor didn't necessarily get home from work in the evening; they were apt to get home from work at any hour of the day or night.

So far, though, Harmony had always produced a welcoming smile, and it wasn't just a “Hi, honey, how was your day?” smile, either. Harmony really
was
welcoming. She loved to see her Jimmy come through the door; only, at the moment, just as
Jimmy was expecting to have his spirits lifted by the welcoming smile, Harmony didn't have the welcoming smile.

“What's wrong, honey?” Jimmy asked. The look on Harmony's face was so different from any look he had ever seen on her face before that he felt, for a moment, that he might have stepped into the wrong apartment.

It wasn't the wrong apartment, though: the seventeen-pound bass that Jimmy had caught up near Green River, Wyoming, was still there, stuffed, over the television set, claiming pride of place over several framed pictures of Harmony: one with Elvis, one with Liberace, one with Wayne Newton, even one with Mr. Sinatra. All of the pictures were taken back in the days—long-ago days, now—when Harmony had been the most beautiful showgirl in Las Vegas. To some women it might have seemed in bad taste, putting a stuffed fish right in the middle of a lot of pictures of a beautiful showgirl hobnobbing with celebrities, but Harmony had not only been nice about it, she had insisted on putting the big bass right there: after all, Jimmy was her man, he had caught the big fish; it belonged where visitors could see it and appreciate it, right away. Anyone seeing that fish would know what a fine fisherman Jimmy Bangor was.

Actually, Harmony and Jimmy didn't have that many visitors, though both of them considered themselves to be friendly people. Most of Harmony's friends in Las Vegas had either died or drifted away—quite a few went east, to try their luck, when the big new casinos began to open in Atlantic City. Some of Jimmy's old buddies had left town, too, but the reason Jimmy Bangor developed the habit of hanging out mainly with Harmony was that he had fallen in life. Once Jimmy had been head of security at the Tropicana, but he had got caught sleeping with a girl who was a little underage—five years underage, to be exact—so he had lost that job and slipped all the way down to his present level, just a parking lot attendant at Caesars. Jimmy didn't care to socialize with too many of the people he worked with, who tended to be either kids or dopeheads. Every time one of the security men at
Caesars stepped outside to get five minutes of sun, Jimmy—if he happened to notice the security man—became a little depressed. He didn't like to be reminded of the days when he had been head of security at the Trop, and had a name that was respected all over town.

“Jimmy, I don't want that glass in the house, would you throw it back in the yard?” Harmony said, again. Keeping the glass with the yellow paper in it as far away as possible felt like her only chance.

“Why, hon? It ain't broke,” Jimmy said, before he noticed that Harmony had tears in her eyes. She was not the same cheerful woman he had left only eight hours before. It occurred to Jimmy that the freak accident he had been speculating about might have occurred in Harmony's head, but before he could do more than formulate the thought, Harmony snatched the glass out of his hand. This time she didn't simply roll it out the window, either. She threw the glass as hard as she could, not into the street—that might have endangered someone—but at the sidewalk, only a step or two behind Jimmy.

The glass shattered, but the paper that was in it just lay there. There was no breeze; the paper didn't even flutter, much less blow away. The tiny fragments of glass that lay on it and around it sparkled in the sunlight like diamonds.

Jimmy Bangor was dumbfounded.

“Well, it's broke now,” he said, noticing that two or three tiny pieces of glass were lodged in the cuffs of his trousers. He knelt in the doorway and picked them out, as carefully as if they had been grass burrs.

Before Jimmy could even get all the glass out of his cuffs, Harmony shoved past him and began to kick at the paper. There were three sheets of yellow paper in all, and Harmony soon kicked them apart. She seemed to be trying to kick them into the air, or into the street, or into the corners of the yard.

“Don't, my God, don't, you'll cut yourself—there's glass everywhere,” Jimmy said. Harmony was barefoot, of course; she always kicked off her shoes the minute she was inside the door. Now she
was kicking about wildly, on a sidewalk strewn with sharp fragments of glass—kicking at the three sheets of yellow paper.

“Hon, what is it?” Jimmy asked, trying to grab Harmony and pull her away from the glass. Already he could see blood on her feet. Jimmy was respectful of property, and the apartment had wall-to-wall carpet; he had an impulse to go spread some paper towels before he steered Harmony inside, but her feet were cut already, she might cut an artery or something if he didn't get her off the sidewalk quick.

“Is it PMS or what?” he asked—surely some freak accident had occurred in Harmony's head; Jimmy had no idea what the accident might involve.

“PMS—my daughter's dead!” Harmony said, stopping suddenly: out of the corner of her eye she saw the school bus round the corner; in only a second or two it would be stopping in front of the apartment, to let Eddie out. Eddie was five—he was a preschooler—and it would be a big embarrassment to him if his little friends saw his mother kicking pieces of paper around the yard and cutting her feet to pieces in the process. She couldn't be a crazed mother, even if the terrible words in the letter were true. She had to think of Eddie—if the words were true, if Pepper was dead, then Eddie was the one person left that she absolutely
had
to think about.

“Jimmy, would you just get me the broom and the dustpan, real quick?” Harmony said. “I need to sweep this glass up before Eddie gets off the bus.”

Jimmy was only too glad to grab the broom and the dustpan; he immediately started sweeping up the broken glass himself. In his haste he forgot what Harmony had just said, until he looked up and saw that her cheeks were now wet with tears. Jimmy had never met Harmony's daughter, he had no idea what she was like and now he never would, because she was dead.

Just then Harmony saw the red lights flashing, as the school bus pulled up to the little gate in front of their apartment building. She dried her cheeks as best she could. She caught a brief glimpse of Eddie as he came down the steps of the school bus, but
then, for a moment, all she could see of him were the golden curls on the top of his head. Eddie was just the height of the little gate that led into the yard; then, there he was, a big smile on his face as he burst through the gate and came racing toward his mother, just as he did on every normal day.

“Eddie, don't run please, there's glass on the sidewalk—somebody broke a glass,” Harmony said; but Eddie didn't heed her, he loved to run into his mother's arms at the end of a day of preschool.

“Mom, I drew a lion,” Eddie said, and then he gave an almost perfect
grrrrr
sound, just the sound a little lion might make, as he flung himself into his mother's arms.

Harmony hugged her son tight—really tight. Just for a moment, kneeling on the glass-strewn sidewalk, her sunny five-year-old in her arms, she was able to kid herself, to pretend that it was still a normal day.

“Mom, you need a Band-Aid,” Eddie said, when he saw the blood on his mother's feet. He wasn't too concerned, though. He himself often needed Band-Aids—fortunately there was a big box full of them, in the bathroom. One of his mom's toes was allover blood, though.

“I think it might take
five
Band-Aids!” Eddie said, when he noticed that his mother was crying. “Can we still have the macaroni and cheese?”

Harmony remembered that she had promised Eddie macaroni and cheese for dinner—it was his favorite meal. Fortunately she had made it to the supermarket the day before and had plenty of macaroni and cheese. She picked Eddie up—he looked so cute, with his little book bag that mainly had coloring books in it. Jimmy Bangor, meanwhile, was frantically trying to spread paper towels to protect the carpet when she carried Eddie in.

“Wait, hon, wait, you're bleeding,” Jimmy said, but Harmony didn't wait, she went right to the kitchen and got out the macaroni and cheese. Long ago her friend Gary, a man who knew as much about life and death as anyone in Las Vegas—maybe as much as anyone, anywhere—told her that the best approach when someone close passed away was just to keep on doing normal things as normally as possible. Making macaroni and cheese was a normal thing; so was popping Eddie's favorite movie,
Benjy
, into the VCR.

“Mom, make it go fast until we come to the grizzly bear,” Eddie requested; then he picked up the remote and made it go fast himself—he wanted to get to the scary part right away—the part where the wolf gets after Benjy.

“Maybe Jimmy can watch the scary part with you,” Harmony suggested—Eddie definitely liked company while the scary parts were happening. She tried very hard to follow Gary's instruction to do normal things, which meant concentrating on the macaroni and cheese.

“Honey, you're bleeding all over everything, this whole carpet will have to be took up,” Jimmy said. He stood by the refrigerator looking helpless, a roll of paper towels in his hand.

Harmony knew that bleeding pints of blood on the wall-to-wall wasn't too normal, but the major normal thing that still seemed within her grasp was to make Eddie the macaroni and cheese she had promised him yesterday, before the tragedy happened, or before she knew about it, at least. She felt that if she concentrated on the macaroni and cheese and made it and fed it to Eddie, as she had so many times, she might not go crazy. But she had to concentrate very hard on that one thing: feeding her son. Her feet were down there somewhere, bleeding, and the carpet was down there too, getting bled on, but Harmony couldn't direct her attention to the plight of her feet, much less the plight of the carpet. She had to get the right dishes out of the cabinet, and she had to turn the stove on.