The Sleeping Night (16 page)

In the warm Texas evening, Angel read a novel, fanning herself lazily with a pasteboard fan somebody had left on the counter a few days before. The mosquitoes had gnawed her ankles so bad outside she’d had to move into the store, to sit by the big front window where a breeze might catch her if she was lucky.

It was a Heyer, a good romance, set in Regency England, comedy of manners, with clever women and droll men. She’d been reading
Forever Amber
, but it made her restless and hungry and there was just no point, was there? Reading Heyer made her laugh.

She paused to light a cigarette, blew the smoke through the screen and watched it float in a pale blue stream into the darkness beyond her little pool of orange light.

A vague, dreamy restlessness stirred in her middle, the same restlessness that had dogged her through her life. If not for books, she might have been perfectly happy with her life but, early on, she’d been infected by stories. At eight, reading about Anna Pavlova and Isadora Duncan, she’d wanted to be a dancer, had spun in circles around the kitchen floor while her daddy cooked supper, dreaming she was on stage in filmy costumes, admired by all.

Then it had been Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson. By twelve, she had grown drunk on Shakespeare and King Arthur and Dickens, reading constantly, voraciously, insatiably, and English history captured her. England, with its moors and castles and fogs, its cliffs and seasides and chivalry; its customs and words and spirit. Never had she been more jealous of a human being as when Isaiah had been stationed there.

His letters, filled with details of the faraway, had given her new things to think about, dream about. She read
The Berlin Diaries
and all the war news in the magazines, and grieved for losing a world she would never see.

Lazily she smoked, her bare feet propped up on the ledge, and thought of Gudren, with her strange, huge eyes, who’d seen all of Europe, but didn’t speak of it. Isaiah either. It sometimes made her tremble with longing, to know what they wouldn’t say, to know what they couldn’t share. She wanted to ask Gudren about Europe before the war, about the old world before it had been broken, irretrievably. Had she ever gone to a ball, worn a long satin gown and long white gloves’? Her father, from what Angel could gather, had been an important man. Surely there had to have been balls?

It was self-centered of her to think that way, she knew that, but she couldn’t seem to help it.

Faintly, music poured down the river from the juke joint across the way. It was jazzy and upbeat and she imagined a crowded dance all with people laughing and drinking whiskey and dancing until they sweated. She thought of London and distant island paradises and Africa and New York City, and she was suddenly so sharply aware of all the things she would never see or know that she wanted to weep.

Considering everything that happened, what point was there in ballets or swimming faraway seas or seeing Big Ben with her own eyes? She felt vaguely ashamed at her longings, but it seemed there was, somehow, a point. A point to afternoon tea with cucumber sandwiches and white lawn curtains and waltzes, even if she would personally never see any of them.

She took a last sip of the cigarette and stubbed it out, folding her hands across her belly.

Why not?

The thought was unexpectedly mature, and she recognized that it had been brewing there in her mind for who knows how long. She would die if she had to stay in Gideon. Die of boredom and longing.

Perhaps she would never attend a ball or sit in a gondola in Venice. But there was larger world outside Gideon that she could explore if she had courage enough. In the movie magazines, there was always a story of some plucky young actress who’d arrived in Hollywood penniless and friendless to make her way to stardom.

Angel had no interest in Hollywood, but surely there was somewhere she could go, a place she would be happy. Obviously, she wasn’t going to be able to hang onto the store, and that had only been a fleeting loyalty to her father, born from grief. She wanted to honor his memory, but it was one thing for her father to buck the system. Quite another for Angel to do it.

In a sudden flash of inspiration, she realized there might be another buyer—that if she found the right person to take the store, there would be no betrayal of her father. Then she could leave.

But go
where?
And do
what
?

She jumped up and paced up and down the aisle between hair supplies and Big Chief tablets. Go anywhere, she thought. Do anything. Well, anything within reason. She could work in stores, be a waitress, clean houses. Did it matter, as long as it wasn’t in Gideon, Texas?

Filled with a ripe sense of excitement, went to stand outside in the humid night, and leaned on the porch post, idly rubbing a mosquito bite with one foot. Could she do it?

It scared her to think of it. Going by herself out of Texas, when she’d only been as far as Dallas only once in her life? Where would she go, logically? California? New York? New York was closer to Europe, but maybe there were still too many refugees. Maybe she’d starve in New York.

But maybe she wouldn’t.

A crunch of footsteps on the road caught her attention and she found herself poised, nervous, afraid to see Edwin Walker emerging from the deep blackness. It was the heavy gait of a man; no woman would be out so close to ten on the road alone.

Stubbornly, she stayed where she was.

When Isaiah’s face emerged from the gloom, a wash of relief flooded through her. She smiled as she felt it settle in her knees, thinking this was the second time she had anticipated Edwin and found Isaiah instead. Funny that the one who should scare her made her feel secure and vice versa.

“Hey, stranger,” she said.

“Hey.” He paused at the foot of the steps.

“Miz Pierson must be keeping you pretty busy.”

He nodded, his face impassive as he looked off down the road toward something unseeable. “You shouldn’t be out here all alone, Angel.”

“I live here,” she said. “I’m bored. And it’s hot. I don’t remember a spring as hot as this in a long time.”

“And there’s folks in this town who are not taking lightly you keeping this store. You’re also a woman alone.”

“All true,” she said with a nod, then took in a long deep breath through her nose and let it out in a sigh. “Bet you got used to cooler weather while you were away.”

“I liked the summers all right,” he said, and propped one leg comfortably on the stair. “Winters were something else again.”

“I remember you wrote about the snow,” she said. That had been the last letter but one, the long, long letter about the snow and the cold and the forest as they pressed into Germany.

“It always looked so pretty in pictures.” He shook his head ruefully. “Had no idea what it would feel like, not really.”

“Is it pretty, though, anyway?” Somehow, tonight, he was different, not so hard, more like the Isaiah in his letters than the man who’d come back. Still, she tried to keep her voice calm, empty of the hunger she had to just talk with someone for a little while.

“Like sugar, like those little houses you and your daddy used to make at Christmas—remember’?”

“Gingerbread houses.” Angel smiled. “I haven’t been able to make one since before the war.”

“Maybe this year.”

She sighed, thinking of her lost Sunday school class and her departed daddy. “I really doubt it.”

Isaiah said nothing for a moment, but Angel felt him looking at her with pity. “Why don’t you let the store go, live with your aunt Georgia or something?”

She laughed without humor. “Not Georgia. But I have just been thinking that I’m going to die of pure boredom if I don’t get out of this town. If I have to think about chopping tomatoes and listening to gossip and going to the movies on Saturday afternoon all the rest of my life—” She restlessly moved her shoulders. “It makes my skin feel like it’s too tight.”

“Ah-huh.” He pursed his lips. “And where you headed, girl? Gonna go to California and be in the movies? Or maybe you thought you’d go straight to Paris? Or you got some other place picked out from those books of yours?”

“Stop it,” she said, stung to tears. She blinked hard, glad for the cover of night. “You’re as bad as the rest of them. Not a single one of you sees
me
when you look at me!” She shook her head, clearing it. “It doesn’t bother me from them, though. It hurts me from you. In your letters you
talked
to me. You listened. Nobody ever listened to me like that in my life. Then you just quit all of a sudden and now you’re acting like I’m about as smart as a turkey.” She looked away. “It isn’t fair.”

He bowed his head. A whir of cicadas flicked on suddenly, as if to fill the silence, their song a roar in the quiet night. The whirring pulsed and pulsed and pulsed, then just as suddenly cut off. “I quit writing to you, Angel,” he said quietly, “because the war was going to be over and we—” He cleared his throat. “The end was bad, Angel. I didn’t have any words to tell you about it. I didn’t want to put those things in your head.” He looked at her gravely. “I still don’t.”

Angel moved toward him, wanting to take his hand. Instead she nudged his boot with her bare toes. “I know the end, Isaiah. It’s different, knowing and seeing, I know that, too. But you don’t have to make words for things there are no words for.”

“I also knew,” he said and looked at her toes, resting against his boot, “that I’d come home and we’d have to learn how to be right again.” His jaw tightened. “We can’t be friends, Angel. We aren’t children and it ain’t worth dying for.” He straightened. “You go on inside, lock up.”

Angel met his gaze for a long, long moment, then she turned and went inside, feeling his presence as she closed the door and bolted it. There she leaned on the door frame and let the hot tears spill out. Stupid girl tears over stupid lost things, but they burned in her throat and filled her mouth and she just wanted to open the door and ask him to sit down and just talk to her.

She missed his letters, missed them still. He could say whatever he wanted to the contrary, but Isaiah knew her as well or better than anyone in the world, and she had a feeling the same was true in reverse. He was one of the most constant people in her life, as far back as she could remember. There were gaps, naturally, but none that mattered as far as the person inside was concerned. Just now, when he’d talked about the end of the war, she’d known that what he wanted to do was cry. How could you carry the inside of a person with you and not call them a friend, no matter what the rules said?

Stop it, she told herself. She looked through the window, but he was gone.

It’s not worth dying for.
In the bathroom, she washed her face with cold water, then went to her bedroom. Unbuttoning her dress, she wondered. Friendship seemed a better cause than what a lot of wars were fought about.

The next day,
the sense of other places dogged Angel as she did her chores. When the magazine man came, bringing his weekly load of periodicals, they seemed to all be filled with things Angel had never seen, lifestyles she’d never know. All the restless straightening in the world wouldn’t change that.

As the afternoon grew hot, she had her brainstorm. “Come on, Paul,” she said to her small charge, “let’s go inside. I have a great idea.”

Always game, he trailed her into the kitchen, watching soundlessly as she pulled a stoneware teapot from a high shelf in the pantry and washed it off. She set water on the stove to boil, then opened a loaf of bread and had Paul trim the crusts off with a butter knife. There was no watercress, of course, and she wasn’t entirely certain what a scone was, but she made tiny sandwiches with pimento cheese, and peanut butter and jelly, then put them on a pretty platter. In a basket lined with cloth, she placed a handful of cookies, then put Paul to work setting the table neatly. When the water had boiled, she dropped tea bags and mint in the tea pot and set out her prettiest cups. When it was finished, she grinned at Paul, waving him into his chair grandly. His eyes glittered.

“A long, long way away from here,” she said, putting her napkin on her lap, “there’s a place called England. It’s a very, very old country—people have lived there for thousands of years.”

His eyes widened appreciatively, and he draped his own napkin over his slim legs in imitation of Angel.

“Well, if you lived in England, every afternoon, you would have a snack like this.” She waved a hand at the offerings. “If you were rich, servants would bring it to you in the drawing room.”