Isabel met Caroline the same morning she was told that Caroline was “good in bed.” Isabel  had presented herself at the high school for a tutoring session only to discover that her student, who Leland described as “gifted” and the child of a “family friend” was not there.  In fact, the kid was awaiting her in the comfort of his own home several miles away.  Principal  Leland had been insistent that Isabel, and only Isabel, tutor his young friend in history and literature with the goal of preparing him to enter high school in Sept. Isabel had been skeptical of the project. The student, Noah Kraskow, had been home-schooled for years and “gifted” or not, she did not think it likely that he could skip two grades and then function successfully as a ninth-grader, no matter what his chronological age or his reputed aptitude. They had argued. Leland had insisted. He had never, however, mentioned that these tutoring sessions were to take place at Noah’s home.  

As was his way Leland chose to reveal that detail when Isabel arrived at his office looking for her student.  So the battle was joined, with Leland maintaining an annoying smirk as she argued her position. Isabel insisted that the kid should come to the high school where she could work with him in an empty classroom and possibly make some real progress. She explained to Leland that she had done home tutoring, that  when a child was sick or incapacitated that going to the student was essential but that it was always fraught. Mothers, sometimes fathers, were too involved, frequently intrusive. They challenged the curriculum and she had to waste precious time defending it . Sometimes there was domestic work going on that was distracting, even construction and remodeling. Tutoring at a child’s home was simply not the best practice.

Leland listened,  nodded, and maintained his self-satisfied smirk. Then he informed her that Noah’s mother was his close friend laying heavy emphasis on the word friend. When Isabel raised her eyebrows  – thinking, as she was supposed to, of the trending parlance “friends with benefits,”  Leland laughed bawdily and reported that Noah’s mother was “very good in bed.” Isabel blushed, glanced out the window in search of her composure, and realized that she was not getting out of going to this child’s home. She was livid, of course,  but more than anything else she wanted to get out of  Leland’s office as fast as possible without any further report on Noah’s mother’s charms so she snatched the address he had written on a post-it and stormed out. Leland’s laughter followed her. 

“They’re not expecting you for another hour…” he called, chuckling with satisfaction at his ruse.

Isabel took the hour to drive around and calm herself. She counted breaths deliberately,  four on the inhale,  six on the exhale. She wished she had a car phone or one of those new cell phones people carried. She wanted to call Claire just to vent, just to tell her how frustrating it was to work for  Richard Leland.  But she had no phone either in her car or in her pocket, so instead, she drove the Honda up and down the streets of Stony Hill until she located the Krasnow residence on Stone Street.

The neighborhood was lovely, the house itself palatial. A great sweep of bright green lawn edged with flourishing impatiens and contrasting pachysandra testified to professional lawn care. There were cement lions and hydrangea bushes in bloom by the stately blue door. None of it was inviting. Anxiety rising,  she wondered if she should even use the front door. Instead, she walked around to the side of the house where a stockade fence gate was slightly ajar.  Through the gap, she could see a pool and hear the muted chatter of children. She paused for a moment and listened,  wondering at the appropriateness of entering through the back but then she heard the inviting sound of a harmonica cord and she slipped through the open gate. Sitting poolside was a boy she remembered from West Middle School although only vaguely and at the end of his chaise was a very small girl watching him as he experimented with his harmonica producing clear, sweet notes but no melody. it took her only a second to realize that he was new to the practice. There was no adult in sight. The little girl noticed her first. 

Isabel smiled at her. She put her index finger to her lips to signal the child’s continued silence as her brother experimented with his instrument. But the girl grabbed his foot and pointed. 

Noah jumped to attention. “Oh, Miz McNally. You’re here.”

“Yes, I am. Sorry to startle you. I thought it was Larry Adler out here in the back and I wouldn’t miss the chance to hear him play,” she teased.

“Larry Adler?” Noah asked, visibly chagrined that he did not recognize the reference.

“Famous American harmonist. But an older guy. Who’s your inspiration?” she asked.

“John Sebastian,” Noah answered, smiling now. “I like his stuff.” 

Isabel turned to the little girl who was quite obviously Noah’s  sister and sang a few bars of Sebastian’s song, Do You Believe in Magic? to  Allie’s wide-eyed amazement. Noah and Allie both grinned with delight and the unexpected melody brought an adult woman to the sliding doors that separated the pool from the interior of the house. 

“Cool,” said Noah. “I only know a few of his songs. From Welcome Back,  from the TV show. I’ve heard a few others but I should listen more, he’s cool.”

“You should listen to Mississippi John Hurt, too. He  influenced  Sebastian. And others….” Isabel’s voice trailed off as the sliding doors opened and the woman stepped through.

“Can I help you?” The woman asked coolly. 

“Mom, this is Miz McNally, my teacher. My tutor. She came around the back. And she knows about harmonica guys,” Noah filled in too quickly. Isabel sensed he was  working to break the ice in his mother’s voice. 

Isabel stepped forward with an outstretched hand. “ You must be Noah’s mother. I’m Isabel McNally, Noah’s tutor. I’m sorry about coming around the back but I heard the lovely harmonica notes and that lured me in this direction.”

 Noah’s mother ignored  her outstretched hand, so she dropped it to her side feeling the sting. What’s up with this, she wondered. 

“Yes, I am Noah’s mother.  Caroline Shorter. Mrs. Shorter.”

 “And this is my sister Allie, Allie Shorter,” Noah added quickly. He appeared to be the only one concerned with Isabel’s ability to sort out the family dynamics. 

“Well, I am very glad to meet you both,” Isabel said graciously, keeping her focus and her smile on Allie, who did not return the smile. “Where shall we work?” she asked.

Caroline answered: “Out here is fine. ” She gestured toward several tables with chairs on the pool’s apron. Only one had an accompanying umbrella. 

“How about over there at the one with the umbrella?” Isabel asked, turning to Noah’s mother. But Caroline Shorter had turned her back and was reentering the house through the sliding doors. She seemed to be through with Isabel, through with Noah and through with her small daughter who would not be a useful addition to the session. 

“Sure,” Noah answered enthusiastically rising from his chaise. “What’ll I need? Paper and pencil?”

“No, I think we’re all set for now. I’ve brought some books and would like to introduce you to the plan for our sessions,” Isabel told him, following Noah and Allie along the pool apron to the shaded table. She opened her bag on the table, heaving a sigh as she plotted how to maneuver Allie away from them. Allie jumped up into a chair and watched Isabel somberly. 

“Allie, this is going to be kind of boring for you. It’s big-kid stuff. Wouldn’t you rather be inside with your mom?” Isabel asked. Both Allie and her brother looked startled by the suggestion. 

“She’s okay,” Noah assured before instructing his sister to go and get herself a book. Allie had crossed her arms defiantly but moved quickly to follow her brother’s instruction. As she disappeared into the house, Isabel began emptying her bag of books. There were several novels typically covered in middle school curriculum and copies of the history textbooks used in those grades. Noah picked up a copy of Call of the Wild. 

“I read this,” he told Isabel, “I read White Fang, too but the one I liked best was Seawolf. Is that on the list?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Isabel answered. “Have you read any of the others?”

Noah picked up  Fahrenheit 451, Grapes of Wrath, The Outsiders, and To Kill a Mockingbird.  He stacked them neatly beside Call of the Wild. The only book he seemed unfamiliar with was Island of the Blue Dolphin. Isabel was impressed but not completely convinced. Allie came bounding back to the table hauling several books of her own. Her chair scraped on the surface as she pulled it out and scrambled into her place. Isabel was charmed by the little girl, who ordered her own books into a neat pile in imitation of her brother’s. She’s adorable, Isabel thought, reaching out to look at Allie’s titles despite herself. There were four small black and blue marks on Allie’s forearm. Those look like finger marks, Isabel thought. She gently lifted the girl’s arm. There was a corresponding thumbprint on the underside. 

Noah became suddenly anxious. 

“Is this one any good?” he asked, pointing to Island of the Blue Dolphin. 

“I think you’ll like it,” Isabel answered, turning her attention back to Noah.

“I like to read,” Noah told her. “I’ll read anything. And everything.”

“That’s good news, kiddo. Not just for skipping grades but for living life. ‘A person who reads is never bored or lonely.’’”

“Who said that?” he asked. 

“No one you’d know,” Isabel answered. “It’s a good quote though and in my experience has proved pretty accurate, although none of us escapes loneliness and boredom completely. But knowing you can turn to a book certainly gives you an advantage.” 

He picked up the World History textbook and began flipping through it. 

“I know your son,” he announced abruptly,  without making eye contact. 

“Rafe?” She asked. 

“I thought his name was Finn,” Noah responded, his face suddenly clouded. 

“Oh, right. It’s Raphael Finnley. I guess I have heard some of the kids at school call him Finn. “ She smiled. “But I call him Rafe. How do you know Rafe?” 

Allie had opened a book and was running her finger along the printed text methodically. Could she be reading already? Isabel wondered. If so, the little girl was reading soundlessly and without moving her lips.

“He’s the one who turned me on to the harmonica,” Noah told her.

“Really? Good for him. He’s very into music. He plays the piano, although he plays guitar mostly, but harmonica is a good suggestion for someone who’s just starting. He’ll have you playing duets as soon as you get your sea legs,” she told him. 

Noah’s eyes  widened with pleasure at the thought. Then his face fell. 

“I don’t know how to learn to play. I wish I knew someone who taught harmonica; I’m sure my dad would pay for lessons. Do you know someone who teaches it?”

“I do not know anyone who teaches harmonica but I’m pretty sure you could find someone at Music Camp. That’s where Rafe is this summer. Music Camp. It’s a program through  Berkshire College. An overnight camp with all that offers. Rustic cabins in the woods. Swimming. What else? Horseback riding, I think, but Rafe is there for the music. You should look into it. They take new kids every two weeks, I think. Anyway, I know you’d find a harmonica instructor there. You might well be able to get this kind of tutoring as well. You’d be mighty busy -maybe have to skip the horseback riding – but if your project for the summer is learning to play an instrument, you should look into it. Or have your dad look into it,” Isabel told him. Noah was nodding enthusiastically. She took a card from her wallet and gave it to him. “Have your father call me if he wants more parental input on the program. We – Rafe’s dad and I – both think it is a wonderful way to spend the summer.” She was having trouble suppressing a grin. Music Camp was a wonderful program and Noah’s interest in it might get her out of this onerous assignment tutoring him by the pool with his little sister at the table. Wouldn’t Richard Leland be surprised?

Isabel went over the basics of how to read a book, quickly realizing that Noah had indeed read the books he claimed to have read and further that he was the gifted student Leland had said he was. His sister sat quietly at the table, listening to Isabel and occasionally paging her own books in imitation. What a strange little girl, Isabel thought. But it was hard not to like the child who watched her companions so intently while remaining absolutely quiet. 

As the hour wound down, Noah’s chilly mother reappeared. She approached the table as though preparing for confrontation and apropo to nothing, dropped a handful of $20’s on the tabletop in front of Isabel who recoiled.  

“When will you be back?” Mrs. Shorter demanded. 

Never if I can help it, Isabel thought. She picked up her notepad and books just as another voice called from the door, “Carol, what’s this?”

Caroline closed her eyes in annoyance. 

“I’ve told you not to call me that,” she snapped in a voice only a notch warmer than the one she used with Isabel. Isabel turned toward the voice, a dark-skinned young man naked to the waist tossing a prescription bottle in one hand. He smiled at Isabel who could not help but notice his bare feet and the two inches of colorful jockey shorts exposed above his cargo shorts. It made her smile back. Good in bed, she thought with her own chuckle just as Caroline turned to him.

“This scrip? What is it?” He asked again. She held her hand up like a traffic cop.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” she snapped.

“I’m not sure when I’ll be back,” Isabel offered, knowing there was too much obvious amusement in her voice.. “Maybe Noah could call me when he finishes the assignments I’ve left. We should follow up on those, even if you get squared away for Music Camp,” she said directly to Noah as she rose.

“What are you talking about?” carped  Caroline. “He’s not going to any camp.”

“No, Mom, I’m going to check it out. Miz McNally says her son goes and I could probably get tutored there and learn harmonica!” Noah’s voice carried excitement but also apprehension. 

“You’re not going to any camp. You know I need you here,” Caroline responded before turning on Isabel. “Who do you think you are making suggestions about how he should spend his summer? That is a parent’s job.” 

“So sorry,” Isabel responded warily, rising and gathering her books. Flight was her immediate goal; she had not  completely obliterated the amusement in her voice.

“I’ll be speaking to Leland about this,” Caroline informed her. 

At this, Isabel chuckled audibly. Maybe she’d be fired and this nasty woman who was “good in bed” would find herself someone else to abuse. Then she glanced down at the marks on Allie’s arm. 

“I’ll be going now,” she said, gathering her belongings and ignoring the money. “I’m sure Noah can work this out with you and his dad,” she added. “Give me a call when you’re ready, Noah. Miss Allie, it was a pleasure meeting you.” 

As she rose from her seat, a light breeze moved the bill at the top of the pile. 

“I’ll be sending you a bill, Mrs Shorter,” Isabel announced before turning and heading out the gate she had entered through. There were no further goodbyes. 

Outside on the side street where she had parked, she realized how shaky and emotional the encounter had left her. As she struggled to locate her key fob, a car passed, a car like Jake’s. The memory of Rafe in a dodge-em car flashed through her consciousness,  followed by the image of Jared sitting on a tricycle. Inside,  the car was an oven, so she opened the windows and turned on the AC anxious to get away.  She found herself singing Hot town, summer in the city, back of my neck getting dirty and gritty…

Cruising down Heckler Street in his new pre-owned Pontiac with Guns and Roses blasting on the tape deck, –  “I used to love her but I had to kill her she bitched so much,” – Angel had been thinking about Caroline Shorter and the sweat he was putting up with from that rich bitch. Last time he’d run into Caroline at The Mall it has been almost suppertime and he had done something he rarely did with a woman, he suggested and then paid for a movie. He’d held her hand in the dark theater, very nice, like the gentleman his mama always told him to be. When he let it go, she moved her hand to his thigh and when the movie was over she had taken him home to her plushy Stoney Hill house up by the river. It was something right out of a magazine. Angel had been drinking it in trying not to whistle or grin and she’s cool as a cucumber like there’s nothing odd about bringing home the dopeman from Camper Street for a little visit to Stoney Hill. She glides into her living room, tosses her coat on the couch and disappears upstairs. 

“Make yourself at home,” she tells him over her shoulder.

Angel’s thinking he’d sure like to do just that. He’s just getting his bearings, trying to stay loose, to maintain his attitude but shit, this place is a palace. There’s a goddamn swimming pool out there through the French doors with the moonlight shining on it prettier than any painting he’d ever had to gawk at and he’s feeling like a kid suddenly transported to Disney World, although this Angel has never been that fortunate. Then she’s back, this time in a satin robe that looks like something that rich bitch detective would wear on Moonlighting. It’s pale yellow and so inviting he wants to touch, knows that’s what she wants, what he’s here for but he’s agitated at the pace of the thing. He wants to look around, wants to feel himself a part of this room, a guest even, not some stranger just passing through like a handyman maybe, providing some service and then going his way quick as possible. He wants to sit, be offered a beer, be stroked and petted. Women do that for Angel Machado, but this one is not interested in preliminaries; she’s not putting herself out, not offering him a beer even. She’s all business, clear about just who’s the one be doing the strokin’ and if there’s any to be done. It’s all right with Angel, considering who she is, considering where he is, except suddenly he’s feeling no confidence about the one thing he’s always known he could count on to perform.

 She’s on him like an octopus and his mind is telling him what he needs is to sit and look around, to catch his breath; the real nightmare is his goddamn cock is crawling up behind his testicles looking between his legs for a back door escape.

 “Hey, lady,” he growls, pushing her away by her shoulders. He wants to see her face and when he does he sees she’s pissed. Goddamn, bitch! What the hell does she think I am, he’s thinking but Angel goes right into the heavy charm even as he’s treading water and his cock is still leaning towards a strike. “Aren’t cha even going to offer me a brew?” He asks, coolly affronted, smiling his million-dollar smile.

The bitch laughs at him.

“A beer? Angel, you are so working class. I’m sure I don’t have any beer.”

He’s still smiling but what he’s thinking is that this woman needs a slap. Since when did beer become so uncouth, he wonders somewhat frantically, defensive but then suddenly he’s thinking of Archie Bunker and knowing he can make her laugh. 

“Stifle yourself,  Edith,” he quips, flashing that smile again and her face lights up as she gets it.

“Well,  hun, I don’t know about beer but I’m sure I’ve got something to drink. How about wine? I’ve got some wonderful Chateau Mouton … let’s see…” And off she strolls to a fucking wine rack with twenty bottles resting sideways, nestled in and looking totally laid-back, like Angel himself just can’t seem to feel.

He sits himself on the sofa which is white leather and gobbles his ass so he sinks down ten miles. No quick exit if the man comes banging on this door. But his fleeting panic makes Angel smile and a deep, warm pleasure floods him. No cop’s coming anywhere near this chick’s place and here’s the Angel, safer than he’s been since he was in his mama’s cocky little dude. He’s right where he deserves to be, sitting pretty in a leather couch no dope money ever paid for, thinking of putting his feet up on the marble coffee table no gun has ever rested on, but knowing better, knowing he’s got to show this broad some elegance along with the attitude and feeling suddenly like it can be done.

But then she glides back over with these two fat goblets of wine. Angel’s thinking they’re  big as the chalice at St Anthony’s. She sets them down and gets her hand to his nuts before he can taste the stuff. 

“Hey…” he protests to his own surprise. “Where’s your kids?” he asks sounding like some altar boy,  like he’s nervous about getting caught by some first grader with his pants around his ankles and his cock dancing, which he is not. It’s happened. He just wants to slow her down, wants a little conversation, a little vino. Resentment is starting to get in Angel’s way. This broad’s disrespecting him bad. What does she think he is anyway a fuckin’ machine? Fucking machine. Yeah, that’s it, he realizes. Screw machine. He’d heard all those jokes a million times in the neighborhood. Every brother claims he’s a goddamn screw machine but no one can bring them around like the Angel, who doesn’t brag, because he’s got the talent. Just now, however,  his cock is like a small dead mouse curled up behind his balls and not participating. Angel takes a deep breath, telling himself that if this night is going to be his entire career in rich-bitch-ville, he wants to make it last as long as possible, wants to make it last long enough to remember the visuals and not just the skin. Skin he can get in the projects.

“Don’t you fret about my kids, Angel,”  she’s lording it over him again. “ They most certainly are not here.” Her answers are cool like she’s above talking to him about her kids, turning away, reaching for her wine. Just a little bored maybe.

What’s her problem? I’m not good enough to ask about her kids? Most women Angel knew love to have a guy ask about their kids even when they aren’t his. How come this bitch can make me feel like scum even when I’m asking nice about her kids?

 “I’m not fretting.  Just wondering,” Angel answers, stalling and reaching for his wine.

 The stuff tastes like blood. Angel can feel the blood leaving his fingers and feet, like when he’s around blood, like when the guns first start sounding real close, when someone’s knife goes into someone else’s bone. He closes his eyes, breathes deeply. He’s far from the neighborhood and he’s like to get down with it.

Caroline’s watching him, curious. She can see he’s got secrets. She’s studying a sensitive man, he assures himself. Maybe he’s meditating, thinking about things, about involvement. Maybe he has a slow hand.

 “Well, hun, how about we do a line or two with our wine?” she asks sweet as sugar. Her wine’s gone and Angel knows it’s not her blow she’s talking about snorting. Pulling the works from his pocket and he’s thinking he hates this broad, she makes him do stuff he’s never done before including too much coke, including keeping her nose filled, picking up her tabs for goddamn cappuccinos and movies and where is it getting him? Lining up the white powder carefully on a glass top of the marble coffee table, poking it delicately with his razor blade, he remembers he’s heard the guys talking about having trouble getting it up after doing too much coke or ‘ludes, about having to take valium to counter the coke, Even without the coke Angel’s cock is still somewhere south of his asshole. The wine’s making him sweat, but he’s betting the dizziness will pass with a line. He passes her the rolled bill.

I want to fuck this broad so good she never wants anyone but me; he surprises himself with the desperation of the desire. Calm yourself, boy, this one ain’t no different, just richer. Let her come to you

 So Angel played it out. Reminding himself she was just a drunk, he fed her lines and when she lunged at him again he told her he was a man of rare and delicate sensibilities, that he didn’t hop into bed with every woman who jumped his bones. Caroline didn’t like it much but Angel had to go with it because he could sustain no confidence whatsoever that evening and the last time thing he wanted to chance was failure at the wrong moment. This bitch would humiliate him big-time.

 “Hey, don’t be hurt, little girl,”  he whispers rooting around her neck, “‘Cuz I  like you a lot.”

Should I be calling her little girl,  he wonders. This broad’s forty,  easy.

She suddenly shoves him away.

“‘ Like me a lot?’ What kind of fool do you take me for? I don’t care if you like me a lot or not, you crude…” she’s sputtering she’s so mad and Angel doesn’t know what the hell is her problem but he’s on automatic pilot now soothing like he does with his mama when she’s angry enough to throw him out.

“Now don’t you get all riled up, little girl. Take it easy. You’re all tensed up. Let Angel sooth that tension away… Go on, now,  just put your head back… go on…” He ordered firmly and in a moment she had put her head back and he’s taking her foot and starting to rub it, to massage the ball and then the arch and then the calf.  Fortunately, she’s got those fat piano legs he hates so that gives him some space. No wonder she’s always wearing the pants, he’s thinking and she lets her eyes close so he can look all around that beautiful room, all muted and soft with light like candlelight. He’s guessing those doodads on the mantelpiece be worth a pretty penny but that’s not his business here. Remembering business, he looks at the rug, this thick creamy thing cushioning his feet.

 “One of these days I’m going to fuck you right here on this rug,” he tells her and her eyes flash open and he smiles wide and sweet. “Right on this creamy rug here. You’re going to get yourself some rug burns on your elbows that time, little girl, you’re going to get cum all over those creamy thighs of yours. And, lady, you are going to love it. I do promise you that.”

 She half-smiles then but Angel doesn’t think she’s laughing at him so his fingers keep moving up her legs carefully, slowly moving past her knees to those thighs he’s already laid claim to. He tosses her robe aside like he owns the place.

 “And another night, another day, when the weather is warm I’ll take you out there on that patio in the moonlight right in that swimming pool there. I’m going to be sitting on the edge with my toes in the water and you’re going to be sitting on my cock having yourself one fine ride.” He says the word cock like it’s something special. He’s talking like he’s taking over this turf and when her eyes flash open again, there is a mysterious little curl to her lip. Scorn? What the hell is she thinking, Angel wonders. “But right now, this is all you’re going to be doing because I don’t take my cock out for just any woman…”  Her eyes open again. “ I got to see what the lady is like…” He’s whispering and putting his hands behind her knees, he pulls her abruptly toward him so her knees open up for him but she is not affronted,  not pulling away any, like she’s beginning to see how it’s going to be maybe, so Angel’s willing to reward her some. He looks at her coolly, without smiling and then lowers his head to join his hands. Suddenly he’s feeling powerful, unbeatable, in control. He can handle this. The material of the robe slinks across his cheek, across her skin with a rustling noise that sounds like money to Angel, whose senses are bombarded with her smell, too. She’s got nice skin for an old broad, he thinks. feeling better because the funk is familiar, that thick heavy smell of a clean woman’s cunt like no other smell in the world – she’s moaning now and they sound the same at that, rich or poor, just begging for more and Angel knows he’s golden once again.

                                                                         2.

But she doesn’t call. Two fucking long weeks have passed and Angel’s rich pigeon is nowhere on the horizon. It is absolutely against his principles, as well as his instinct, judgment, and experience to call her but he surely wants to. For the first time in his life, he’s yearning for a woman he has been with. Not yearning in his groin, that sucker has stayed completely out of this gig, but yearning in his soul. He feels haunted, preoccupied, frightened even. He’s got it bad, he thinks about her all the time and finds himself unable to do anything except peddle his dope and tool around in his car. He carries on conversations with her in his head but he isn’t calling her. He knows better than that. But the effort of sticking to the program is just about driving Angel nuts. He is so distracted even his mama has mentioned it. But Angel just smiled mysterious-like and kissed her cheek.

“Sure isn’t chemical, Ma,” he assured her and she waved him away, but she was smiling, He didn’t have her fooled much anymore about where he made his money, but she was a good-hearted woman and a practical one as well. She took his donations and didn’t give him too much lip. And then suddenly, now and then when he was smiling in his sleep over something going right in his life, like Caroline Shorter, she was his old mama again, smiling from her soul to see her boy happy.

Suddenly in his rearview mirror he recognizes the girl he’d been eyeing. It’s Rhiney, limping down Heckler Street toward the niggar’s house, where he’d taken her once. What the hell is she doing in this neighborhood, he wonders. She sure didn’t seem smart enough to be setting up her own business with the man.

“Hey, what you doin’ around here, little girl?” He calls, pulling over.

She had this tight, scared little face that breaks into sunrise and flowers when she recognizes the Angel. In a split second, she is in his car.

She sits there grinning at him silently, happy as a clam, like she is finally home. It warms Angel’s heart. This little one is so stupid, she thinks she belongs to him, like he would have her. 

“Hey, little girl, how’s it goin’ with you? I ain’t seen you in a long time. You been okay? I heard you were sick.” He asks these questions tenderly, tucking his chin. He’d run into her brother at The Mall and Dez had told him something about her being sick, like mental sick.

“Yeah, I was in the hospital,” she tells him solemnly but like it was something special. Angel knows a hospital is a place they send to dry you out, but he knows Rhiney’s no big-time user. 

“Yeah, so what happened?” he asks, but even as he does he is remembering. Dez said she’d try to off herself. Angel felt a wave of protective fury. It drove him nuts when the little ones, the unprotected ones got jammed up. “So, what happened, lovey? You just get strung out? Too much stress?”

“Yeah, it was my grandmother,” she half whispers. Angel remembers now. The grandmother is always throwing them out. No money coming in. He’d helped her out that other time. Bought her some sneakers. Let her deliver some crack in the neighborhood for him. Maybe he’ll do that again.

“You gotta get yourself a better situation. What’s the story now?” he asks solicitously. “You heading to the dopeman’s place? You got a plan to generate some funds?”

But Rhiney looks puzzled.

“No, Angel. I was just looking for you,” she tells him like it is right as rain for her to be out looking for him.

 “You going to stay with your grandma tonight?”

 “Nah, she’s pissed again. I don’t know why.  It’s Dez more’n me she’s mad at but he  always splits so she has to take it out on me.” She heaves this heavy sigh. “I just wish my mother would come back. Or maybe just send us some money.”

 “Did your mama come and see you when you were sick?” Angel asks, going to the heart of the matter.

 She hangs her head. He lifts her chin, feeling her pain. She’s got those eyes like Springsteen sings about – “make your heart stand still” – and Angel’s soft heat is moving him along.

“ Let’s go find your mama, Rhiney. I got nothing to do this afternoon. You know where she lives with that boyfriend of hers? You think we can locate her and maybe shake a little jing out of her?”

Rhiney looks uneasy but she loves being with Angel so off they go out of the neighborhood onto the highway south toward Brockton to the nail salon where Cheryl works as a nail technician. They find her to fussing over the hand of a plump suburban matron who can not figure out what has happened when Cheryl, who’s been hustling her for a big tip, suddenly looks up then down again and hisses, “Shit, it’s my goddamn daughter.”

 “I beg your pardon?” the customer asks, flummoxed.

 “‘Scuse me. I got this crazy  kid. That’s her. Looks like she’s got her boyfriend, too. My very own retard.”

 “Hi, Ma,” Rhiney offers softly, appearing at her elbow. Angel takes his stand back at the door. The smell is toxic but he’s curious. He leans against the frame looking around,  hanging back, a little intimidated by this utterly female scene.

 “Whadda ya want?” Cheryl demands harshly. She looks up once defiantly and then down quick and defensive before she asks what she cannot stop herself from asking, “Your sister have that  kid yet?”

 “Yeah, Ma.  Baby boy. Justin.  Don’t you even want to see him?”

 “No, I don’t,” she snaps coldly looking Rhiney in the eye. Angel’s watching her narrowed eyes. This one is hard as nails; she just hates the idea of being some kid’s grandma. He starts strolling over.

 “Jay!” Cheryl calls to the faggot cutting hair at the other end of the linoleum cavern but he ignores her. What she think, some fag is going to throw Angel Machado into the street? Fat chance. 

“Whadda ya want ?” Cheryl asks Rhiney again, confrontational.  “I gotta work here. I can’t have no visitors,” she snaps. The woman she’s working on pulls her hand back abruptly.

 Rhiney is not speaking just staring but Angel can feel she’s about to cry. The smell of the salon’s noxious chemicals moves Angel to action.

 “Hey, lady, what kind of mother are you anyway? The little girl needs her mama. She needs a little jing, too. She’s been sick.” Angel informs her but he can tell she knew that from the way she stiffens and turns back to the customer, trying to smile. He watches the customer stiffen, too, her breath halted on the intake.

 “Who the hell are you?” Cheryl asks, grabbing the hand again.

 “Somebody who’s taking better care of this little girl that her mama is,” Angel informs her self-righteously. Despite the smell, Angel likes himself in this scene

 “Cheryl,” the fag’s getting involved now, signaling Cheryl to get them out of the place. Her customer is visibly uncomfortable, looking nervously from her fingernails which are half-covered with an acrylic mold to the two interlopers who have zeroed in on her technician. You can cut the tension with a knife and Angel is feeling powerful as well as righteous. This is just not right.

 “Your kid needs some support, lady. Money, to start,”  Angel announces ominously and sees immediately that Cheryl is about to cave. She’s looking nervous at the customer who is mumbling something about how she’d be glad to hand over the tip. Within seconds Cheryl’s coughed up some tens and she’s pushing them on Rhiney, who is beaming.

 “Satisfied? Now get out of here!” Cheryl snaps and Rhiney, looking stricken again, is again on the verge of tears. Angel takes her arm.

 “Come on, little girl, your ma is not worth it.”

 “Who the hell are you?” Cheryl,  brittle now and aggrieved at her financial loss is on her feet nearing hysterics. “Why don’t you find someone your own age?” she asks stupidly and Angel snorts at her. “Rhiney, you stay away from this guy, you hear me? Whassa  matter with Noona that she lets you hang out with thugs?”

“He’s not a thug, Ma. He’s my boyfriend. He cares about me.” 

 Angel is strutting his stuff.

 “We’re out of here, little girl,” he announces looking straight at Cheryl, showing her his attitude, showing her that he’s in charge here, that he’s the hero. 

Later he took Rhiney’s $40 bucks and provided her with a stash to sell from the oxycodone he’d lifted from Caroline Shorter’s medicine cabinet. He’d only taken a few, not wanting to piss her off, thinking she might not even notice. He was sure she didn’t know the stuff had street value. Even if Rhiney could only get $10 a pill, she’d be way ahead. Angel’s not sure she can handle it so he walks her through it, slow and steady. 

 “Don’t do any of this stuff yourself, little girl. You hear me? The last thing you want to do is use up your own stash. That’s for losers. You sell the pills one at a time. Give you a grandma the money a little at a time, when she’s ready to blow. It’ll cool her some. I’m going to take you over to the Franklin Project, see if you can stay with Jermaine tonight. She’s all right. She let you stay one night or so, favor to me. But she’s not a mission. You know you gotta work out your own situation. You come back and find me when you run out of these. We’ll see. Just play it cool. You goin’ to high school soon? Good. Here’s what you do. You tell your customer, put this in your mouth for a few seconds. See? Then take it out and wipe off the coating. See?” An orange  streak appeared on Angel’s tee shirt where he wiped the coating off the damp pill. A small mound of white remained in the palm of his hand. “Now this is the stuff. You tell ‘em to snort it for the real high. Or swallow it. Some like it like that. But it is better for you if they snort. They’ll want more that way. Now, let me repeat. You do not try any of this product yourself, you hear me?”

Rhiney nodded, soberly, her brown eyes adoring him. Angel’s cock immediately kicked in.

 “Let’s cruise, little girl. We’ll go sit in The Mall parking lot? Whadda ya say? You wanna do a little neckin’ with the Angel?”  He asked rhetorically. Suddenly, he remembered he had not thought of Caroline Shorter in hours. But he had just peddled the pills he’d lifted from her bathroom. Just let her come to me, he reminded himself. She’ll come around eventually, and if she doesn’t, it isn’t as though there’s not always another one waiting in line for the Angel.

copyright ©Meredith Powers 2015-2025

 

 

Nonna was on edge all the time since Rhiney and Dez came to live with her. Dez said she was on the rag, or change of life, but Rhiney didn’t think that was it. Nonna was just pissed they’ve been dumped on her. Their mother hadn’t been around since the day she dropped them off. Nonna tried calling her, even at work but no one would put her through and Ma never returned the calls. Nonna kept getting more and more stressed out. She took it out on them and had Rhiney and Dez doing all this stuff around the house. Dez said it was like they were her personal slaves but Rhiney didn’t mind. She even helped clean the basement for Nonna’s landlord when he complained about them being there and overusing the plumbing. But Rhiney had done it just to help out and make everybody friendlier. It hadn’t done much good though. Nonna just kept exploding about money. Ma had left them without leaving any money. She sent a check once but it bounced which had made Nonna totally ballistic. 

 

“Goddamn, guttersnipe!” Nonna had shrieked to Dez when he forgot to bring down the trash bags. “Freeloader, you do some friggin’ work around here or I’ll put you out in the street with the trash.  You and that half-wit sister of yours.”

 

Dez was instantly angry. Rhiney could see he was deeply insulted, enraged even. Nonna and Dez had been sort of stalking each other for weeks now and Rhiney had begun to sense the Dez was getting dangerous. Like he was going to let it rip. Not that he ever had before. But now suddenly he seemed older, more like a man and his anger was meaner and Dez told Nonna he wanted more respect. He was driving her places and fetching stuff at the store for her and he expected credit for that. But Nonna didn’t want to give him any. She wasn’t any good with boys. She snorted when he said that. The sound she made was like a horse in a field but with evil in it. Sometimes Rhiney felt Nonna was baiting him like she wanted to push him until he couldn’t keep the lid on anymore. Rhiney knew that now that Dez had Nonna’s car, Tom was making him go places he didn’t really want to go, places where guys could get drugs and guns. She knew Dez could blow from that pressure, too. But it wouldn’t be Tom Dez screamed at. It would be Nonna.  And then what? Dez liked to be nudged to do stuff, teased and such. Now Dez was like a sleeping animal; if disturbed he growled and made her want to get out of his way. It was scary. But it just made Nonna nuts. She seemed not to know what Rhiney knew, that it was better to just leave him alone. This morning he had left the bathroom door open when he was taking a piss and Nonna had started right in on him for being such a pig. He slammed the door in her face like he might break it. Later he scowled and smoldered when he came into the kitchen to make his breakfast. Nonna started right in on him about the trash. He grabbed food with his hands and then turned and looked really cocky from her to the trash bags stacked by the stove. He managed to give the impression that they had absolutely nothing to do with him, no direct connection whatsoever. He even lifted his leg as he passed them as though they were just too gross to even touch him. Then he glided out the door with a snort of defiance. 

 

“Get back here, you little bastard. You think you’re goin’ to do nothing for your keep around here?”

  Rhiney stood very still hoping no one would notice her but inside she was frantic to figure out a way to get to the door. Behind her was a door to a little porch where the clothesline was connected to a tree but she couldn’t get out that way unless she jumped. She needed to be on the other side of the kitchen so she could split with Dez. But her grandmother’s angry mass stood like a wall between her and that escape. She thought of opening the door behind her very quietly and just slipping out into the brisk May morning, hiding out on the porch until it was all over. It was pouring rain out there but the noise of Nonna’s screaming would be muffled, distant. There was nothing out there, she reminded herself, just the clotheslines and the black asphalt yard below. There were cars parked down there, haphazardly claiming a  legal square inch of off-street parking. Maybe Angel would come, Rhiney thought. He’d come once before. He might come into the back yard in his car with the salt and rust all over it and she’d fly to him …swing down on the clotheslines maybe.  He’d whisk her away for a ride or to The Mall. She closed her eyes tight to preserve the vision. But she knew The Mall wasn’t even open this early. 

 

Nonna was yelling still. Dez had reappeared in the door, his jacket zipped. 

 

“I’m outta here,” he informed her scornfully, inflated with his brand new macho defiance. “And I ain’t taking your trash, old woman, so you better plan on getting off that fat ass and hauling it yourself,” he told her cruelly. “ And I’m taking your car.”

Nonna grabbed Dez by the jacket but he was too strong for her. But Nonna’s rage propelled her now and she lunged at his jacket again. This time he flung her off and then shoved her for good measure. She was thrown back against the stove, howling at the indignity as her massive bottom landed with a thud and she stumbled to the floor.

“Get out and don’t come back,” she told him. Rhiney could hear from her voice she was winded.

“Yeah yeah. I’ll get out all right but I’ll be back, too. I got a right to live, you know.” Dez spit out the last sentence.

“Not here you don’t. You ain’t my responsibility, you piece of shit. Call that whore mother of yours. You her problem not mine, you little bastard. You and your retard sister.”

Rhiney could barely distinguish the words but she panicked anew when she heard her name. She wasn’t insulted or upset, just terrified and trapped. Nonna was wheezing and Dez was leaving.  She couldn’t get by her grandmother splayed out there on the floor with the gross fat of her upper thighs showing. Those black hairs, the stockings rolled like tightropes… Rhiney couldn’t look. Something awful’s gonna happen. She knew it. Dez was so mad and she couldn’t leave with him.  Something awful’s gonna happen. 

Just then Dez swooped down and then up again quickly. He loomed in the doorway huge and angry, his eyes squinty and mean, his face all blotchy red. Rhiney and Nonna both stared. Something bad is gonna happen.

Dez had Cookie by the scruff of the neck. The old dog just hung there just dull-eyed and waiting.

 “Cookie!” Nonna howled,  this time in pain more than anger.

 

 But it was too late. Dez took the little dog by the collar, just hooked his finger in and with one angry defiant glance at his grandmother, he slammed its little body against the table like the kids did to the frogs in the science lab. The dog screamed a sharp little wail that sounded more like a person than a dog. Noona started to her feet, stumbling, her eyes like slits, looking from Dez to the dog to her frying pan. 

 “Don’t bother, you disgusting,  old ‘ho,” Dez spat out his words again and Nonna fell back like he’d pushed her. Had he pushed her?

Outta here…outta here…outta here…It echoed inside her head. It thundered. How do I get by Nonna to the door?

Dez tossed the limp poodle into Nonna’s lap and turned on his heel without a glance at his sister. 

Outta here….outta here…

For a moment Nonna just stared down at the furry mass in her lap, not touching it, not yelling, nothing. Rhiney thought she could run for it, just leap across those tree-trunk legs and run, but before she could do it Nonna remembered her, and her head snapped up and she was alive with rage again. 

“You!” She started, shoving the dog aside, grabbing the chair to pull her huge body up. 

“No.” Rhiney knew she’d be going for the frying pan, knew that it wouldn’t help to offer to take the trash out, that this time she had to get out.  But her grandmother’s impassable bulk was still between her and the exit. Propelled by accelerating panic, she turned and push open the door onto the balcony. The wind and rain slapped her, but she climbed over the railing without hesitation and held herself steady for just a second. Then she heard the voice behind her bellowing, “Get back in here, you little….” And she jumped for the pavement two stories down.  

 

2.

 

“Isn’t this place bogus?” Rue asked Rhiney when she came to see her in the psychiatric hospital where she was sent after her broken leg and cracked pelvis were set. Rhiney was surprised by the question. She hadn’t thought too much about the hospital, any more than she had thought about the first one. She was just there and it was boring sometimes, but people came to see her. Even strangers took a real interest and everyone was super nice. Her grandmother had come to the hospital and wasn’t mad at all. Everyone suddenly seemed to take Rhiney real serious now that she’d tried to commit suicide. Now Rue was here and maybe her mother would show up, too. Nonna had promised she would try and call and let Cheryl know about Rhiney. 

“Don’t you know Nonna’s only being nice ‘cuz she doesn’t want you to tell them why you jumped? You’re such a ninny, Rhine….I know you weren’t tryin’ to off yourself,” her sister announced dismissively as she waddled along like the empress penguin. They were going to Rhiney’s room to have their visit. Rue had been there exactly four minutes. Rhiney didn’t answer her. Rue sounded like she was pissed at her, but maybe she was just jealous because somebody else was getting some attention for once. But Rhiney didn’t say that. Rue’s boyfriend’s mother, her “soon to be mother-in-law,” Flo was with her and that made Rhiney even more reluctant to speak her mind to her sister. They filed into Rhiney’s cell, a tiny room with a bed and one stiff-backed chair. Rhiney manipulated her wheelchair with ease. 

“Ain’t you got a better chair ‘n that, Rhiney?” Flo asked indicating the stiff back chair. “Rue and that baby’ll never be able to fit, much less be comfortable,” she complained.

“I’ll sit on the bed, Flo,” Rue said as she heaved herself onto the bed and propped herself against the headboard. “This place is creepy. Don’t they give you no bureau?”

Rhiney began to feel depressed. She had been so glad to hear that Rue was coming, then so glad to see her, fat and pregnant as she was, but now it seemed like nothing was right to Rue. Rue thought the hospital was for off-the-wall cuckoo birds and Rhiney felt guilty and stupid because up until this moment she had liked it all right. Now she felt obliged to defend it while suspecting she ought not to have liked it so much herself. 

“It ain’t that bad, Rue. There’s a closet, see, with shelves.”

Just then Rhiney’s new friend Ashley appeared at the door. She was very friendly and kept up with things on the ward, She had taken Rhiney under her wing and now she contributed a fuller picture of Rhiney’s experience there. 

“They won’t let us have our makeup though, which is a complete and total drag…”

“No makeup? How come?”

“I don’t know. Gotta ask every morning for my hairdryer and makeup. Dorkey, huh? But the food’s great. Nobody bothers ya…ya teacher’s here….Miss Jackie Kennedy…she comes to see Rhiney every afternoon. Hey, is this your twin?” It had taken Ashley a few moments to notice the resemblance. Rue’s face was puffy with her pregnancy. 

“Who’s ‘Miss Jackie Kennedy’?” Flo asked. “Not the Jackie O. She’s dead.”

Isabel McNally appeared in the door and paused politely. 

“Hi, Rhiney. Hey, Rue, I haven’t seen you in ages. How are you doing? Expecting I see.”

“Hey, Miz McNally! Yeah, my baby’s due in three weeks. Are you Rhiney’s teacher?”

“Well, I’m trying to be but your sister has lots of visitors so we haven’t gotten much teaching or learning done. Do you think you could let me have Rhiney for a bit?”

“Whadda mean? We just got here!” Flo protested. Isabel gave her a long, unblinking look. 

“Are you Rhiney’s mother?” She asked in a level voice.

“Goddamn, no,” Flo protested. “I’m Rue’s soon-to-be-mother-in-law and let me tell you, my kid is smart!” 

“Too smart to jump out a window, ya mean,” Rhiney remarked drolly. 

Just then Nonna appeared accompanied by Dez and carrying a large wicker basket out of which emitted tiny whimpers. Isabel felt the urge to roll her eyes.

“It’s Nonna, with the new puppy!” Rhiney squealed, whirling her wheelchair around. 

Everyone was grinning. Isabel watched as Dez took the very small white poodle from the wicker basket and placed it in Rhiney’s lap. 

“Isn’t he cool?” he asked. “We’re naming him Floyd.”

“We’re naming him Cookie,” his grandmother proclaimed and an argument ensued.

“Excuse me. You’re Rhiney’s grandmother?” Isabel asked. “Her guardian?”

“No!” Dez, Rhiney, and Rue protested at once. Isabel just looked from one to the other. She realized Dez was a familiar face from school and saw the familial connection to his sisters. The grandmother was less obviously related but that could have been because corpulence blurred her features. 

Isabel cleared her throat. No one offered any further clarification of connections but the entire crowd in Rhiney’s small bedroom were delighted with the puppy who could not have been more than six or eight weeks old, She cleared her throat again. 

“Mrs. Colango?” She asked.

“No!” the fat grandmother howled again. She lumbered toward Flo sitting in the stiff back chair. “Gimme that chair, woman. Can’t you see, I’m sufferin’ here?”

Isabel tried again. “Are you Rhiney’s grandmother?”

“Yeah. But I’m no guardian, so don’t be asking me about all this business,” she answered combatively without taking her eyes off the puppy. 

“Well, I’m her tutor and I’m trying to get in some time tutoring. Without much luck. I thought you could help with that.” 

“Nah. That’s between you and Rhiney,” Nonna snapped, again without taking her eyes off the puppy. 

“Just stay and visit, Miz McNally,” Rhiney placated. “We can do the tutor part another time.”

“Well, thank you but I can’t,” Isabel answered wearily, thinking that there was nothing less appealing to her than remaining in this tableau. “I’ll call the nurse’s desk and set up an appointment, Rhiney, but I can’t keep coming here and finding you too busy to get to your studies. You’re missing so much at school.” 

“It’ll be summer soon,” Rhiney answered as though the change of season would obliterate her academic obligations for the second semester of the current academic year. Isabel thought better of enlightening her. Poor kid had enough to deal with. As she left, she heard the two older women huffing with indignation. 

“Who she think she is, anyway?” Flo asked.

“Ms Jackie Kennedy,” Ashley announced and they all laughed, the grandmother loudest of all. 

3.

Isabel found time during the next school day to report to Richard Leland. Claire Howard was leaving the principal’s office as Isabel arrived. She left the door open as she exited and Leland signaled her to close it. Isabel stood her ground. 

“I’m not staying long,” she announced. “I just want to report that I am getting nowhere tutoring Rhiney Colango. She fights me. She’s got a million visitors, a million excuses. If you want anything accomplished there, we’ve got to get a parent involved.”

“Talk to guidance,” he responded indifferently. “All I know is that we’ve got to clock time spent there. So keep it up. I’ve got another one for you for summer. A brighter kid. You’ll like this one. What’s his name?” he asked himself rustling through papers on his desk. “Caroline’s kid,” he continued, as though Isabel would know who Caroline was. 

“Richard, I don’t have time for anymore. I have plans for summer.”

“Too bad. You’ll be busy. Here’s the slip. Caroline Shorter. Her kid’s name is a ….Noah. Very bright. He was homeschooled and now needs to be caught up so he can start at the high school on time. Here’s the number and address. Call her. Make the arrangements. You’ve got all summer to catch him up. And you’ll love him. Bright. Motivated. Right up your alley.”

Isabel stared at the slip of paper in her name. It included a residential address. Stone Street. She heaved an audible sigh.

“Why doesn’t he just go to summer school? There is a summer school for these kids, Richard.”

“Not this one,” he answered. “She’s a friend. Plus, he’s bright. Motivated. As I said.”

They stared at each other for a long moment and then he spoke.

“So get it done.” Then he looked deliberately to the open door of his office. Isabel looked down at the sheet in her hand, heaved another audible sigh and left his office.

 

When the boyfriends started showing up Noah was visited by a pressing desire to get Allie out of there. His mother just wasn’t very good at being patient with  Allie when she had a suitor in the house. Sometimes he could talk his father into taking Allie with them when they went out to dinner and even overnight to his house but eventually, there came a day when Noah proposed he take Allie to a late afternoon movie when Caroline was expecting some guy to stop by. Toy Story 2 was playing at The Mall. His mother was so pleased with the plan she insisted she drive them there and dropped them off outside The Mall entrance. Noah agreed quietly although by then he was pretty sure he could have gotten them there by bus.

The problem with the movie was the first scene. Toy Story 2 begins with a video game that Allie did not recognize as a game;  in it, the toy dinosaur Rex is trying to defeat a  Darth Vadar-like monster name Zurg. Allie got so scared that she jumped out of her seat, stumbled across her brother and ran out of the theater. Noah had to follow her. Unfortunately, in her terror, she had wet her pants so he took her down to the family bathroom by the Game Room and once there, removed her tiny underpants with the Minnie Mouses on them and threw them in the trash. Allie was fond of Minnie so this did not go over well until Noah explained to her that she was going to be like a space toy herself able to  pull up her leggings  without any underpants and “go commando.”

With some persuasion, he got her back into the movie theater but the movie was just too complicated for Allie.  There were some scenes she followed, like when Woody ripped his arm off and when the penguin couldn’t squeak but the larger plot was convoluted and she quickly lost interest. She squirmed around in her seat while Noah tried to placate her with popcorn. Eventually, she sat on the floor under her seat and began eating discarded popcorn off the floor. Noah realized with disappointment that he was not going to stay long enough to learn whether Buzz Lightyear rescued Woody so he resolutely hauled her out from under his feet and set to the task of finding some other way to kill time in the brightly lit Mall.

It was definitely too soon to go home. His mother would be apoplectic if he called her now and besides, he had no interest in meeting her latest dude. Allie didn’t like these interlopers and couldn’t be convinced to ignore them so returning home would lead to conflict between her and her mother.  So he took his sister’s hand and headed up the central thoroughfare toward the Game Room again. He had money, as usual, and thought he might be able to start her on some of the easier games if the place wasn’t too crowded or the environment too hostile. If that didn’t work, he could take her to Dalton Books. He loved it there and the bookstore included a nook with little kid books where they could hang for a while.

“What the fuck!” came Fat Tom’s too familiar voice as they entered the darkened Game Room. Noah spotted him immediately. He was with Dezzy playing Grand Theft Auto. Noah grabbed his sister’s hand to exit but she had developed a sudden interest in some dumb machine that delivered cheap stuffed toys for every token inserted. Some of them looked more trash than toy but Noah heaved a sigh and went to purchase tokens. He could feel his neck burning with dread and confusion as he turned his back toward Tom and Dezzy.  He was just waiting to appear in their spotlight.

Before Dezzy and Fat Tom noticed Caroline Shorter’s children, however, they got into an altercation with the Game Room supervisor. Noah didn’t catch the beginning but he intuited that Fat Tom was doing something rough and stupid, like trying to lift a machine to alter play or to activate it without using a token. The supervisor instructed Tom patiently to stop hipping the machine and suggested he buy more tokens or leave. Tom’s response was predictably feisty but his interest in the confrontation was abbreviated because he suddenly spotted Noah.

“Noseark! The dude is in the Room!” Tom hollered with unrestrained relish. “He’ll give me some tokens, won’t ya, dude? He’s the man!”

Noah did not turn around. The supervisor who Noah could not see said nothing. The woman cashier was also silent. She looked from Noah with his ten-dollar bill, to the group behind him without saying a word, then she handed him his tokens.

“You’re hurting me,” Allie protested and Noah realized he had her hand clenched in a death grip.

“Be careful of the kid,”  the woman cashier scolded.

He turned around, loosening his grip on his sister and faced Fat Tom and the supervisor, Dezzy behind them.

“You got tokens, Noseark?  Lend me a few tokens, Bro. I’ll make it worth your while.”

Noah tried to keep his face expressionless. He quickly assessed that neither the cashier behind him nor the cowed supervisor would offer any assistance. His best bet was probably to just give Fat Tom the tokens and get himself and Allie out of there. But giving him all the tokens seemed too weak, so he separated them into two piles and put one in his pocket. Still holding Allie’s hand, he turned and placed the remaining tokens on the cashier’s counter behind him. “He can have these,” Noah told her. “Now tell him to leave us alone.”

The cashier snorted, Tom grabbed the tokens with a triumphant squeal and the ineffectual supervisor seemed to fade into the woodwork. As Noah left the Game Room, he heard Dezzy protest weakly:” He’s got his sister with ‘em, Tom.” It sounded as though Dezy thought Tom had not been playing fair as if playing fair was ever Tom’s intention.

Noah led Allie across the central artery of The Mall and slipped into Dalton Books without turning back to The Game Room. His mind was emptied by fear. He knew it was unlikely Fat Tom was through with him. Giving him those tokens was like giving a bully your lunch. He’d just be back for more. But for right now Fat Tom was occupied with his bully tokens and Noah had gotten Allie away from that particular danger. The bookstore offered its sweet reprieve.

Noah was pretty certain that Fat Tom had never seen the inside of a bookstore and was unlikely to follow them there.

He sat on the floor in the kids’ section where Allie instantly helped herself to the soft covered books left on the floor by previous readers. Noah’s mind was still an ice-sheet, frozen in terror and brightly lit by the knowledge that they were still not completely out of danger. He picked up a Richard Scarry book, What do People Do All Day? And was momentarily jolted by irony. He lifted his head from the book and scanned the store. Allie was at his side, mumbling contentedly, apparently deep in conversation with Lowly Worm. Across the room there was a vaguely familiar teenager in a big chair, seemingly engrossed in a book. Elsewhere a few browsers took books off the shelf and perused them. Over at checkout, there was a single cashier processing purchasers.

Then Fat Tom came crashing in, loud, obnoxious and accompanied by not just Dezzy but by a young girl, one that  Noah had encountered in the school nurse’s office. His eyes widened in apprehension and he dimly registered the physical similarities. This girl was apparently Dezzy’s sister.

“Leave the kid alone, Tom,” Dezzy muttered as he tailed his friend.

“Leave him alone? Come on, Dez. Noseark’s my man, and we know he has more tokens,” Tom bellowed, having caught sight of Noah.

Everyone in the store turned to follow Tom and his entourage into the store.   Like a tornado on a summer afternoon, they arrived loud, minacious, ominous but beyond anyone’s ability to stop.

Noah stood up and took a step over his little sister placing himself between her and the approaching trio.

“Noseark, my man!” howled Tom homing in on the kids’ nook. He spotted the other teenager in the chair and without losing a beat, called out, “Hey, it’s The Finn fag! Geeks’ a gathering in ye old bookstore,” he quipped.

Noah reached into his pocket to gather up the tokens. He thought of his step-father’s gun.

“Whaddya want?” Noah snapped, his anger blooming from his impotence.

“Ah, don’t be a whiner, Noseark, you know what I’m here for.” Tom ‘s voice was decibels above Noah’s; he radiated confidence. The single adult in the bookstore, the cashier, was following him with her eyes. Noah knew she would offer no help.

“Noah,” Allie spoke his name urgently as she grabbed at his pant leg. “Noah, I gotta go potty,” she announced.

Tom and his two companions stopped short and stared at Allie.

“I’ll take her,” offered Dezzy’s sister.

“No!” barked Noah. “I’ll take her myself.”

Tom took a step in front of them and stood with his legs planted and far apart. He was as large and square as a refrigerator.

“You give me them tokens, Noseark, or she pees her pants right here in this bookstore,” Tom announced, his tone made more scornful on the first syllable of bookstore.

“Leave ’em alone, Tom.” This was Dezzy now, with the girl,  his sister, having grabbed his arm and communicated some urgent compassion. “You want a ride home, Tom, we gotta go now.”

“I ain’t goin’ till I get what I come for,” Tom answered without taking his eyes off Noah.

“Noah, please,” Allie whimpered, crossing and uncrossing her legs.

Noah reached into his pocket for the handful of tokens, simultaneously sensing that there was movement on the periphery. He set his jaw and reached out his handful of tokens toward Tom, who leered contentedly, reaching for them. At the last second,  Noah flipped his hand and released the tokens onto the floor.

Heading quickly for the door he heard Tom behind him: “What the fuck do you want, Fag?”

The kid from the armchair had risen. “You wanna fight for ‘em, ya fag? Me and my man, Dezzy?”

But Dezzy and his sister were no longer with Tom in the bookstore. They had followed Noah and Allie to The Mall.

“Nope. Not gonna fight,” the guy answered smoothly. “Just gonna stand here and watch you pick ‘em up. One by one.”

“You boys get on out of here before I call the police,” the cashier hollered.

Without turning around, Noah could feel Tom’s rage. But now it made him want to laugh. How the hell did that guy know exactly what to say to bring Tom down? Without having to pull a gun or punch anyone?

“Oh, no!” Dezzy’s sister squealed. Noah turned to Allie, who was wetting her pants.

Noah cleaned her up a little in the family bathroom but there wasn’t much he could do. She had no underwear and her leggings were sodden. He’d have to walk down The Mall to Walmart and buy her new pants but his immediate problem was avoiding Tom.

Outside the family restroom, Noah found them waiting for him.

“Oh, she’s so cute!” Dezzy’s sister squealed as she knelt in front of Allie. “But it’s cold outside, Noah, you gotta cover up that cute little butt.”

Noah knelt beside Allie and wrapped the arms of her jacket around her waist so it hung like a skirt to her knees.

“Good job!” The girl affirmed as if Noah cared.

“You need a ride?” It was the kid Noah did not know. “Wanna go for a ride? I’ve got my father’s car. We’ll take a ride and then I’ll drop you home. We’ve got this.”

Noah nodded with numbed joy. Yes, yes, yes.

“Here comes Tom,” Dezzy warned. “You better get outta here.”

“I’ll meet you in the parking lot at the rear entrance of Walmart. Get our girl here some pants and see if you can arrive without smelling like piss,” the new kid suggested good-naturedly.

Noah lifted his sister to his hip, knowing she should be cleaned up, knowing he’d likely smell like piss. He strode toward Walmart without another word. The new kid walked along with him, just once muttering, “OK, second speed. He’s seen us.”

Fat Tom did not catch up with them. Noah quickly found the little girls’ department, grabbed a pair of pull on flannel pants that turned out to be much too big and a three-pack of underpants that fit perfectly. The cashier was grumpy and uncooperative. She mentioned that it wasn’t right to be carrying around a half-naked little girl. Embarrassed, Noah nodded, paid for his purchases and headed to the back door to the parking lot. In the foyer he dressed his sister, transferring her jacket to its original purpose and then pushing out into the slushy glooming.

The kid, who Tom had called Finn, appeared immediately at the wheel of a blue Prius. Noah and Allie jumped into the passenger’s seat. Noah grabbed the seatbelt and latched it around the two of them, then he heaved a huge sigh of relief. Allie turned and stared at the driver.

“Hey, kiddo. I’m Finn. What’s your name?”

She just stared at him.

“Ok, so how old are you?”

“This is Allie,” Noah answered. “I’m Noah Krasnow.”

“Yeah, I remember you from soccer. Remember we played on those teams when we were little kids? Our fathers both coached, “ Finn laughed. “Such as it was,” he laughed.

Noah did remember it vaguely. Then suddenly he remembered Finn had been a really bad soccer player, all alone out in the field studying the sunlight in the trees and while his teammates raced across the field after the ball. He laughed nervously.

“Coming back to you, is it? I really sucked. Memorably sucked, “ Finn laughed wryly as he turned on his blinker and steered the car out of the parking lot into traffic. “Wanna go for a ride? Get our calm vibe back? We could go down River Road. I’ve probably got an hour before I have to get my dad’s car back.”

Noah thought it sounded like heaven.

“Fish?” asked Allie.

“Finn, not Fish,” answered her driver. “Technically fish have fins but I’m not technically a fish. So there you have it, Miss Allie.” He winked at her and she stared at him intently.

“No staring, Allie. Look, the river’s like a mirror,” Noah pointed out as they pulled onto the parkway. Across the river, the colored lights blinked on one by one and stretched their long sparkly tails across the still river.  Noah breathed in deeply. It was beautiful.

“What we need is some music,” Finn announced. “What’s your preference?” he asked his passengers.

“I don’t know anything about music. My mother homeschooled me for a while and I learned a lot about math and science. I listened to all these great books on tape. But never music. I never learned anything about music,” Noah felt a sudden sadness at the loss, at his inadequacy and it was captured in his voice.

“Hey, man. You can listen, can’t you? If you can listen, then you’re in with the tunes,” Finn told him. He reached into the valley between the seats and pulled out a couple of CDs. “Just listen and tell me what you hear,” he told them. “Tell me what instruments you can hear.”

He popped in the Hollies and the harmonica introduction swept over Noah like a soothing breeze.

The road is long….

“What was that? What was the instrument?” Noah asked excitedly.

“Harmonica, my friend. An instrument you can pick up at Dalton Books. And probably teach yourself to play.”

He’s not heavy, he’s my brother…

And Allie turned to Finn and pointed to Noah. “My brother,” she announced, joining the conversation.

The boys both laughed. Neither of them noticed the flashing light immediately, neither of them realized until the siren sounded that the cop car was trailing them.

“Oh, shit, shit, shit…” Finn stuttered, pulling over. “Oh, shit. Sorry to swear. Just shit, shit, shit.”

He reached into the glove compartment for the registration, then pulled back and opened his window as the officer approached the car.

Finn’s eyes were as wide as saucers. Noah wished his father was there. He’d know what to do.

Finn grabbed the steering wheel at ten and two and lowered his head toward the rim.

‘Focus,” he muttered. “Just focus on the music.”

Focus on the music? Who is he talking to, Noah wondered.

“It was a great harmonic riff,” he offered and Finn grinned at him just as the officer appeared at the driver’s side window.

“Hello, Officer. Was I doing something wrong?” Finn asked.

“License and registration,” the officer articulated, no greeting, no smile, no reassurance. Noah scrambled to hand them over.

“Stay in the car,” he ordered and returned to his car.

“Holy shit, holy shit…” Finn muttered, tracking him in the rearview mirror. In a few minutes, the officer returned.

“Ok, Jared. These seem to be in order. Your violation involves your young passenger here. She should be in a car seat in the rear seat. Where’s the car seat?”

“Oh, right. Yeah. I mean, I don’t have one. I just ran into my friends here at The Mall and they needed a ride home so I offered. Didn’t really think about a car seat. Sheez, that was stupid. Is that a law?”

“Yeah, it’s a law. I’ll bet this little girl travels in a car seat when she’s with her mother. Don’t you, honey?”

Allie did not answer the officer. Instead, she buried her head in Noah’s chest.

“You the brother?” The officer asked him.

‘Yes, sir,”

“Well, you should know better. So get your sister into the back seat.” He turned back to Finn. “Jared, you get your friends home by the most direct route. Drive slowly. And do not take this little girl out again without a car seat. How would you feel if you were rear-ended and the little girl became a missile through the front windshield?”

“Oh, sheez, no. That’d be terrible. I just didn’t think!” Finn groaned with visible regret.

“Ok, I’ll let you off the hook this time. But don’t let me find you cruising with this child without a car seat in the future.” He slammed with car roof with his flat hand. “Now, get going. Straight home.”

“Yes, sir, ” “yes, sir,” Noah and Finn spoke almost simultaneous and then laughed. The officer slammed the top of the car and turned back to his squad car,

Noah was still laughing as he opened the passenger’s side door and relocated Allie behind him in the back seat. He secured her seatbelt. Her eyes were still wide from the encounter with the policeman. As he hustled back into the passenger’s seat, Allie began to protest her exile.

“Jared?” Noah asked. Finn snorted as he put the vehicle in gear and pulled back onto the parkway.

“Oh yeah, my brother,” Finn told him. “He’s old enough to drive.”

“Doesn’t he mind you use his license?” Noah asked, realizing that Finn himself was not old enough to drive and that they had just gotten away with outsmarting a cop.

“Nah. He doesn’t mind,” Finn responded evasively.

“Noah, I wanna be in front with you,” Allie insisted. “With you and Fish.”

Both boys laughed.

“I’m not a fish, kiddo, but I do have a friend who’s a frog,” Finn told her. He shuffled through the CDs in the bin and pulled out Three Dog Night. “Put this one in, Nosearck.”

“Please,” Noah answered inserting the CD. “That guy just rides me.”

“Hey, man, you did all right with the token toss. I liked that. He didn’t.” Finn punched a number to move to a specific song. Then he began singing.

Jeremiah was a bullfrog,

Was a good friend of mine,

I never understood a single word he said

But I use to help him drink his wine

 The second time Finn played the song they all three sang at the top of their lungs and were still singing when the car pulled into the driveway at the Shorter house on Stone Street.

And you know he had some mighty fine wine……

As they got out of the car, Noah felt a jolt of impending loss. Finn would never take them for a ride again. There was no car seat and that was that. He grappled with a sudden desire to cry.

“Thanks, Finn. Sorry about the car seat thing,” he offered gruffly.

“No big deal. Glad we stuck it to Fat Tom. Plus you’re now into the harmonica, man. Next time we can play together,” Finn told him. “Bye, Allie. Be a good kiddo.”

Allie answered by singing: “Joy to the finnies in the deep blue sea, joy to you and me.”

Noah dragged his sister toward the empty house, fighting tears he could not begin to explain.

Angel met her at The Mall. He was making his rounds before noon one morning in April, seeing the managers of The Weathervane and The Limited, the owner of the little Gourmet Take-out place, all of whom were his regular customers. Angel sold recreational drugs. Marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy K, even – however reluctantly –  the occasional Roofie. He had it all for the ordering. Working The Mall was a pretty good life for a guy from Camp Hill Terrace and it kept Angel in gold chains and $200 sneakers. The best thing it did for him was get him off those mean streets back in his own neighborhood. There weren’t many who could have worked this particular gig. You had to have genuine sophistication, a sense of culture. Fortunately, Angel had been formed as much by his mother’s ambition as by the street. Deliberately grooming their little darling for what they conceived to be his obvious destiny, getting them all out of the neighborhood, she and his older sisters had drilled and corrected his English grammar and pronunciation and cultivated in Angel a polite and reasonable demeanor that obscured a less than tranquil heart. From them, he had learned that when you step beyond the limited frame of the homeboys, too flashy clothes and lousy grammar marked you as the lowest of the low. They had had something else in mind for their Angel, something other than this upscale drug beat, but their training had served him well. Angel had come to deeply resent the scorn they had for his success. This Mall was a cultivated environment; they should have been happy for him, but they weren’t. They were such hypocrites. They never even thought of shopping here; too expensive, they complained, taking themselves off to the mills in Fall River for last year’s styles at reduced prices. Yet in their bargain-basement apparel, they were more than willing to talk down The Mall, to criticize Angel for being satisfied with a life here. Not that Angel would have been willing to work at The Mall in any other capacity than his present calling. All these salespeople and management types who bought the goods Angel peddled so politely didn’t make in a year what he could make in a couple of weeks. Suckers. Angel did appreciate the superior ambiance of The  Mall. Sometimes there was a piano player in the mid-Mall Garden who wore a tuxedo and closed his eyes and played with a passion that seems to transport him to another realm. And Angel was pretty sure he didn’t do any dope. Art exhibits lined the nook beside the frame shop and sometimes people stood around in front of the pictures discussing them. Angel had discovered it a very serviceable point for picking up women, especially those who could afford his wears. The Mall catered to a different type than you found in Camp Hill Terrace. His opinionated older sisters with their scrubs and stingy paychecks would never have been able to fit in at this mall. It gave Angel great satisfaction and self-affirmation that he could.

He first caught sight of Caroline Shorter drifting around looking in through the big windows of Saks Fifth Avenue when he was on his way to The Gourmet Take-out. She wore a full-length fur coat open over a velour running suit that had never known a droplet of sweat. She looked like she had just come to Hawthrone Hill by way of Aspin and Angel’s mouth watered. He resolved to find her when he finished his business. She’d be perusing the paintings or having herself an expresso. The languid aimlessness of her manner was a sign to Angel that she was killing time. The elegant types who frequent The Mall in the early morning were easy to pigeonhole. Those who meant business traveled double-time and quickly accumulated large stuffed parcels in bags from Saks and Bloomingdales. This one looked exactly like the pigeon he’d been hoping to catch. She was drifting, maybe waiting for something to happen to her, something that would give her a little rush, maybe something just like this Angel

Angel had a way with women. It was his long suit. It was the one thing he had learned in school which he thought was a skill worth attending to. In the beginning, it has been an astonishing surprise. There he was, a  ninth-grader suddenly thrown into the big time at Benjamin Butler High School, wound up tight as a drum from the tension of staying on his feet, keeping peace with the homeboys and the gangs just trying to get his portion of respect and not lose too much in the process, when suddenly he discovered his marketable talent. All Angel Machado had to do was smile and the girls lined up to fall into bed. It was like magic. All he had to do was smile.

There’d been a class trip that year to Washington, DC. The parents had raised money and the kids had had car washes and walkathons so even the underprivileged kids had an opportunity to get out of the neighborhood for a week. Angel, being interested in culture and such, I had wanted to go. His Ma had not had the bucks right off, but then the aunts and his sisters all chipped in, all telling him they had high hopes for him and were willing to make sacrifices. Angel had felt kind of sorry for them doing it because he knew they were trying so hard to define him as someone who was so special he could defy fate and stay in school. He had begun to suspect that that was a pipe dream, a matter of hope over reality, a typical mother’s dream, but he had not known that for certain then and so was willing to take their jing and fancy himself a sophisticated and superior dude, a world traveler even.

So he’d seen the Lincoln Memorial and that huge national cock, The Washington Monument, goofed off with everyone else at the Air and Space Museum, but he’d learned his most valuable lessons at night. Girls came to him. They fought with one another, clawed and pulled the hair if need be, to come to his room at night and get laid. It was a marvel like none he had so far encountered; it was like winning the lottery, or finding you could play basketball good enough for the NBA.

In the morning two or three of the girls might be shooting daggers at one another over breakfast but not a one of them was reeling him in. They learned early not to piss him off or he’d walk. In fact, he made sure they knew from the beginning he was a free agent and intended to stay that way. In part that had been fear of his mother but there was also in Angel an inherent conservatism. Initially, he had been apprehensive, fearful of being hooked by this new high. So he cultivated a cheerful bravado about staying free and it turned out to be fortunate. While Angel himself was just having fun, he found he was able to set up the homeboys with ripe little sluts from other neighborhoods, a service so immediately and thoroughly valuable that he thought for a while it might keep him in school.

But such was not the case. Angel did not make it through high school. The lure of easy money was too much. He believed he was meant for something more than getting up at the crack of dawn on winter mornings and having his ma hounding him every night to study that boring shit they assigned in school. He was a smart kid, smooth and charming to women as well as girls, and he carved out virgin territory doing business at The Mall. The guys on the street who controlled the supply appreciated his incentive, maybe, so they took care of Angel and it was a damn good thing because Angel couldn’t have taken care of himself, that he had learned early.

Angel just wasn’t that tough. He hadn’t the stomach for it. Blood from a bad cut was enough to make him dizzy; he had more than once fainted. Guns made him absolutely sick: terror, of which there was always an ample supply in his neighborhood, had more than once made him wet himself. There were chicks doing business in his neighborhood – some younger than him – with more balls than he had. They were the rollers who peddled to strangers right off the street and held their own while they were doing it. The rich suburbanites would just cruise down certain streets in Angel’s neighborhood and find a roller selling stuff on a corner. Apparently, the ladies were more approachable for the marauding yuppies who tooled in from Newton and Eastwood and Wellesley. To an insider like Angel that action was a great joke. There were the yuppies thinking they were safe, making their contract with a roller without ever having to get out of their cars, probably thinking these broads could never do them a bit of harm, maybe even contemplating the big kill, taking the drugs and peeling off without paying. Of course that never actually happened because these ladies had a system, airtight and money guaranteed. Angel respected them. They had something he did not. Balls. Cold courage balls. They wielded guns. Some of them could shoot straight right into another human being, watch the blood flow and just walk away. They kept a bunch of paid bodyguards, stupid thugs with limited ambition but loyal enough to take out a cop if need be. Angel had respect for them. It was an art keeping up an operation like that, and Angel knew he didn’t have the nerve for it. Once he got hold of a gun and sort of hung around with it. Set it down next to him on the couch. Let it sit on the pillow beside his head. He’s been convinced the proximity would ease his discomfort, but he’d been wrong. He just could not get used to the thing. It gave him the creeps, continuous. Made him feel liquid in his gut. Maybe that made him a terminal wimp but there didn’t seem to be a damn thing he could do about it. You needed to be pretty hard to make it in that kind of operation, in almost any street operation. It was just luck that he’d found himself an insider-type situation. Fate had cut him a break, so to speak. Whatever. He had been golden – for a time at least.

Another thing, Angel did not have the stomach for was jail. Once, the summer after he finished ninth grade, he had to take the rap for an older guy, a wheeler-dealer named Roger who could absolutely not afford to get pulled in again. They had him for grand theft auto unless someone else admitted having done it. It had been a necessity.  Angel had not questioned that;  it was something he just had to face and endure. Others before had done their time. He hadn’t even waited to hear the threats, he just went. He was fifteen years old, cherry, a juvenile with no record and they let him out as soon as his mother came around. She put up a convincing show and they’d given him a suspended sentence with her promising that she’d straighten him out. He heard more shit about how grand theft auto was a gateway gig and next time he’d be carrying; those cops were such losers. They thought they had it all figured out, but they really knew nothing. The whole process had gone exactly as Roger and promised him it would and he had had it to do it. It has been the end of his Ma’s delusions unfortunately but that had had to happen sometime. So he’d had to put in some time with a juvenile probation officer who lost interest in those interviews faster than Angel did. That was no big deal. The major lesson he had learned had been during those few hours in jail, that he did not have the stomach for jail either, that he had to stay the hell out of trouble and take no more falls for the brothers. Fortunately, his fine style with the ladies had already begun to manifest itself and he’d become too busy getting Roger laid to even consider wanting Angel Machado in the can.

But who really knew how long he could keep this up? Angel knew he was vulnerable in the long run. The single guy was always threatened with extinction. It had become more and more necessary to affiliate with a gang. No longer were Lone Rangers tolerated, no matter what their gimmick. Angel could see the writing on the wall. These days there was a new guy, a nigger, moving on Roger’s business and the word on the street was that it was a shoo-in, Roger was just doing too much of his own stuff. Angel’s girls told him all Roger wanted was to chase the dragon, a sure sign of financial difficulties. Angel expected he would not be all that valuable to the new guy, who had a steady lady, an icy fox who did not look like she was about to be replaced even temporarily. Either way, it had put him back to wondering how to get himself out.

He sure as hell could not hang around hoping to win the lottery, though he sunk ten bucks into tickets every week on the longshot. He’d thought of pimping. As it was he did that line of work effortlessly and for nothing. It was a cakewalk. But he abandoned the idea. In operation, the pimps looked as ominous as the dealers. Angel could recruit a stable, no sweat, but where would he set himself up? And how would he keep order? He’d need a gun or a thug who carried one. But even if he hired one some hooker with bigger balls than his could turn on him and blow him away for diddling some new face. Either way, he’d get himself killed, of that he was certain. 

Eventually, he conceived of winning a different kind of game. The Mall was frequented by rich suburbanites from Newton, Wellesley Hills, and Chestnut Hill. Some of them just wandered around, all dressed up but adrift, not unlike the high school girls he’s been picking up in The Mall for years. They were all just looking for something, some means of escape, some distraction, maybe a little of Angel’s goodies, maybe a little of the Angel himself.

Angel began to envision himself as a potential happening in the life of some wealthy, easily duped older lady. How hard could they be to handle? Were they so different? Of course, he might have trouble getting rid of them. Walking away from women was Angel’s real forte. He was nobody’s keeper. No hungry fox was about to hold Angel’s life in her twat. Forgetaboutit. He would take them and leave them. And he loved the leaving, in fact, just patting ass and telling her he’d see her around gave him a rush. They loved it, too. That was the real mystery. He’d wait, disappear even, and they’d come looking for him. Like clockwork. He’d puzzled over that plenty but never abandoned the practice. He just perfected it as much as he could. Now and then some little jewel disappeared like she didn’t have the self-respect to come looking or maybe she had too much but he seldom had the feeling that he’d been dropped for spit or because she was too good to come looking. Let her come to me, he’d tell himself whenever he was tempted to call a woman or whenever he found himself wanting one again. Sure as sunrise, they always came. Then he knew he had them good. Eventually, they might get tired of it, might even get mad, but he’d just shrug. After all, he had not been the pursuer. What else could a broad expect who chased after a guy? But the biggest rush for Angel was when he held back, didn’t call, just waited and didn’t think about it and sure enough, the lady came to him. One after another. All he needed to do was to wait her out. 

So he’d started looking, started taking notes on the variations of the breed and which of them might have something to offer him. He’d had to practice, to flirt, to bumble even, all of which was part of feeling out the stock. Angel had never known any wealthy or educated women personally, unless he counted the manager of The Weathervane, who had gone to some junior college and studied marketing, thought she was something special because of it, too. Angel was very polite and deferential, but he really thought it was a crock. He suspected that the rich ones weren’t all that different, just icier, more full of themselves. When he first started trying to make time and found himself cut off with cold or astonished dismissals, he had been surprised to discover that his feelings were hurt. Cunts. But he had worked on his attitude, polished his come-ons, learned to move in when they were gazing at their paintings, listening to the musicians or drinking cappuccino while they watched the passers-by and wondered what the hell to do with the rest of their day.

At first, he’s been very careful and conservative. He definitely did not want to get a reputation, didn’t want his Mall customers in the know. One woman he met told him he was “an aspiring gigolo” and that she was flattered but she unavailable. She suggested he rent “Midnight Cowboy,” this ancient movie about these two losers. It was incredible that that guy, Dustin Hoffman, was the same one as in “Tootsie.” The guy was definitely into weird stuff. Angel sold the woman some cocaine, which was always to the good, but when he saw her around after renting a movie, he avoided her. The bitch was just waiting for him to ask her what the hell she meant telling him to rent that movie and he was not about to give her the satisfaction. Let her come to me, he’d tell himself whenever he was tempted and sure enough, she did. Showed up out of nowhere as he was leaving The Gourmet Take-out place and they’d sat at one of those little tables while she lectured him all about the movie. She was worse than those guys on TV who do the movies. It was nuts. But Angel understood that there had been something important about sitting at that little table, leaning toward one another as she chattered excitedly about this movie they had both seen – like they shared some special secret. He could see that she got off on this stuff and he wasn’t scornful as much as intrigued.

Angel did worry briefly that they might be too smart for him. He started listening to those two dorks who give movie reviews and one day on a whim he bought a book at DALTON BOOKS on art, planning to read a little. It turned out to be a massive success even before he cracked the binding. He’d tossed the plastic bag and stuck the thing in his pocket and gone down to the little gallery. Right away he saw a woman there browsing and he walked right up to her and started shooting the breeze with her about the paintings. At first, she was very cool, looking down her nose at him, but then he reached in his pocket and asked her if she’d read this book and whammo! He was golden. After that, he bought books off the front racks on movies, but he got so he would call them films. He could bullshit better about movies than he could about art, but he learned a little about one or two painters – Jackson Pollard, Jasper Johns – what was not to like? He just talked them up, which usually got him through the first few minutes and sometimes bought him a cappuccino, but he couldn’t seem to get much further than that. He had begun to think he needed to make an initial investment, which was actually against his principles, but he began to contemplate the possibility of picking up the check for the cappuccinos or whatever, just to see where it might go from there. It was clear enough that you couldn’t tell these bitches to hit their knees if they wanted to score. 

The morning he spotted Caroline Shorter he did not have a book. It had been his intention to pick up something before homing in on her. With the book as a prop, he was more confident, he felt he came on more sincere. But by the time he finished his business she had moved down to the gallery and that was always his best setting, so he double-timed to down there, never letting her see he was cruisin’ and before he got within a foot of the broad he knew she was high. Ten-forty-five on a Wednesday morning and this babe in the fox fur smelled like the night before, smelled like she was sportin’ a blood-alcohol reading of .09, minimum. Angel knew in his soul he was golden.

Confronted with Nick’s generosity and the surrender of his best-in-class lawyer, Caroline was hard-pressed to continue her breezy refusal to appear in Aaron Rosenbloom’s office with her children. Initially, she had refused, insisting to Nick that it was unwise to focus them so thoroughly on the catastrophe of the fracturing of the family when in actuality she and the children were conducting themselves at home as though Hugh were merely absent as he had been so often during the marriage. Nick had been surprised by the characterization. To him, Hugh had seemed ubiquitously present, but then what did he really know about Caroline’s family life? He had only a peeping Tom’s knowledge, he supposed. Caroline claimed that Allie was completely unaware of any change, being too young to see beyond her need for her mother, and Noah’s new penchant for silence came more from the fear of change than the reality of it. Noah and she were very close, she reminded Nick. She knew how her son was feeling and they were really doing just fine. Nick needed to fret less.

Nick listened. Noah and his mother had always appeared close: Noah was certainly attached to his sister.  He wanted to accept Caroline’s expression of maternal authority, but there were times when she seemed inexplicably giddy despite the seriousness of events. It was as though she was skimming along the surface of things, especially when he pressed her about things she did not wish to address, like Noah’s altered behavior or his custodial relationship with his sister. Yet in the next conversation, she would as likely be utterly impassioned, crazy with rage at Hugh or one of the previous lawyers. Currently, she was on the sweetest terms with Win, a love affair of convenience perhaps, but one which Nick nurtured with the diligence of Friar Laurence. He asked her once when she had seemed particularly distracted if she were taking medication of any kind but she had been very defensive. Caught off guard, she had stumbled in her explanation. Yes and no. Her PCP had given her something for the ankle, a new painkiller which worked quite well and had no side effects She barely ever had to take one now.  Her therapist had prescribed a tranquilizer, just Valium,  five milligrams, but she found the medication unnecessary most of the time. She was fine; it was sweet of him to be concerned but now that Win  Abrams was in her corner, she would most certainly no longer require that drug either.

Nick believed her, some of the time at least. It was so much easier to believe her when she reassured him. It seemed right and just; he had sacrificed his own champion, Abrams, to his one-time enemy to guarantee her good health and therefore his son’s. For Noah, he thought whenever he needed to explain his actions to himself. But justice was a slippery thing. Nick recalled Win’s glib assurance that he could revert back to Nick’s corner if Nick and Caroline ever went to the mat over custody of Noah. “I was your lawyer first,” Win had boomed, his florid face flushed with emotion. But what emotion? Nick felt himself the willing babe. He accepted without believing. Win’s current motive was obviously the hefty retainer. Logically it did not follow that he would return as Nick’s advocate against Caroline if he was in possession of any portion of that retainer. The best Nick could hope for was that he would refuse to represent Caroline as well and he was not certain Win had that kind of professional integrity. His reputation would concern him however and Nick was an influential man in Boston. The emotional connection that had existed between them seven years earlier and had been of such solace to Nick then had apparently been woven of gossamer stuff. Nick chided himself; he had been naive to think it had been a friendship. Win had forgotten it except as it showed in his willingness to handle Caroline’s divorce himself instead of turning her over to an associate. And Caroline was a wealthy woman in her own right. Nick’s own sway over Abrams, intense and compelling as it may have once been was a backdrop to the interesting and potentially lucrative drama unraveling in Shorter v Shorter. Nick understood that he was marginal here and accepted the trade-off, but he did intend to collect something from Caroline by pressing her to see Rosenbloom.

Nick had accompanied Caroline to her first meeting with Abrams and had been on the phone with him twice since then. Now and then he reflected on the absurdity of these developments but Caroline’s father, who was footing Win’s bill, was almost as explosive as his daughter. There was no point in letting him be the intermediary, that had been tried, and Nick did not wish all the effort that he had put in so far to come to naught. So he continued to find himself more deeply involved in his ex-wife’s divorce. Intellectually he knew that he was best suited to handle the role of go-between, but there were times when he felt such a fury that this obligation fell to him. Would he never be free of this weak woman? No, he expected not, not so long as she was connected to Noah.

Eventually, he did prevail upon her to take the children to the therapist but she had insisted that he join them. So he left work to meet her at Aaron’s Devonshire Street office. She appeared, late of course, and accompanied by a particularly fitful Allie, and a particularly sullen Noah. Noah barely greeted his father and when they were shepherded into the lobby, he took a seat by the window where he could stare out through the blinds and remain emotionally detached from the group. Rosenbloom was an expert in family therapy; he specialized in situations involving problem children and he was quickly called upon to demonstrate his expertise when Allie threw a tantrum at the door and inexplicably refused to enter the office with her mother, who promptly attempted to drag her. The doctor quickly intervened to demonstrate a painless restraining hold for Caroline to try on Allie. But it became unnecessary when Noah appeared beside the child and took her hand, instantly quieting her.

“She just doesn’t want to go in alone,” he mumbled without lifting his head and then he and his sister led the others into the office, where Noah promptly took the seat nearest the window and again stared out through the blinds.

Nick was powerfully distressed by these events and his depression continued as he looked around at where he was and with whom. There they sat, this motley foursome who so resembled a nuclear family, but who were in actuality just fragments spliced together by genes and consanguinity, by defunct conjugality, by hopelessly obscured responsibility. It made him want to cry, but instead, he turned to compose himself by looking out the window and found Noah already there. As the doctor worked with a skittish Allie, who refused to be restrained, who kept whimpering and crawling away from her mother’s lap, Caroline’s answers to his questions were distracted. At first, she was cloying in her efforts to lure Allie into line but soon enough she became sharply impatient. Again he felt like weeping. Time ticked away. What are we doing here trapped in this room with these peculiar strangers? Nick wondered, addressing his rumination to his son.

“Caroline, let Allie alone,” he found himself suddenly snapping. Both his ex-wife and the doctor looked over in surprise. Only Noah did not turn. What can he see, Nick wondered some escape that eludes us both perhaps.  “Noah, could we have your attention?” he scolded taking control of the disarray while simultaneously thwarting his own tears.

Allie was suddenly still, Caroline silent. The cacophony had passed from the room. Even Noah had turned to join them. The therapist jumped at the opportunity to question Noah.

“Noah, your mom has been telling me that things have been relatively calm at home despite her separation from your stepdad. How do you feel about the situation? Would you tell us about your feelings?”

Noah looked quickly at his mother, who smiled at him.

“I feel sort of confused,” Noah offered with some hesitation.

His father leaned forward with it great interest. Maybe now he would begin to understand.

“Confused? How so?” asked the doctor.

“Just confused. Like when my mom cries and how am I supposed to help her?” His voice rose in plaintive appeal. “Do I go away or what?”  There was a flash of resentment in the question. Everyone in the room, including Allie, seemed so startled at Noah’s abrupt, nearly impassioned participation that they were hushed and attentive. The attention made Noah withdraw somewhat. “I’m just sort of confused.”  

“No, that’s not how he feels, Doctor. Noah is just terrific!” His mother abruptly inserted, looking piercingly at Noah. “He has been my great helper. My best friend. He is just so responsible and mature. He is always there for me. He’s not confused about that. He knows I’ve come to depend on him and that I think he is just being wonderful.”

“Do you feel wonderful about helping your mother, Noah?” The doctor asked. In his fascination, Nick held his breath.  Noah’s face clouded with discomfort.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled.

“Honey, of course, you know. We’re best friends, aren’t we? A team. You and me. Together we have been doing just fine, especially since your dad has been so supportive,”
she added the last nervously, tentatively pulling Nick in as an ally. Nick did not speak, was neither flattered nor cajoled. He stared at Caroline and then at Noah and waited with bated breath for the next stroke from the therapist. How did he get this stuff out of this child when his own father could get nothing?

“Noah, do you recognize that you are helping your mother?” the therapist asks patiently. Nick felt the tug of resentment since the question was posed in such a way as to suggest that Noah would be slow to understand.

“Yeah, especially with Allie. And sometimes when she is really tired and falls asleep on the couch,” he answered grudgingly.

“Noah, I’m surprised at you! When does that ever happen?”

“Mrs. Shorter, let’s let Noah finish.”

“But it’s not true. At least it is an exaggeration…” Caroline protested.

“We are just getting Noah’s point of you now. Sometimes one person in a family sees things differently from another. There is no deception involved, just a difference in perception,” the therapist placated her firmly.

“Noah, when is your mother falling asleep?” Nick interjected to return them to the track.

“Just during ER or Friends sometimes”, he paused. “When she’s had a G&T,” he added.

“A G&T?” Nick echoed incredulously.

“Oh, Nick, stop it. A gin and tonic. It happened once, at most. It’s not like you’re not drinking wine when he’s with you, for heaven’s sake.” Her tone changed as she shifted to her son. “Noah, really,  they are going to think that I’m a bad mother.  You know that is not the way you feel. Is it? Tell them.”

Noah looked back out his window.

“No, Ma,” he answered barely audible.

“We know you do not think your mother is a bad mother, Noah,” the therapist rejoined supportively but then he shifted in his seat. Oh no, thought Nick, our time is up. He felt the urge to insist they go into overtime. This was breakthrough stuff and now the doctor was ready to knock off. Nick attempted to communicate his frantic resistance but to no avail.

“We are going to have to stop,”  the therapist began with that ersatz regret that is so much a part of the closing routine. Nick’s regret was real. “Noah is tired, I think,” the doctor added looking compassionately from Noah to Nick, and only for a split-second, not long enough for Caroline to have seen it. She had risen, her breath hissing out in exaggerated relief as she stuffed Allison’s chubby arms into a jacket.

“She’s tired too,” Caroline offered when she found both Nick and the therapist had turned expectantly to her. She exited quickly, jerking the unwilling Allie along behind her. Nick shook the therapist’s hand with genuine appreciation

“Thank you, Doctor. I learned more today than…” he was unable to finish; then I wanted to know, he thought, affectionately stroking Noah’s head. “We’ll be back, won’t we, Noah?”

“Dad, come on,” Noah insisted in a tight voice.

“How could you?” Caroline hissed at Noah as soon as the elevator door closed on them. Nick was astonished, but when he looked at Noah, the kid had tucked his head. That slender neck. Nick’s shivered.

Caroline refused to take them again claiming it made an already bad situation worse. Noah had lied, she exclaimed, something that he was not inherently inclined to do and she for one thought it was their own fault for pressing him about feelings and things that he could not fully comprehend.

“Children say what they think we want to hear! That’s why all this child abuse stuff is so dangerous, Nick. Imagine him saying I fell asleep every night with a G&T? You’d think he had to put Allie to bed himself! Nick, this is not good for him and I for one will not be schlepping in there to that fat guy so I can hear my son lying about me, right in front of me. I have troubles enough, thank you!”

Those were her final words on the subject. Nick could not budge her and eventually despaired of trying. He made an appointment with Aaron for himself and Noah. But then he found Noah unwilling. “She won’t like it, Dad,” he pronounced without antecedent.

“It doesn’t affect her,” Nick had snapped in return. But the warning had soured the venture.

In the end, Noah reverted to a stubborn non-compliance in Rosenbloom’s office and when his father pressed him afterward he was hostile.

“Look she doesn’t want me to go. The hell with it,  Dad.  The guy looks like Jabba the Hutt. He can’t help. Everything is just line.  Leave me alone, okay?”

It could only have been desperation that prompted Noah to such hostility to his father. Nick felt a desperate compassion in return. He gave it up, hoping to salvage what he could from Caroline’s goodwill because of his surrender of the lawyer and working to repair and make stronger his relationship with his son. The very least he could do was to leave Noah alone. Leave him alone and provide an unqualified place for some quiet, for R&R, away from the noise and the heat of battle.

copyright ©Meredith Powers 2015-2025

Nick met Evelyn Fox at the mall. He had first contacted her through the personals in Boston magazine or maybe it was that new match.com site. He wasn’t actually sure but he’d apparently given her his office number and just when things were busy in the office and more intense with Caroline and Noah, she’d talked to  his secretary who  immediately put her through. Nick had been furious, but he’d also been rational enough to know that despite his desire to be angry with someone, he had himself put these events into motion. While  he mastered his impatience long enough to arrange a face-to-face meeting with her, he was certain it was a waste of time

And it was.

He had planned to park on the north side of the mall close to the restaurant where they were meeting but there was some sort of “Mall Days Sale”  going on and no available spaces anywhere near where he wanted to enter. Faced with the prospect of having to leave his car in the hinterlands and hike through the blustery sleet, he was tempted to just skip out and forget the entire rendezvous. But that would be rude and she did have his office number. Instead, he locked his car and crossed the slush, unsuccessfully avoiding icy puddles as he pushed into the crowd and bright lights. His cell phone buzzed  but he ignored it. There were all these people milling about inside and the music sounded louder, harsher, the lighting more garish than expected. Once inside he stomped his sodden feet and wondered what he was doing here and how he’d ever recognize one woman,  Evelyn Fox, in this scramble.

  But he did. Or she did. This middle-aged woman suddenly materialized beside him,  touched his arm and introduced herself.  He was immediately flustered. All he could do was hope his face did not reveal his disappointment. She was old, for  Christ’s sake, forty if not older. And why do these women lie about their weight he wondered. It’s not as though they can perpetuate the myth. But she was competent. She had already been into Ruby Tuesday’s and secured a single stool at the bar. The place was so crowded that even the  stool in the dimly lit bar area was an oasis.  Nick gave the hostess a tip to get them the first available table, hoping they would have a quick civilized exchange and then part. Soon he found himself across the table from a woman who could best be described as matronly. She had an age spot on her left temple and the beginnings of a  spare chin.  She had probably once been pretty enough but now she’d surrendered to the excesses of makeup and jewelry older women wear to disguise the truth of their slack jaws and deeply etched laugh lines. Who are they kidding,  he wondered.

Oddly enough she told him the truth. Not immediately, but after a few minutes of very tedious good manners and a few sips of a cheap Chardonnay, she told him that she had a confession to make; she had lied about her age.

   “Men do it all the time,” she announced and he felt challenged to defend his entire gender. “How old are you?  Be truthful, Nick, this is ‘fess up time.”

“Forty-nine,” he’d lied, and excused himself by politely not pointing out that she had also lied about her weight.

“So, we’re the same age,” she responded triumphantly. “ And I must add,  almost all men lie about their height, so that doesn’t count,” she’d laughed either demonically or conspiratorially, he couldn’t tell which. Feeling the weight of their mutual inadequacies, he chose the latter.

“Well, I guess you’re right. We are neither of us but we claim to be. It can be a bit discouraging, can’t it?” she continued. 

“Indeed it can,” he agreed. 

So they shared a glass of wine and exchanged their stories, not stories of their childhoods or their midlife dreams but stories of their divorces and of dating in the impersonal world of cyberspace and the glossies. As the wine mellowed him Nick found he liked this pleasant maternal woman. He’d never see her again, of course, but he felt comfortable and was unwilling to surrender that comfort for the empty evening that stretched out before him. So he asked Evelyn if she’d like to stay for dinner. His cell phone ring before she could answer. This time Nick answered. It was Caroline.

“Nick, can I come over? I’ve got to talk to you. I’ve got to talk to someone!”

“I have company, Caroline. I’m not even home. Aren’t your parents there? Didn’t you tell me they  were coming to dinner?” 

He smiled at Evelyn, then moved away from the table, hoping to hear his ex-wife better.

“Oh, yes, I tried to have a nice dinner but you know what happened. My father started lecturing me and I got so exasperated that I just left …”

Pursued by adolescent demons, thought Nick, looking back at the bland, inquiring face of Evelyn Fox. She gestured that she would go, but he shook his head. He’d be damned if he’d let Caroline drive her out.

“Where are you?” he asked his ex-wife

“I’m in a phone booth on Boyle St and it’s sleeting!” she wailed.  “And I think I broke my ankle! It’s swelling up and hurts so much!”

 Nick raised his hand to his forehead with forbearance. He had forgotten this part. Envision me, soaking wet, wounded and forsaken, she demands silently, so she can demand aloud,  “Are you sure you can’t come over? My parents are still there with the children. I cannot go back there.”

“I have company,”  he repeated enigmatically. He was baffled by the saccharin in her voice. Was she coming on to him, he wondered. He forced deliberate patience to enter the exchange. “I’m not even home I told you.” 

Over the heads of a few diners, he could see Evelyn was becoming uncomfortable. She had placated the waitress but was clearly self-conscious.

“Do you have time for just one story?” she pleaded.

“Yes, just one story. What happened to your ankle?”

He looked at Evelyn, aware he was being  most unfair to her but lacking the necessary energy to assertively resist Caroline,   a forty-year-old woman now huddled in a phone booth where she had ended up after  stalking out of her own house in the middle of a screaming match with her father, one of her dinner guests.  A grown woman who was his ex-wife, mother of his only child, who might well be coming on to him. Could that be? Goddammit, she was so panoramic in her inappropriateness.

“I actually had to fire Simon Wade, that lawyer Daddy got me without knowing anything about how difficult he is. He doesn’t even do the work himself but foisted me off to some green associate who does not even know what he’s doing!”

“When did you fire him?” Nick asked, his forbearance now laced with despair.  This was so predictable. Caroline’s impulsivity results in a lengthy process becoming lengthier and more fraught. For Noah. 

“Nick, don’t you start.  I had to fire him. He was so rude to me. This is my divorce.”

“Yes, but lawyers are the ones who have to manage it for you. Caroline. It’s just like Investments. You wouldn’t think of managing your own portfolio, would you? You might oversee it a bit, but you would have the good sense to listen to the experts. The same is true of real estate.  You’ve always said that people who try to market their own property are just fools. With this, too.  You have to let the experts handle it for you. It’s especially true with this divorce stuff. You know you have some experience with these problems before. You just can’t keep firing lawyers. You’ll be ripped apart by this thing and it will  just take that much longer.” He meant for Noah it will.

“But he gave me to an associate, Nick. This young guy who got snotty when I called him at home one day when Hugh was late to pick up Allie and I wanted to know if I could take her with me instead of waiting like I was at Hugh’s disposal, which is exactly what Hugh thinks! Oh Nicky,” she whimpered.  “It seems like everyone is against me! Plus, my ankle is killing me. I’m sure it’s broken.” 

Nick was disgusted but also completely sure she was coming on to him and that he had to be very, very careful. 

“Cal, I’m not against you. Come on. You know you only feel this way because things are looking so bleak just now. In the morning you’ll have some resilience. There’s nothing new or catastrophic in all this. You’ve had difficulties with lawyers before and you’ve been having arguments with your dad for almost forty years. Don’t blow everything out of proportion.” He counseled with patience and solicitude that was complete artifice. 

“Nicky,  sometimes it’s so nice to listen to you. Just like the old days. You were always so good with advice.”

That disconcerted him momentarily. The last thing he wanted her to think was it he was dangling a romantic or even a nostalgic subtext.

“Even that will pass,” he answered with levity. “You’ll be back to thinking I’m a perfect bastard in the clear light tomorrow morning, I guarantee it,” he forced the humor to ring in his voice but he was still concerned enough so that he let in an impulsive regrettable largess. “Why don’t I call Win Abrams for you in the morning, Cal? Maybe he’ll consider representing you. You know he’s the best.”

“Abrams? You’d get Abrams for me, Nick? How wonderful! I thought you couldn’t do that because he represented you when we divorced. And I know he was the best.” If this was a thinly-veiled attempt to criticize the final settlement of their own divorce, Nick circumvented it without allowing it to register.

“I don’t know the story on that, but I’ll find out. What is important now is to end this thing quickly for Noah’s sake and your own. For Allie and you as well. Abrams can do that and I’m sure he will willingly if the case looks lucrative enough, which I suppose it is. I’ll look into it in the morning and call you. Now go home.  No, stay right there and I’ll call a cab to swing by for you.”

“Okay, I will. I feel so much better. But my ankle is just throbbing. Nicky, can’t you come get me? I might need to go to the ER. No, it’s okay. Send a cab. You’ve been such a help already.  Thank you.”

He clicked off the phone and leaned his head against the wall. What had he done? So much for the custody issue. Abrams but not represent them both. He rubbed his eyes. A passing diner jostled him. He’d have to make the best of it, salvage what he could from the goodwill it would bring from Caroline and act as a mediator so that she didn’t fire Win or drive him to fire her. Shit, here he was straightening out Caroline’s chaotic life and he didn’t really even want to talk to the woman. Abruptly, he remembered Evelyn Fox.

She was gone.

Oh well, he supposed he had been rude and should call her. Maybe in the morning. She wasn’t anyone he was going to see again anyway. Too old. Too maternal. Right now he was exhausted and just wanted to escape into sleep. Maybe this resolution was really for the best. For Noah, how long could he go on witnessing these battles without becoming battle-scarred? Actually, that was close to the way he was behaving. What did they call it? PTSD? Post-traumatic stress. Goddammit, how can I keep my child from the wars? How can I protect him or at least arm him? Then he shuttered with discomfort remembering the incident with Hugh’s gun, remembering Columbine.

Nick pulled his collar up and headed out into the sleet in search of his car. He forgot about Evelyn Fox; in the morning he would set himself to the task of talking with Win Abrams about representing Caroline in her divorce. But first, he’d head over to Boyle St and rescue his ex-wife and her injured ankle. Maybe he’d have a chance to see Noah before he went to bed.

copyright ©Meredith Powers 2015-2025

Isabel had worked for years to get a position teaching at the high school. Administrators tended to first move men up from elementary and middle schools. There was some misplaced notion that it was more appropriate for women to teach the younger populations. Plus an ole-boy system prevailed in Blackbrook as it did elsewhere where the desire for success in boys’ athletics required placement of talented coaches at the high school, coaches who might be more committed to their field assignments than to classroom teaching. In the spring of 1999, Isabel had submitted an innovative curriculum for a humanities program that merged 20th century American literature with both history and music. Some enlightened school board member had been interested enough to push for its implementation. For Isabel, it had been a coup.

In late August she had learned that Richard Leland had been appointed principal. 

But Isabel was a determined optimist. She told herself to keep her head down and make her new curriculum a resounding success. Leland would have to leave her to it. Or so she thought.

Isabel was at work before seven every morning. Usually, she was the first to arrive. On more than one morning she had had to wait in her car for a custodian to arrive and unlock the building. The custodians suggested she ask Leland to issue her a key but she had not. She did not want him privy to her habits.

The early arrival was part of a routine she relished. The sound of the clock radio clicking softly on usually woke her and she remained in bed listening to NPR’s Morning Edition for a few moments while collecting her thoughts. She loved the morning stillness, the smell of her own coffee brewing in her own kitchen, the clothes she’d laid out the night before, even the sight of herself in the mirror – dressed and ready – before she left. When Rafe was home, she woke him before she left. When he was younger she had been able to tease him awake with a few bars from a song but no more.  In the last year brooding adolescence had set in and there were mornings she felt she was waking a sleeping lion. These mornings she tread carefully,  turning on his music so he wouldn’t fall back to sleep, prodding gently before leaving him. He could be trusted to get himself up, to finish the coffee she’d prepared, grab himself some pop tarts or fruit and be ready for the bus when it swung by an hour later. Rafe was a dependable kid, a self-starter.  She trusted him to do what he was supposed to do; he understood that this new position was important to her and required her early tending.  He liked the independence of mornings on his own.

The roads were almost empty. Sometimes, driving to the high school she would ruminate about the odd comfort the routine gave her. Isabel had been twenty years old, a college sophomore hanging around a music studio when a member of a struggling rock band lamented aloud how they desperately needed a singer.

“Can any of you sing?” he’d asked the girls and her friends had turned to her.

“I sing. I mean, I have a pretty good voice. So I’ve sung. A bit,” she’d answered hesitantly and that had been the beginning. What followed had been a chaotic decade of late nights and sweet songs. As lead singer for The Pink Mellon Circus, she’d learned to manage the formidable egos of talented young men. She’d taken voice lessons and polished her craft. The band had made some money, gotten cocky and a tiny bit famous, then bickered and broken apart. Their singer had continued as a soloist at places like the Belmont Club, working her way through graduate school. At twenty-three she’d found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Jared had arrived and late nights in clubs had been replaced by late nights rocking a sickly child to strangled lullabies and wondering how she would get through. Then James had rescued her, had loved her, had buoyed her and Jared both.  A teaching job materialized, a second son arrived.

But the transient joy had imploded with Jared’s death and the years of grief and divorce that followed. That was all over now,  all such issues resolved, however unsatisfactorily. Tragedy was exhausting. These days she lived a quiet life and cultivated the routine of it, the absence of chaos, the simple pleasure of doing what she could in her classroom.

An enthusiastic teacher, she worked hard to prepare and correct and to be innovative and succinct with her students.  One of her strengths was the ability to take complex events and weave and connect them into a narrative that her students could relate to. She knew they would not always be paying attention and that many of them needed repetition to process and retain detail. So she covered the walls of her new classroom with an ever-expanding collage,  a visual anchor for each of the decades of the 20th century with keywords or glyphs which she returned to again and again. She loved her work in that classroom. She loved her success. And she sang to them, gave them a soundtrack to the lessons, from the Ragtime of the turn of the century to Tin Pan Alley, Irving Berlin, Billie Holiday. She got recurring laughs for Berlin’s soldier’s lament, Oh How I Hate to Get up in the Morning. There was full-throated accompaniment for Shine on Harvest Moon and almost anything from George M Cohan, a local boy. They scorned the scratchy old recordings but loved it when she sang a few bars, alerted and engaged when she led them in something they knew. or something they quickly picked up. 

It had begun in early  September when she’d tangled with a class of upperclassmen dominated by a cadre of football players. They had wanted to crush her.  Having practiced together through August, they had arrived in her classroom an indomitable force, intimidating and rawly masculine,  rowdy, aggressive mammal cubs with sharp teeth.   They sought to dominate and were initially dismissive of this newcomer to their world, this small woman who thought she should command their attention. About to lose control of the class one afternoon,  she’d been momentarily terrified, in confrontation with one ornery player who snarled disrespectfully that she was “bothering” him with all her assignments and expectations. Without thinking, she’d responded by singing, pitch-perfect, the first lines of Taj Mahal’s Cakewalk into Town: I had the blues so bad one time, it put my face in a permanent frown….” It had been perfect. They’d listen, captured by the sweetness of the sound, then laughed, delighted with the novelty and humor of the lyric.  Even the boy who might have seen it as humiliation had been swept up.   And so had begun her quirky exchange. She sang to them. Some perfectly appropriate lyric would pop into her head and take on a cappella life of its own, briefly, sweetly, disarming conflict, recapturing attention, refocusing the class. The magic of it still made her laugh.

Principal Leland had discovered her early arrival by accident. While it was not his habit to arrive early for anything,  a January storm had brought him into the building early to coordinate the delayed opening. He’d parked his car next to Isabel’s. Discovering its proximity when she left at day’s end had filled her with uneasiness. Nothing was said.

Several weeks later, on this frigid February morning, she was working to incorporate a broadside of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire onto her collage of the early 20th century.  It had put her deep in an empathetic preoccupation with the young women who had died there, the fourteen-year-olds who had jumped to their deaths or died because locked doors pinned them in the inferno. Standing at her desk, bent over her work, she had not realized anyone was behind her until a figure loomed and his groin made contact with her ass; he’d grab the desk and pressed aggressively into her glute.  She’d jumped and whirled, infuriated.  Then she’d realized who it was –  the principal. His erection, hard and unwelcome against her flesh, now lingered as an angry protuberance in his pants.  His smile was humorless, a grimace, yet with an odd touch of hurt in it.

“Too early for you, McNally?” he asked by way of explanation. She stared at him in silence, wrestling unsuccessfully to control her outrage. Breathing. in and then out.

“Oh, come on. We’re both adults here,” he’d continued, moving backward to study her wall. “You finding this kind of collage stuff works?” he asked in an altered tone. He was, after all, her supervisor.

Backed up against the desk, she inhaled, counting out the beats with her breath, unsure what to do. But she knew her face showed her fury. Just then Rafe appeared in the door.

“Mom?” Rafe’s voice captured his confusion but also conveyed some basic sense that what was happening here was alien.

“Hi, honey,” she forced her voice to a near-normal range, tore her gaze from Leland. “What do you need?”

Rafe was shifting his own gaze from Leland to his mother and back again. He hesitated before answering.

“I just wanted to tell you I was going to Dad’s office after school. He thinks he can get out early to give me a driving lesson. Okay ?”

“Of course. Never too early to start learning…..”

“McNally, I came up here to tell you something,” Leland interrupted sourly. Both Isabel and Rafe turned to him with apprehension.

“I want you to sing today. At the rally. National Anthem,” he announced gruffly, heading toward the door of the classroom. Rafe scrambled to get out of his way.

For a few seconds, Isabel was frozen by discomfort and disbelief. It was Rafe who spoke first.

“Without accompaniment?” he asked.

“I don’t care how she does it,” Leland snapped. “I just want it done.” He stared confrontationally at Rafe.

Rafe turned toward his mother who was swimming slowly through the sludge of her conflicting emotions, focused on her desire to spare Rafe. He read the pain and confusion in her face.

“We got this,” he told her as Leland shoved roughly past him and out the door.

“Mom? You ok?” He asked.

She exhaled and then smiled at him.

“Yeah.  Yeah. OK… just unprepared. Star-Spangled Banner, without accompaniment, without practice….” she muttered, shaking her head.

“We got this, Mom. Look for me in the gym. Sunglasses!” He shouted and was gone.

Isabel lowered her head and remained leaning against her desk as she felt hot tears of powerlessness rising. Outside the classroom, she could hear the kids beginning to gather.  Her hands were shaking, her heart pounding. She inhaled as the first wave of her students entered her classroom.

It took half an hour to regain her composure. A few of the kids eyed her curiously, but she pushed ahead, beginning her lesson, focusing on something other than the encounter with her boss. That was the thing about teaching. There was seldom a moment to regroup emotionally. Another class was always pouring in. In every class, she was center stage and fully on. 

Later, lessons over, she faced her further humiliation downstairs in the gym. It made her want to cry, the idea that he could mistreat her so badly and yet demand she perform at the rally in front of the entire student body. But what choice did she have? Remembering Rafe’s instruction, she grabbed her sunglasses and entered the swarm of teenagers and teachers, all in high spirits, heading to the rally. Her head was pounding; she feared her voice would fail her, feared she might just weep into the microphone 

But once there, she spotted her son, an odd and misplaced figure in the doorway to a locker room, standing at a portable keyboard, dressed completely in black, his sunglasses hiding his face but not his intent. It thrilled her; it washed her with relief. She knew exactly what he intended.

Principal Leland quieted the boisterous crowd by telling them that the rally would begin with Ms. McNally singing the National Anthem. He carefully exaggerated the “Ms,” his scorn for the honorific inherent and conveyed. Isabel did not flinch. She took the microphone from him without making eye contact and turned to Rafe who signaled with the first notes from his keyboard. Then she delivered a worthy imitation of Ray Charles’s throaty version of America the Beautiful.

Oh, beautiful for heroes proved

in liberating strife

who more than self

our country loved

and mercy more than life….

Her recollection of the lyrics did not fail her, nor did her precision with the notes. It was her gift; she didn’t know where it came from but it was there and she could almost always count on it. For a moment the line about mercy brought up emotion so strong it threatened to  swamp her, but she shifted it with full force into the chorus:

America, America

may god thy gold refine

till all success be nobleness

and every gain devined…

She shifted to a speaking voice and continued:

You know when I was in school

we’d sing it

something like this

sing it with me now……

And with that they were all singing, stomping to their feet, a few pulling sunglasses from their bags and packs, exhilarated because this was novel, because they knew this song and liked this teacher and her goofy son, but mostly because it was Valentine’s Day and with this rally they’d be freed for winter break, a week’s vacation that could feel like the promise of  everlasting freedom when one is seventeen.

Later she couldn’t locate Rafe. He’d disappeared to return the keyboard and because he had very little interest in hearing the wonders of the basketball stars lauded at this rally. She wanted to thank him, of course, wanted to thank Ray Charles and all the stars in heaven that had delivered her voice but she was wasted with exhaustion so she headed quickly to her classroom to gather up her things and bolt to the reprieve of her car, to the onset of her vacation.  But Richard Leland materialized,  as he was wont to do. He appeared at the bottom of the back stairs by the exit, smiling but with his lip slightly curled.

“Quite the performance, McNally,” he quipped, damning with faint praise. “Quite a performance……yeah, and I want you in my office on Monday when we get back. I’ve got another job for you. Tutoring at Bradley. But we’ll talk about it then. I’m sure you’ll be as impressive as you were with this….”

He’d turned away from her, dismissively, then wheeled back.

“And I do know that was not the National Anthem,” he added, as though she had not known.

She pushed open the door and sucked in the icy air. Through blurred vision she dragged herself to the old Honda.

Claire Howard had gone into the city that afternoon. She’d been having trouble with her hands. They trembled all the time. Her primary care physician had spoken of the possibility of a central tremor or something worse. Claire had dismissed her. She was thinking instead that it was stress, that it was time to retire. So she had made an appointment with an investor at Profitline to ask about her investments, the ones that Herbert had left her when he’d left her a widow. She resented them then, wishing he had instead survived to grow old with her and fuss with the damn things himself.  But now thinking of retirement, she needed to pin down the exact amount she could cull from them to supplement her pension. Exiting that interview to the sidewalk, thoroughly preoccupied, she spotted a car with a driver who seemed familiar.  Claire was not a car person, so she could not have identified the make or model but the sole occupant, the driver,  looked a lot like Rafe.

Is that Rafe? Is Rafe old enough to drive already? She wondered momentarily and then the thought disappeared into the ether. Later, she rendezvoused with Isabel and other colleagues for pre-vacation libations. From them, she heard the story of Ray Charles’s 1972 rendition of America the Beautiful on the Dick Cavett Show, an old show she remembered with pleasure. They told her how that same song had been Isabel’s small rebellion and had considerably enhanced the rally. There was laughter,  and a slapstick glee as the sweep of the vacation stretched out before them. Isabel did not mention the awful episode with Leland in her classroom. While she applauded Rafe’s costume and his keyboard, Claire did not mention sighting him on the road.

copyright ©Meredith Powers 2015-2025

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Nick had no plans for New Year’s Eve. He had no date and had spent the day at the office fretting idly about the remote possibility of Y2K complications. There had been none. He had tried throwing himself into preparation for a week of business meetings scheduled for early January but the effort had failed. He thought he was looking forward to the work,  having fallen into a self-deceptive cycle in which he focused on work as an escape from what seemed of late to be constant anxiety. Plus,  it was New Year’s Eve, and he had no date. Actually, that wasn’t quite true, wasn’t that bleak. He would be spending the evening with his son.

Driving in the pulsing traffic, delayed by one slow down after another, horns honking, lights flashing, Nick found his stress rising. He was burdened with the pressing need for some decisions, not just for Noah’s sake but to relieve his own chronic angst. Not that he wasn’t looking forward to seeing Noah: he certainly was, in fact, more so now that Noah had become so silent and troubled. The only time he felt the boy was safe these days was when he was beside him. But lately, the pleasure of his anticipation at seeing Noah had been laced with a haunting, acid concern. Something was so obviously wrong in Noah’s world, and Nick could not fully fathom just what his own responsibility was in this. The beautiful house on Stone Street was once again the setting of vituperative domestic eruptions, of endless recriminations, of constant ubiquitous warfare. Nick remembered vividly the unique fractiousness that had characterized the weeks between separation and divorce. It was a horror to balance the luminescence of the first season of love, its pitched agony so shrill and intense it seemed little mitigated in Nick’s memory even all these years later. Too intense a thing to last, he thought, yet indelible, unforgettable, and for Noah this time, too.

He winced at the thought; Noah, sensitive, vulnerable little boy, once more entangled in that awfulness, though this time perhaps in a somewhat peripheral role. Nick wanted desperately to spare him but was unresolved as to how to do that. So he rationalized. This divorce, after all, was not something happening to Noah’s own parents; perhaps it was not as difficult for the child as it would have been if Hugh had been his biological father, or if Noah had developed a serious attachment to him. It had only been a five-year marriage. Noah seldom spoke of Hugh. What do I really know, Nick wondered desperately. Noah was prudent enough to avoid discussing Hugh with his father.  Nick thought briefly of the soft, heart-shaped face of Allison, her eyes so like his son’s. Age has a lot to do with the intensity of the trauma of divorce. Nick had read that. Noah had been seven when his own father left, still so obviously dependent on his mother. Nick had been almost incontinent in his campaign to make himself available and accessible to Noah in the years that followed. Boys from eight to fourteen were the most damaged by divorce, hadn’t he read that? But what about divorce once removed? Does Noah worry that he will not see Hugh again? Nick found that the question hurt him, astringent to his own still unhealed wound. At least Hugh would be taking those damn guns with him, Nick thought, wishing them as far away from Noah as possible, wincing at the recollection of the September debacle. Now it made more sense, fall out from an ugly divorce.

An angry honking startled Nick out of his reverie. In the second he turned to glare at the other driver, he realized that he had been frowning already. The intensity of his helplessness washed over him, cold, wet, unexpected. My son lives in a house where they leave guns lying about for children to play with and there is nothing I can do …. He sucked in his breath and let impatience take over. In everything, he had control, success, insight, but in this, the most important thing of all, he was a bumbling fool, a puppet to the whims of parvenus. At least one of the parvenus was moving out.

He resolved to press Noah to talk more about his feelings. But Noah was truculently silent these days. He offered nothing willingly, seemed always guarded. When his father interrogated, he became stubbornly opaque. Nick found himself inadvertently gruff, at least lately, too pushy perhaps. Noah had once told him things spontaneously. Nick longed for those long-ago days. Now he was dutiful at best. There were no more impulsive confidences. Nick thought of Aaron Rosenbloom, the psychologist he had been seeing on and off for years. How was it that Aaron’s straightforward questioning seemed so soothing? Nick ended up telling him things he had resolved ahead of time that he did not wish to discuss. Of course, he was broadly willing, but then so was his son, he assumed. Aaron had a way about him – nonjudgmental compassion – that was it, a willingness to suspend judgment, that made one prattle on and stumble onto one’s own insights. He had recognized the same technique in Dr. Melfi when she worked with the mobster Tony Soprano on that new HBO hit.

Yet Noah told Nick so little and when he did Nick felt obliged, as his own dad had, to give interpretative input, to offer evaluation and judgment, helping his son begin to see things as he ought. Of course, Noah did seem to be a pretty straight thinker on his own, but wasn’t that the risk of the conscientious parent? Thirteen years old, almost fourteen. Nick could remember himself at that age. He was essentially the same person as he had been then, less tentative certainly, but constructed of the same mettle. Less a Republican, as well. JFK had been such an appealing figure; he remembered his enthusiasm, remembered too his father’s hostility toward the young Catholic and toward Nick when he spoke well of him. That summer – 1960 – had been the summer of that Catholic kid he thought of so often when he masturbated. Of course, he would never have told his father of that experience. It had happened at camp. He’d not expect Noah to reveal such a thing, certainly not.  Nick wondered what went on in Noah’s life when he was not with him, wondered too if Noah ever needed him to know things that he could not speak. Maybe he confided such things to Caroline.

What do I expect, he wondered, turning onto Stone Street. I’m his father, not his buddy. Yet he had hoped it would be different, that one of the unexpected bonuses of their odd-couple relationship would be a kind of friendship. Yet it appeared to be Caroline who had his loyalty. Savagely protective when questioned, silent on the subject of his life with his mother, Noah was more secretive these days and Nick was hesitant to press him, afraid it would push his son prematurely into the full-blown sullenness of adolescence. And there was that awful episode with the gun.

In the driveway, Nick pulled in behind Hugh’s car before he realized that its motor was still running. Someone sat in the passenger’s seat. An adult. A woman already? Nick registered it with bleak irony. They were both exiled fathers now who would pass one another in this driveway as they fetched the siblings, Allison and Noah, fragments of the ever-changing modern family. It has come to this.

He was out of the car and up the back steps before he realized there was a problem. Hearing the Shorters shouting, Nick hurried, automatically assuming he could help, then halting in ghastly trepidation as he realized he was barging into one of those uniquely ugly, pre-divorce altercations. Where the hell is Noah? They are probably carrying on like this right in front of Noah. Indignant, he pushed open the back hall door which had been left ajar.

Inside, astonishment froze Nick as he came upon his ex-wife and her soon-to-be second ex-husband, each pulling on one of their daughter’s arms. The little girl, a chubby toddler, was screaming in terror and pain. Her parents were oblivious to Nick’s entrance; this was no feint but a deadly tug-of-war.

“Caroline,” Nick interjected, the assertive if unwilling referee.

Hugh whirled in Nick’s direction. His face already ruddy with rage, it instantly reddened further with embarrassment. He dropped his daughter’s arm and the little girl broke from her mother. A wild thing freed unexpectedly while battling a trap, she looked frantically to Nick, whose intervention had freed her. For a horrifying moment, he thought she was going to run to him. He barely knew the child; uncomfortable and apprehensive, he instinctively turned away from her. She flew from the three adults into the half-darkness of the kitchen beyond. It was then that Nick spotted Noah standing in solemn witness, his face as white as the refrigerator behind him. Noah opened his arms to his sister, not with drama so much as practice and she barreled into him and spun herself between him and the refrigerator. Noah became her buffer. His expression was more weariness than fear.

“Hi, Dad.” His voice was weirdly calm. Eerie.

“Hello,” Nick stared past them all, his eyes riveted to his son, the impact of Noah’s function in this scene made emphatically clear. For a second Nick felt a powerful pride, then an explosive rage.

“Caroline, what’s going on here?” he asked stupidly, absurdly authoritarian. Who was he, the Blackbrook Vice Squad? They could throw him out. It was their house.

“Nothing that is any of your business, Nick,” she snapped, clearly ready to take him on; no shadow of Hugh’s embarrassment was evident on his wife’s face.

“Not my business?” Nick snapped. “One of these kids you’re fucking with is mine!”

Nick’s bellow was an unfamiliar boom. Allie began to keen softly.

“Watch your language,” Caroline barked absurdly.

“Knock it off, Dad,” Noah added. He heard the echo of his own voice in Noah’s, the familiar authoritative resonance. As it should be. Flabbergasted into silence, Nick felt his anger dissipating, air from a  balloon. He felt diminished, almost silly. Who did he think he was?

Knock it off, Dad. Had Noah said that? Of course, he had and rightly so. Noah’s hand fumbled with his sister’s head, reassuring and protective. Practiced. That’s what horrified his father; that he seemed so practiced in this role.

“Caroline, I’m leaving. I will have my lawyer get in touch with you. And know this: you will not keep me from my visitation rights!”

And with that Hugh Shorter slammed out of the matrimonial home.

Nick noted that it was his rights and not his daughter that concerned him, noted too that Caroline had apparently learned nothing from her first divorce, that some of the altercations in that prequel had taken place in this very room. Had Noah heard them back then?

“Caroline,” he said her name softly, firmly with but with deliberate sympathy he hoped. She snapped around.

“Don’t start, Nick!”

“I’m not starting anything, but you know that you will have to work out visitation….”

“Stop!” she shrieked, covering her ears. “Stop! Stop! Stop! This is not your business, Nick Krasnow. Get out of my house!”

Nick wanted desperately to do just that but would not go without Noah and Noah had not yet budged from the refrigerator where he stood shielding his sister, whose stunned little face peered out from behind her brother’s arm. How could he get Noah to leave Allison?

“Cal…” he tried again, this time with the nearly-forgotten diminutive of their long-age intimacy. It softened her. She threw herself into a kitchen chair, her head in her arms on the table. “Cal… how about if Noah and I take Allie with us to dinner?” Where did that come from? Nick astonished himself.

From the corner of his eye, he read the unmistakable flash of emotion on Noah’s face. Gratitude. “Could we bring her back tomorrow, Dad?” the boy interjected quickly. Nick was instantly resentful. He did not want her. What would he do with this traumatized little stranger? He looked from Noah to Allison, her face a scaled-down version of his son’s. That similitude made Nick uncomfortable; it always had.

The only option was to bolster her mother into some sort of shape. He touched Caroline’s shoulder which shook with emotion if not with sobs.

“Do you want me to take her, Cal?” he asked gently. She lifted wet brown eyes to him. Noah’s eyes, Allie’s eyes. That look of helpless surrender to one so much stronger and wiser than herself. Her hero. It made him scornful now but he did not allow that to show. Once it had had such power over him, had rendered him instantly competent and protective.

“Oh, Nick, that would be wonderful. I just need some time to myself.”

“Okay. Noah, get Allie’s pj’s.” But Noah had grabbed the two backpacks already waiting on the floor beside him. So Allie had been set to go with her father. Whatever had happened between them had happened quickly; he thought of the strange woman in Hugh’s car and of Caroline’s volatility. Nick looked her squarely in the eyes.

“You want us to take her?”

“Please, Nick, please.” Dewey-eyed, the practiced aura of helplessness exuded with her assent. Right. Of course, she wants me to take over. Has anything changed?

Driving away from Stone Street with Noah and Allie, Nick felt raw, exposed, put upon. Noah had fetched his sister’s car seat from Caroline’s car and connected it to the seat belts in the backseat of Nick’s before his father had even begun to recover his composure. Noah was peculiarly efficient, careful and expert with his little sister. Practiced, Nick thought again, sourly. It was outrageous but Nick did not know who he was outraged at. Certainly not Noah, who was trying so hard to please, obviously fearful that his father, too, might explode before they left.

“Get in front,’ Nick snapped at his son and was instantly sorry. Noah looked at Allie, who was wide-eyed but seemed less fragile, then to his father who was glaring despite himself. Some wordless communication took place between the children and Nick was reduced by it to sheepish frustration. Noah was so thoroughly in charge. He said nothing yet he generated an absolute reassurance in Allie, who popped her thumb into her mouth and accepted that Noah would position himself in front of her in the front seat. Her eyes followed him, glazed over sleepily as Noah took his usual place beside his father. Nick had slammed the car door, angry again, resentful of Allie, then humiliated by his own inappropriate emotions. His son sat hunched and uneasy beside him, his neck seemingly elongated, a vulnerable and overtaxed stem.

“Hells bells, it’s finally quiet,” Nick said heartily to break the strained silence. Noah turned and grinned at him tentatively. “Where to for dinner?” Nick asked conspiratorially, having mastered his frustration. “Papa Gino’s?” Noah loved pizza and Nick wanted to indulge him.

“Yeah. Allie loves pizza,” Noah answered immediately, deflecting his father’s caretaking to his needier companion. Nick felt an instant sour resentment. Again. He sighed heavily and with a trailer of exasperation, slammed the car into gear and pulled onto Stone Street. Noah retreated further into his shoulders.

At the restaurant, Noah took care of Allison without any assistance from Nick. From disconnecting her from the car seat straps to cleaning the dollops of tomato sauce from her jersey, Noah was careful and expert. Allison accepted the arrangement as familiar. Nick wondered how much of these babysitting chores Noah had had to do lately. What the hell is the matter with Caroline? At the same time Noah handled his sister’s unspoken, compelling needs, he answered his father’s rudimentary questions about school and friends and whether he had spoken with his Krasnow cousins this week. His eyes were pinned on Allie, seemingly fearful that something would go wrong with her. He answered his father without accompanying eye contact, but the treatment of both seemed somehow an extension of the same function. Noah was caretaking. It infuriated Nick who found himself ignoring Allie or at least excluding her, although it wasn’t exactly deliberate. This delicate, small-scale version of Noah who impelled her brother’s solicitude seemed a repugnant foil to Nick, whose resentment was too strong to allow him to initiate a relationship. Noah, however, had no choice, so he bridged the gaps between them and the effort pained his father to greater fury.

Nick did not know his own child tonight, much less Allison. He looked at her as she studied her brother. Her great brown eyes were so solemn, so like Noah’s own, yet Noah had been a cheerful child, rowdy and demanding. Not Allison. She was silent and sober, compelling her brother’s attention without saying anything. By depending. Nick thought once of that first image he had seen: Allison, her little body splayed as she formed a human rope between Caroline and Hugh. Nick had to close his eyes against the image. And Noah watching the whole thing from the shadows of the kitchen. Goddamn, what are they doing to the children?

He tried to focus on modifying his impatience but it was difficult. Driving from dinner to his own house he wondered about his obligation to Allison’s father. Hugh was working on those row houses down by the old Navy Yard in Charlestown. Nick was tempted to drive there now, momentarily sure that Hugh would have gone there to console himself. We could bring Allie there, Nick plotted and was immediately annoyed. What do I know of Hugh, he asked himself impatiently. I go to work for comfort and distraction, maybe Hugh prefers a bar or the company of that woman in his car.

So he took Hugh’s daughter to his own house and watched with prickly jealousy as his son like some underprivileged, put-upon sibling performed his fastidious care-taking ritual. Miniature parent. Nick offered to help bathe her, but Noah was firm, almost panicky in his refusal, so Nick left them alone and half-sulking, half-fuming he took himself to his study while the children were occupied in the bath. He sat at his computer, checked his emails. There were responses to his ad in the personals. For a second his spirits rose in anticipation, then the children were in the doorway, two beautiful, look-alike cherubs in blue PJs, Allie’s the sleeper kind with feet. Noah’s neck looked more reed-like and delicate to his father, his bare white feet enhanced the vulnerability and frustration flooded Nick’s momentary tenderness. Who the hell am I angry with? He castigated himself. Noah? Or Allison, poor thing?

Truth be told he was sort of angry with Allison and that realization humbled him. He did spontaneous penance, bending to scoop his son’s small sister up by her chubby middle and tossing her over his shoulder in a playful gesture that had never failed to make Noah and his cousins gleeful.

“Come on, troops, let’s find ourselves a game to play.” He began with hearty goodwill but Allison’s bleat of distress halted him. Hurt, he lowered her to the floor and she scurried to her brother. Whatever emotion had caused her to cry was not revealed in her face. She looked forth mildly from her safe haven, unexpectedly curious about Nick, warming to him perhaps. Nick forgave her easily. Poor thing, she was forgiving him, too. They were both intruders, players in their own tug-of-war for Noah.

“Dad, Allie and I just want to watch some tv if that’s okay.” Noah sounded suddenly weary and it touched Nick, who felt weary himself. They had all been on an emotional roller coaster. He felt resigned to his own bewilderment, yet felt with certainty that the best thing to do for these two right now was to let them rest from all the raw stimulation of real life, to offer them sanctuary and the escape of television if that was what they wanted. It was at best a shoring up, but seeing it and resolving to follow through on the insight made Nick feel better. Within a few minutes, Allie was propped on pillows on the couch with Noah tucking a tartan around her and then pulling the bottom over his own naked feet.

“ You warm enough?” Nick questioned gruffly, compelled again to reclaim the role of parent. But Noah shook his head, distractedly surfing with the remote. He flipped quickly through the offerings until he found what he was looking for. Suddenly, a dim-witted Homer Simpson appeared in all his comedic inanity; he was without his family, hopelessly trying to extricate his car from a Denver boot. His windshield was thick with tickets and the car was apparently stranded between the Twin Towers in New York City, far from Springfield. Nick thought of telling the children that he had been there, that he had eaten in the restaurant at the top of the South Tower, that it had been like eating in a parked airplane. But just then Homer was bolting for the nearest public restroom and as plot would have it, that was at the top of one of the towers. Nick snorted at the absurdity. Just as suddenly Allie and her brother were laughing along with the soundtrack. Of course, a policeman showed up while Homer was indisposed. Kids do you still like potty humor, he thought. The laugh track seemed to steady them. It felt like they were lost to him but recovering themselves in the celluloid netherworld.

“Is it funny?” he asked, tentative in his loneliness.

Noah stared at the TV, completely absorbed, but Allie, her recovery now quite obvious glanced momentarily at her host and offered some obscure comment pointing helpfully at the silver screen where Lisa and Bart, accompanied by their mother were sightseeing while Homer drove his car from between the twin towers without removing the Denver boot. Nick winced as the boot scraped away at the car. Didn’t seem all that funny to him, but they were laughing together, without him, and he felt too cumbersome and old and foolish to penetrate their union.

He watches too much TV when he’s with me, Nick thought as he took himself back to his study. Caroline was grimly restrictive about what they could watch so Nick enjoyed indulging Noah. But sometimes it seemed as though he was transported by it, as though he was no longer available, had escaped to another planet perhaps. Escaped what? Me? Nick had chafed at his own parents in adolescence. But that was different; this was supposed to be different. And Noah had other things far more serious to escape. The thought shook Nick yet again.  High seismographic reading. How can I protect my own son he wondered desperately

Nick’s found the lawyer’s phone number and dialed it, but as it rang he pressed the red button. Was this an emergency? New Year’s Eve?  He had not called the guy at home in over six years. The crisis of his own divorce and its aftermath had eventually played out. Surely this would as well. Next week when he came back from London he would call and ask about the possibility of suing for custody of Noah.

Next, he located Dr.  Rosenbloom’s number and sat at his desk staring at it. Could he call Rosenbloom at home at night for what wasn’t an emergency? And reveal that he was home alone with these children?  No, it just wasn’t an emergency, plus it was New Year’s Eve. One did not need to make an emergency call on a holiday. Damn Caroline, he thought,  damn the woman to hell.

Suddenly the phone in his hand rang and it was Caroline. Pliant, sweet, docile,  relieved, she had called to thank him for taking Allison, for allowing her some real rest. She was under so much stress, she told him without petulance, she could use one of those back rubs he used to give her; did he remember those? Within seconds Nick was mollified, his anxiety over Noah salved as he assumed this familiar role, adviser, manager, champion. This man knew instinctively what to do, suffered no inkling of self-doubt.

“Caroline, I remember. Not just you but Hugh too is under enormous stress ..” he barreled ahead despite her attempt to protest.  “But we absolutely have to work to spare Noah… To spare both children… and to that end, I will help you as much as I can. Really. Do you need money?” It was a time-honored panacea and allowed him to dodge easily around the back rub reference. It sounded foolish to him, but Caroline herself murmured something grateful which was neither affirmative nor negative. For an alarming second, he envisioned her thinking he was offering to treat her to a facial or to a leg waxing or some such trifling indulgence – a massage perhaps. In pursuit of peace but of integrity as well, he pressed direction on her.

“How about a therapist? I’m sure you’re seeing one yourself but how about letting me arrange for family therapy for you and the children? They are the ones who are under the most stress…” But he knew that any diminishment of her burden would not go over well, so he qualified quickly, “For them, it is all so confusing.”

She agreed, consoled as much for his masterful intervention as by any desire she may have actually had of alleviating her children’s distress. She asked him to keep Allie for the New Year’s Day party at his brother’s house. Before he could answer, she told him he’d cheered her up, that she thought she’d get dressed up and go to the Belmont Club for a drink to usher in what had to be a better year. 

 Nick himself felt oddly elated when the call was over. But the flush was short-lived. When his brother Peter called, he told him the story of the afternoon, his narrative climaxing as the hero saves the day by rescuing the little damsel. He embarrassed himself by taking too much of the heroic role away from Noah, who was his sister’s tireless, selfless champion, who protected her from her father and from his own. By the time Nick recounted the denouement, Caroline’s last phone call, a jaded weariness had entered his recitation. The patina of triumph he willed into the telling fell flat before Peter’s silence. Again Nick felt powerfully exhausted and attempted to avoid what he knew would come from Peter. He wanted nothing so much as to get the kids to bed and then to go himself. But Peter, good brother that he was. would not be put off so easily

“Nick, call the lawyer next week, will you? Caroline hasn’t changed. One weekend without her kids is not going to make her over into the sensible parent.” Such was Peter’s ruthless assessment. 

Nick did not call the lawyer in the morning or the next.  The second day of the new year he was running late with just enough time to give Caroline another moment of supportive advice while he trundled her silent daughter into the house, then rushed off to drop Noah at West Middle before heading into Boston. He had an early meeting. Before he knew it was lunchtime and he was sitting alone in his big office for the first time with a moment to reflect. Outside the huge bay windows, small figures moved across Financial Plaza, bundled against the wind. At that moment Nick felt content, powerful,  confident as he always did after a successful interlude sitting in this chair. But with the vacuum, the angst returned, wraith-like at first, nebulous. What was this? Why was he worried? Recollection of the night’s events swept into his consciousness. “Shit,” he muttered as he remembered; glumness and self-doubt returned.

Should he sue Caroline for custody of Noah? Could he even? Who the hell did he think he was? Mr. Mom? Dustin Hoffman playing that father and Kramer vs Kramer? He remembered all too well what had happened to Ted Kramer’s career. Nicholas Krasnow was the colossus of his company because he was ambitious and  thrived on his work, willingly spent much time at it, not just long hours in his office but at least one night a week in New York, at least a week a month in Europe. What would I do with Noah? Board him out? What about boarding school? The idea simmered for a moment and then dulled. Right, I’ll just take Noah away from his mother whom he loves, from his sister who he is almost fanatically devoted to and put him in a boarding school, just in case he hasn’t had enough grief for one lifetime? Wouldn’t he just love me for it?  If only I’d remarried, he mused, thinking he needed to put in more time on Match.com. After all, he was a charter member. But it’s a goddamn part-time job. Just then his secretary buzzed and the sound reminded him of his recent contact with that New York prostitute.   He had already forgotten her name, but not her business acumen, not the silent sting of humiliation he’d felt at being taken so far before he realized who and what she was. Great, I’m about as good at evaluating women as I am at solving Noah’s problems.  He flipped the intercom and asked his secretary to call Dr. Rosenbloom’s office for him and make an appointment. That done, Nick turned his indefatigable energies to the rewards of work. 

copyright ©Meredith Powers 2015-2025

 

Rhiney met him at The Mall. It was the first time she went there with just her brother Dez. They had been dumped at their grandmother’s house and their ma’s doing her big-bang exit, one of her super explosions, the kind only she and Rue can pull off.  Nonna had yelled back for a while but then Nonna’d started crying and it became clear that Ma was gonna win. Rhiney wasn’t sure what that would mean, but their mother was gonna walk, that much she understood. 

Rhiney could just see the quivering yellow of Nonna’s big boobs under her housecoat. There was her ma in her boots and glove-fitting jeans, her leather jacket and frosted hair – Rhiney knew her mother was cool. But it was depressing to watch them fight like this again. Couldn’t they just love each other like families on TV Land? Nonna wasn’t cool, not like TV grandmothers. She was fat and old and gray and carried that silly little poodle dog on her shoulder all the time. When they were little the twins had thought the dog was cute, but now it was old, with white whiskers and really bad breath. Rue said it was gross; that Noona ought to have it put down because it made her grandkids wanna puke and grandkids were more important than dogs. Rhiney didn’t say anything against what Rue said, but the poodle didn’t really make Rhiney wanna puke. The way Nonna clung to that dog, whose name was Cookie, reminded Rhiney of Dez when he was little and he wouldn’t let anyone throw away that dirty pink penguin he’d had practically since the day he was born. The penguin’s name was Floyd. Sometimes Rhiney wondered what had happened to that penguin but she didn’t ask. She was afraid even Dez wouldn’t remember the penguin, wouldn’t even remember its name. Rue sure wouldn’t.

Rhiney felt irrevocably linked to that penguin and to her depressing, colorless grandmother. Rue was like their ma, fiery and sure of herself, always exploding and exiting and making people take notice. When Nonna tried to tell Ma to give up her young stud boyfriend, that he was just taking her money and making her forget her responsibility to her own kids, Rhiney felt a glimmer of hope, such logic always worked for TV families but at the same time she had known in her deepest self that it wouldn’t work in hers. First Ma just looked bored and stared at some spot on Nonna’s ceiling, and when Nonna faulted her for not being there for Rue, for having driven Rue away, then Ma exploded big time and they’d just gone at one another again. 

“If you’d of done this…I’d d never of done that…if you didn’t think you were something so damned special…like you shit ice cream….you’re just jealous, you ole hag…”

Rhiney couldn’t tell which one of them was yelling if she didn’t concentrate and what was the point. If she turned away and watched television with Dez, their voices blurred into one another. Mother and daughter had the same pitch, the same demeanor, the same self-righteousness becoming frustration becoming recrimination. They seemed to grow out of one another, to get louder and crueler because of the other’s loudness and cruelty. Neither ever said sorry. Sometimes she’d hear her sister’s name – Rue – like it was a lost jewel they were talking about. Whenever she heard her sister’s name, Rhiney held her breath. She continued staring straight ahead but did not see the television. The Huxtables just blurred into one another and the laugh track cackled harshly as Rhiney yearned toward the combatants in the kitchen. Passionate, inarticulate, unspeakably wretched, she listened for some word of Rue, for some insight into all the upheaval and fragmentation that had suddenly become her life. Always there had been her erupting, sweet-sweet-smelling mother. Always there had been Rue, yelling back, just as passionate, wild, working out the rough edges with their ma, breaking into the absorptions their mother inevitably formed with her boyfriends, yelling and protecting while Rhiney waited, holding Dez’s hand. Now they were both gone. Rue to her baby and her boyfriend’s family. Ma, too. And there was just Nonna, a fat, worn-out non-person who nobody would ever put on any TV show. A throw-away person, like Rhiney, only older.

“Let’s get outta here,” Dez hissed abruptly, unexpectedly, a savior where Rhiney had expected none. Little Dezzy was suddenly big. Hard. Angry. Male. It occurred to his sister that he was better able to handle things than she was. Tougher, maybe. Smarter, too. A guy.

“Where’ll we go?” She asked, almost unable to hear herself through her mother’s bellows and her grandmother’s half-wailing responses. Accusations and recriminations. No one saying sorry or let’s just stop this, like they tried to teach you to do in school. No one in Rhiney’s family ever hugged or made up. Theo Huxtable and his friend Cockroach were trying desperately to con his parents into some crazy scheme. Claire and Cliff were benignly, serenely unaffected. The laugh track loved it.  Rhiney was confused and anxious, a little panicky.

Why would Dez offer to take her?

“To The Mall. You comin’ or not?”

It was a brusque and dispassionate proposal. A lifebuoy tossed perfunctorily as the reluctant hero turned away, refusing to be tempted or delayed by the dialectics of the thing, refusing to cajole or convince. Gruff and peremptory. Desmond was intent on survival, seemingly unconcerned with the impracticality of abandoning ship, certainly unwilling to acknowledge the desperateness of the seas. 

“Yeah.” So she left the noise and squalor of her grandmother’s flat for the garishness of the neon-lit Mall. In front of Spenser’s Gifts, Dez was suddenly scowling, intent on studying a display of giant vibrating wands but maybe thinking of something else. The girl on the package held the wand against her calf muscle but Rue had told her what they were really for. Over the intercom, the Elmo and Patsy were singing…She’d been drinking too much eggnog, And we begged her not to go, but she forgot her medication and … when suddenly Dez was taking off. He thought he knew where he’d find a guy he knew from the neighborhood. How could a fourteen-year-old know so many guys?

‘Meetcha in the game room later,” he’d offered vaguely and she had turned her plaintive,  yearning eyes to him: Don’t leave me. Take care of me.  For a millisecond he had entertained her message before a defiant glaze crept over his eyes like fog.

Don’t leave me, she’d pleaded silently to his retreating back, but, like Rue, he did.

Rue.

Rhiney’s grief was bottomless and everywhere like air and breath.

Angel Machado and his friend had seen her outside the window of The Limited. Wishing she could think about the clothes, she had been thinking about the baby, a little unborn baby whose hold on Rue was so absolutely more secure than her own. 

She’d let me die, Rhiney thought, seeing layettes march across the window in a single reflective dimension between herself and the headless mannikins in their Christmas plaids. She’d never let you die, little baby. 

“I wanna have his baby.” 

That’s what she’d told her sister. It had sounded so brave and romantic. So much more, a million, trillion times braver than Rhiney would ever be. Surer. More grown-up. How come she knew she wanted to have his baby? Now Rhiney was alone, moving aimlessly, from The Limited to Urban Outfitters, without money to buy anything, without Rue to show her it didn’t matter.

“Hey, little girl, you gonna buy an outfit to go down under,” asked a husky voice close to her ear.

Two guys were standing there She saw their reflections in the glass beside her own. Rhiney had no idea what he had said, but she felt the dim lure of attraction. 

“Come on, Mash, let’s go.” The other guy couldn’t be bothered. She saw that right away. To him, she was invisible, like she was to everyone. She watched them work it out in the windowpane, a one-dimensional drama that replaced the layettes and only remotely concerned her, though she felt a thickly muffled stirring of interest. What’s this? She wondered vaguely without forming any more distinct thought. Essentially she agreed with the notion of her own discardablity, but somewhere deep within a stubborn if battered resistance bleat weakly, not quite allowing her to accept this stranger’s knowing ahead of time – without her having yet even opened her mouth – that she was a loser, that others a million times more significant than his friend had already rejected her today.

“Somethin’ to do,” the cuter one told him. “Whassa matter? You afraid I’ll score?” he taunted as he flashed Rhiney his big, even smile. Matt Damon smile! She failed to actually hear him because his smile compelled her. She was startled by the unexpected power of it, by its warmth, by the feeling that it was so utterly for her. A gift. For her? Does this mean he likes me?

Somehow his friend evaporated and Rhiney was walking the concourse with the guy, looking into windows, listening to his steady stream of chatter, letting him seduce her into laughter. The puffy whiteness disappeared from her face. She saw herself in the narrow mirrors on the pillars between the stores. High color appeared in her cheeks as he babbled on, low and funny and talking just to her. She never noticed how much the change made her look like Rue, but eventually, she felt hot in the face, felt herself beaming with relief. She felt high with the sudden buoyancy of unexpected emotion. Enjoyment. This was fun. 

“Come on, little girl.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward a door that read Emergency Exit. Rhiney forgot for a moment and hesitated out of habit, turning to tell Rue where she’d be. Abruptly, painfully, she remembered. No one was waiting on her. Rue had left her. Gone. Gotten herself pregnant and dumped her.

Rhiney felt flushed and daring. This guy was cute and he was with her. She’d never been in the stairwell outside The Mall. There was a long hall with everything painted pale gray, very clean, without graffiti. Their footsteps echoed weirdly and Rhiney felt the thrill of their secret escape.

“Where are we?” she asked excitedly. It was the first time she had spoken.

“Mega! She like speaks!” He howled, pulling her to him. “I thought all you could do was smile, little girl,” he whispered, his face so close.

She could feel his breath. Rhiney liked the way he braced her against him like maybe she could lean on him for a while. He lifted her off her feet, pivoting her against his groin, but she didn’t let herself notice. Basking in his smile, his warm attention, she knew he was going to hug her. Hug her. It was such an appealing idea. She craved it like food. Hugs are good for stress.  Rue had told her that once.

“Hey, look!” He half-whispered, but he loosened his hold while not quite letting her go. He’d spotted something on the lower stairs – a brown leather purse, just sitting there, abandoned.

Rhiney felt a rush of pleasure. Some girl would be really relieved they’d found her purse.

“We’re in luck, little girl!” Angel hooted his pleasure, drawing her into his conspiracy. “How much? Ya wanna guess?” He lunged for the purse, dragging Rhiney by the hand. Her face ached from the smiling. Yeah, we can take the money, she thought. It had not occurred to her but it certainly seemed like a fabulous idea. She’s never got money now. Not from Nonna. Rue’d always been the one to get them money.

“Quick, once for luck,” Angel’s eyes were shiny with excitement. Rhiney didn’t understand what he wanted, just that she was the reason for that bright face. She, Rhiney Colangelo, the dumb, quiet twin, and that shit-brown purse he clutched in his other hand.

“Just once, honey, for luck,” he repeated. She stared at him dumbly and he laughed. “Come on, girl. You know I gotta have ya,” he told her sweetly in a low husky voice. His arm was around her again and he wasn’t asking really. He lifted her easily off the ground, leading with his hips. “I wantcha bad…for luck, little girl, just once, for luck.”  

Her shoulders were against the wall, his groin pressed hard against her pubic bone when she bought of it…does he want…? But her questions were silent and in slow motion and he smelled so good. She wanted him hugging her again. This time hard, with both arms.

He was moving frantically. She felt his cock getting bigger, but it seemed more persistent than enormous; he’d pushed her skirt up around her waist. 

“Hug me,” she ventured tentatively.

“What? What’s ya say, little girl?” he pressed, undressing a rag dog, seemingly surprised she was capable of speech. 

“Hug me,” she repeated more forcefully, almost an order.

“Honey, I’m gonna fuck you,” he growled, impassioned by what he perceived as her assent. He even dropped the purse, their prize. He knew it was empty, but she wasn’t going to be. “Help me with these tights, girl, help me…” His hands fumbled with the cloth stretched across her ass.

“Hug me,” she whimpered, her arms going around his neck. Angel was wild with his good fortune. He laughed out loud. Where had he found this little nugget?

“I’m gonna fuck you and fuck…you…” he told her, ripping at her tights. He lifted her off her feet while she clung doggedly to his neck. Shit, she was so light….empty bones… “I’ll fill you up, little girl….” He mumbled as she dropped her body to the stairs. He had the tights down but the angle was still not right. He couldn’t get in with her l legs locked so tight by the pantyhose. How could he get them off? She was still clinging, not whimpering or moaning or anything, just hanging on, letting him. He fell on top of her, her smallness between him and the stairs, and with one hand he pulled them to her knees. Shit, she was so small, all over small. Don’t wanna break her, he thought, shoving himself in. And she never said no,  never howled, just clung to his neck as he found his way. Hot damn, she’s such a tight little girl. 

Rhiney just kept clinging until he was through. She didn’t care that he was having sex with her. It didn’t hurt except where the stair treads pressed into the back of her head and spine. She knew you couldn’t stop them even if you wanted to. That boyfriend her mother had had when she was twelve had taught her that. He’d made her quiet with his hand over her mouth. “Be quiet or I’ll hurt Rue,” he’d said, and then Rue woke up and beat him with a coat hanger and told their mother. You couldn’t stop them because they were so strong, even if it hurt, but Angel did not hurt. At least this was her thing; she was doing what she wanted. That was important. Rhiney liked it when he hugged her, he felt so good and she wanted him to like her.  You couldn’t keep a guy unless you let him.  Rue and their friends talk about that. Next time she’d wear knee socks so it’d be easier. There was a lot of wet stuff between her legs and nothing to wipe it up with. 

He was cursing now, but not really angry. There was no money in the wallet.

“Shoulda known,” he scoffed good-naturedly and threw it down the stairwell. “But you’re my good luck, little girl,” he told her and smiled again. “Let’s get outta here before we catch it for being in the same place with that empty purse.”

Rhiney felt warmed again by his protectiveness. She pulled her tights back up quickly and took his outstretched hand.

“Let’s go find my man. What say your name was? Princess Bride? Jewel of the Nile? That’s it! Jewel! Am I right?”

That made her smile again and she forgot the uncomfortable wetness, the bruise on the back of her head. He had big hands like his big, open-faced smile, dark eyes and hair shiny and brown like chocolate fudge. She felt anchored and safe holding his hand.

Wait’ll I tell Rue, she thought but it took her joy away to think of Rue so she didn’t and instead wondered if Angel would want to do it again. Angel made her forget to miss Rue, made her forget to remember she did not know when she would next see Rue.

But then they were back in The Mall with Angel’s friend heading to the Game Room; it was over and Rue was still gone.