Snow Angels (19 page)

She is sitting on the end of her bed putting them on when she notices the room is different. It's subtle, a subtraction of something not there in the first place. Brock's stereo—it's missing. She goes to the closet; his smaller half is empty, the pole bare of hangers. He's forgotten his toothbrush, probably on purpose. His razors and shaving cream are gone, his nail clippers. Annie checks his dresser drawers. Cleaned out.

She knew he would leave, but now that he has it's no consolation. He could have at least told her. But that wouldn't be Brock.

Downstairs the sauce is bubbling, spewing like a geyser. The stove is a mess. She turns it off and sits down at the table and finds she's carrying the toothbrush. In the other room the news is going on and on. She gets up, goes to the front door, opens it and throws the toothbrush into the yard. It skitters to a stop. She slams the door and turns off the news and sits on the couch. She lies down and looks at the sky in the front window. Cold gray. At least the waiting's over, she thinks. Now what?

An hour later she is still lying there watching the sky darken when she hears a car on the road. The sound jerks her head off the cushion. It wouldn't be him. She thinks of Glenn and the gun upstairs and dashes across the room to the window. Before she sees it, she recognizes the engine, a high-pitched metallic ringing that reminds her of a wind-up toy.

The yellow Bug comes into view and Annie runs outside in her slippers. Barb swings in behind her car.

“He called and told me,” Barb says. She shows Annie the bag with the bottle in it and they embrace.

“I'm sorry,” they both say.

“Jinx.”

“I owe you a Coke,” Annie says, but can't keep from blubbering.

“Turn it off,” Barb says, just beginning herself.

In the town where Glenn's fathers were born, there was a square with benches and swings and seesaws. Which one took him there he can't remember. It's not in any of his pictures; Glenn has to draw it in. He wakes late in the day and sits in his long underwear at the dining room table, laboring over a sketchpad with his colored pencils. He gets things out of perspective and proportion but it's unimportant. He can see the streets, the dust in summer. The store his father robbed has two gas pumps out front with glass heads; you can watch the amber juice bubble. Glenn hasn't tried to draw his father. He envisions him in prison, playing solitaire, his face the same as Glenn's, and thinks that finally he understands him, that the blood they share is a stronger bond than he used to believe.

He only shows Rafe the town and the portraits of Tara he's copied from photos. The pictures of the old house and Annie he keeps flat under his mattress; when he takes them out when he's alone, they're smudged, the red lead staining the boxspring's ticking. He remembers her opening to him, and thinks of Brock. He can't go by the house anymore or the judge will give him time. “You're a young man,” he said before suspending Glenn's sentence. “If I were you I
would cut my losses and move on to the next part of my life.”

Glenn's driven past the road, watching for Brock's car. He knows that Annie's back on nights, which means she and Barb have patched things up. Deep in the morning, when he wakes to take a piss, he thinks of her alone in the house, asleep, her father's revolver on the night table by her head. He thinks of Tara's room and the snow blowing over her grave. His truck is outside; Bomber's asleep on a pile of dirty clothes. Glenn gets into the warm bed and lies on his back, open-eyed.

“I wish you would tell me what to do,” he prays.

Late the next afternoon, as he's working on Tara's chin, he suddenly stops and puts down his pencil. The photo is from the mall package, the last pictures they have of her. He's never given Annie or her mother a set. He takes two of each print—the wallets, the five-by-sevens and eight-by-tens—and fits them into an envelope.

In the truck he decides it's not enough, pulls a U-turn and heads for the mall. It takes him a while to find a store that sells frames. He only has enough money for one of the nicer large ones, and he needs two. He asks the cashier if they take checks.

“All major credit cards,” she offers.

“I don't have any of those,” Glenn says.

A line is piling up behind him.

“I can hold them for you.” The cashier moves to take the frames, but Glenn says, “That's all right,” and picks them off the counter and walks out of the store.

“Sir,” he hears her call, “sir!” but he's running, dodging the shuffling holiday shoppers. It's funny how they part to let him through. It makes Glenn laugh.

Annie is bringing in a busbox of fruit cups and saucers when Barb says she has a phone call. She swings the box off her shoulder and down to the counter where Mark the dishwasher begins emptying it, cramming the untouched melon balls and strawberry halves into the Insinkerator with his bandaged hands. She wipes her own on her apron before taking the phone.

“Glenn was just here,” her mother says. “I thought I should warn you.”

“Are you all right?”

“I'm fine. He brought over those pictures he had taken, do you remember those?”

Annie doesn't.

“Of Tara,” her mother explains reluctantly. “They're very nice. He's had one framed or framed it
himself, I'm not sure. I told him I could take a set for you, but he didn't want to leave them with me.”

“Did you call the police?”

“He was very polite. He even had a cup of tea.”

“So you didn't call them.”

“I did,” her mother says. “I thought you'd want me to.”

“Good.”

“I don't know what you think they're going to do.”

“I don't know either,” Annie says, “but I'm glad you called them.”

Barb says she can stay at her place tonight if she doesn't mind sharing a bed. It's a joke; in a way they already have. Thank God for Barb.

Work sucks. Annie gets a cracked busbox and the oil from the Caesar salad leaves a line on her shoulder. The special tonight is Maine lobster; she hates the juice and roe, the red carcasses, the scratchy legs. Mark the dishwasher feeds them into the Insinkerator, covers the hole with a plate so bits of shell don't fly out like shrapnel. They serve dessert, and while their customers linger over Irish coffees, take a ten-minute break.

Annie and Barb go down to the loading dock for a cigarette. It's so cold they can't smell the dumpster, and clear, the snow on the fairway starlit. The spotlight
stripes the interiors of parked cars with shadows. Even in January they've seen people doing it in backseats. They search a stack of milk crates for clean ones, turn two over and sit.

“Why don't you move in with me?” Barb says, continuing a day-old conversation.

“That's nice,” Annie says. “I don't think I'm ready to leave the house yet. It's weird.”

“No, it's not.” She blows a smoke ring, pokes it with her Marlboro. “I don't know; I think your mom's right, you'd be safer.”

“Yeah,” Annie says, but not in agreement, more as a signal that she doesn't want to talk about it.

A truck glides down the road, the sound of its engine trailing behind a second. It turns between the lamp-tipped pillars of the club entrance and crosses the causeway beside ten's water hazard.

“He wouldn't come here,” Annie says, but stands. They're both protected by the shadow of the doorway.

Barb touches her arm. “Maybe he won't see us. It's probably not even him.”

“It's him.”

The headlights reach the black edge of the clubhouse and disappear.

“Would he know to come back here?” Barb asks. She's standing now.

“My car's right there.”

“Let's go inside.”

“No,” Annie says. “I'm sick of this shit.”

“I'll go call the cops.”

“No, stay here with me. I want you to be a witness.”

The truck reappears at the far end of the lot, creeping along. It's his. Annie steps to the rubberized edge of the dock, into the light. He brakes at her car, then keeps going. Maybe he's seen her. If he has a gun, she's dead. Fuck him.

“Hey!” she shouts, waving her arms over her head as if to flag down a train. “Fuck you!”

The truck turns the corner and faces them, the headlights blinding. She can see the shaggy outline of Bomber in the passenger seat. The truck stops short of the dock, sits there chugging. White exhaust pours up behind the bed.

“This is stupid,” Barb says.

The door opens and Glenn steps out. He's carrying a package, probably the pictures her mother was talking about. “Annie.”

“You're not supposed to be here,” she says. “Legally you're not allowed within a hundred yards of me.”

“I've brought you some pictures of Tara. Your
mother said you'd like them.” He walks toward the dock with the package out in front of him, gingerly, as if she's holding a gun on him.

“I don't want them,” Annie says.

“They're pictures of Tara.”

“I said I don't want them.”

“I'll just leave them here.” He reaches the dock and lays the package at her feet, starts to back away.

“Why don't you listen to me?” Annie says. “I don't want them. I don't want anything from you.” She picks the package up—it's heavier than she thought—and flings it at him. It lands with a crunch.

Glenn stops walking backwards and looks at her.

“Let's go inside,” Barb says, and grabs her arm.

“That is our daughter,” Glenn says, pointing to Annie. “That is our blood you're throwing on the ground.” He turns and walks toward the truck.

Annie runs down the stairs of the loading dock, scoops up the package and charges after Glenn. He's halfway in when she catches him. She throws the package at him and follows it with her fists, screaming, “You fucker!” The horn goes off. Glenn pushes her away, but she's on him again, digging her nails into his face. Bomber is pulling at Glenn's arm, growling, Glenn shouting for him to get off. Behind her, Barb is screaming, and then Annie's head is suddenly numb and she's flying backwards out of the cab and
falling hard in the snow. He has shot her, she thinks, unsure. Heat swarms to her face, fills and overflows.

Glenn is standing over her. “I'm sorry,” he keeps saying, holding a hand to his head and turning around as if looking for help.

“You better get your ass out of here,” Barb threatens from the loading dock. “You better just leave right the fuck now.”

“Are you all right?” Glenn asks Annie.

She can't feel her nose or her teeth, only a runniness. Something's broken. She tries her arms and finds they still work, sits herself up. There's blood on her uniform.

“You're going to jail,” Annie says.

Barb calls Annie's mother and takes her to the emergency room. Her nose isn't broken, only some stitches in her mouth, a loose tooth. She'll have to stick to a soft diet for a while.

“You say your ex-husband did this?” the nurse says.

“Husband,” Annie says, and has to go through another form with a policeman. Yes, she wants to file charges; no, she's not sure where his residence is.

“Did you see him do it?” Annie asks Barb in the car.

“Not really. You just kind of dropped all of a sudden.”

“Then he only hit me once.”

“Once was enough,” Barb says.

“We should have gone inside.”

“Shit,” Barb says, “I wasn't going to say anything.”

The next morning she wakes up and her lips are crusted. Barb is asleep on the couch downstairs. It hurts to chew the banana she has for breakfast. It hurts to drink anything. Smoking's okay; it stings a little inhaling.

“I always thought he was an asshole,” Barb says.

“He wasn't then,” Annie says. “He turned into one. I don't know what happened.”

“You're being generous when there's no reason to be.”

They're watching “Let's Make a Deal” when Annie remembers all of his shit in boxes in the basement. She and Barb lug them upstairs and outside, pile them neatly in the snow at the end of the drive. She calls Glenn's father.

“Are you all right?” he asks. “The police told us what happened. They can't find him.”

“Then you don't know where he is.”

“Rafe said he took off sometime last night.”

“Well, I've got a bunch of his stuff I can't keep anymore, and it's going to get snowed on if somebody doesn't come pick it up.”

“I can come over,” his father says. “I'm very sorry about everything, we both are.”

“I know you are,” Annie says.

When he does arrive, she watches him from the window. He opens the trunk and the back doors and slowly fills the big Plymouth, from time to time glancing at the house. He seems older since she last saw him, resting a heavy box on the bumper before jerking it up and into the trunk. Halfway through the stack he's red-faced and puffing. She's sorry; it's not his fault. She'd like to help him. She hopes Frank understands that she can't.

D
R.
B
RADY'S OFFICE
was downtown, above the Hot Dog Shoppe. You had to enter the restaurant and take a left through another door, where there were mailboxes at the bottom of a steep and darkly shellacked staircase. The linoleum was old and bumpy underfoot.
Around the rail at the top stood six closed doors, numbered plainly, as in a dream. The building was old, and as Dr. Brady brought up and I downplayed my problems, we could hear rising from the heating grate the mingled conversations and clashing dishes of the Shoppe's patrons. From working at the Burger Hut I had learned not to trust food prepared by anyone other than myself, but the smell of grilling onions that leaked up through the floorboards tempted me, and after our session I would rumble down the stairs and scarf two chili dogs with onions and cheese.