Chapter Five

five

It was a cold, clear morning in March, sunlight skating across the sparkling surface of the snow, when Big Roly Schmitt’s ten-year-old daughter turned to him and said, boom, out of nowhere, “Daddy, teach me to drive.” They were on their way to the Fair Mile Crossroads, where Big Roly fetched his rents in person, the first Saturday of every month, going door to door the way his own daddy had done. Big Roly felt it was important to maintain personal contact with his tenants, to check on all properties, business and residential, with his own two eyes. Besides, he genuinely liked to visit with people. He looked forward to hearing the gossip, maybe telling a story or two of his own.

“Most kids wait on driving till they’re a little older, Scoot.”

She looked at him, dead serious. Uh-oh, Big Roly thought. She said, “I think it’s a life skill everyone should have.”

The kid just busted him up.

“Maybe. If I see a plowed parking lot.”

“I’ll be a good driver,” Christina said.

“I know you will.”

They were coming up on the International Harvester dealer ship, which had gone belly-up five years earlier. Big Roly had known the family who’d owned it; the parents retired to Florida, bought themselves a trailer right smack on a canal. Now there was talk of Toyota coming in, selling those zippy little cars. The area sure was changing fast, with so many people moving in, drawn by the millpond and the Onion River, the safe public schools, the affordability. For eighty thousand, a person could build a nice ranch house on a two-acre country lot—although that was changing too. It was just twenty miles from Ambient to the I-90/94 split, and from there it was only sixty to Milwaukee, seventy-five to Chicago, take your pick. Commuting was nothing these days for the corporates who worked via modem and fax. Big Roly ran ads in the big city papers: AMBIENT—WISCONSIN’S BEST-KEPT SECRET! The folks who responded were worth a little extra time, and Big Roly personally drove them around in his Lincoln to admire the town and countryside. The River Road shoe factory was said to be haunted; he’d pull into the parking lot to describe the ghostly woman more than one night watchman had seen. “They say she’s dressed in an apron, carrying a roasted turkey on a platter,” Big Roly would say. “I’ve heard you can smell that turkey even after she disappears.” If they liked that bit of local lore, he continued on along the railroad tracks until they reached the J road, cutting back across the highway bridge, where many of the river angel sightings took place. “Of course, I’ve never seen it myself,” Big Roly always said, “but I know a man who did. He’d gone for a dip, caught himself a cramp, and just when he thought he was going under, it carried him to the shore.”

And then, perhaps, he’d glance in the rearview mirror, catch the couple exchanging a look, and one of them would say, “How on earth do stories like that get started?” or something along those lines. In that case, he’d laugh sheepishly and say, “To be truthful, I didn’t know the man myself—although my daddy did, and he swears it’s true.” But if the couple seemed interested, he’d tell them how the river angel had watched over Ambient since the flash flood of 1898. Those settlers who’d survived reported an angel had led their families to safety.

“You can look it up at the library,” he’d say; he had heard that this was so. “The museum’s probably got some records too. We have a lovely little museum for a town this size,” and then he’d chauffeur them back into Ambient, past the library and museum and town square, ending the tour in Cradle Park with a walk across the footbridge, and maybe he’d even hand them a penny to toss the angel for luck, just the way he did with Christina.

“How about right here by the IH?” he asked her now, and he pulled off the highway, followed the plow track around to the back of the building, where they wouldn’t be seen. God only knew why anyone bothered to keep the parking lot cleared; only teenagers used it now. On weekends, they’d hollow caves in the walls of the packed plowed snow, then sit inside drinking beer and making out, and if they got cold, they simply built a bonfire in the parking lot. You could see the blackened circle now, surrounded by beer cans, fast-food wrappers, old tires, and bags of trash. Big Roly parked beside it, got out to switch places with Christina. The plow drifts were taller than he was, boxing them in. It made him uneasy. He hustled around to the passenger’s side of the Lincoln, eased his three-hundred-pound bulk into the seat.

“Fire her up,” he said, and Christina did, not even grinding the starter. Christ, she could barely see over the dash. He kept a Polaroid in the glove compartment for doing property appraisals, and he wanted so badly to take her picture, but she could be sensitive about stuff like that. “Daddy, stop patronizing me,” she’d say.

Daddy. She still called him that instead of Dad, even in front of her friends.

“Now what?” she said, bouncing in the seat. Her ponytail stuck out from under her snug Packers cap. She had Big Roly’s red hair, but less carroty, more of an auburn color—strangers were always exclaiming over it. She had Big Roly’s freckles too, but thank God, not as many. While he was a mass of pinkish-brown pigments, she had only a fine constellation, distinct as chocolate sprinkles across the vanilla bridge of her nose.

“Put your foot on the brake and hold it there.” Thank God I drive an automatic, he thought. She had to slide down a little to reach. Sweet Jesus, but the worst she could do was run them into the plow drift, and he had a good shovel and plenty of sand in the trunk. He leaned over, helped her shift into drive. “You won’t need any gas,” he said. “Take your foot off the brake and let the Lincoln do the rest.”

She drove all the way across the parking lot as if she’d been doing it all her life. He turned the Lincoln around so she could take it back the other way, hands at ten and two just like he showed her.

“OK?” he said. “Enough?”

And she nodded, batted his hands away, and put it in park herself.

“Don’t tell your mom about this,” he said, more for the fun of sharing a secret than out of concern for what Suzette would think. Suzette believed in taking risks. Each morning, she put on her snow boots and walked to work at the fertilizer plant, where she’d been the first female to rise past Floor into Management. “Don’t put up with bullshit from anyone,” she’d tell Christina, and Christina nodded because she already knew. From the time she was born, she was wise beyond her years. By six months she was speaking, and real words too, not just ba for bottle, like Big Roly’s sister’s kid. There just wasn’t any comparing her to other kids her age—hell, she figured as well as he did, better than her teachers at school. Just last Saturday, she’d been with him when he dropped in to see Pops Carpenter about some snow-removal work. Pops was baby-sitting his grandson, Gabriel, and while he haggled with Big Roly over his fee, Christina sat down with the boy, who was in her class at school. By the time Big Roly came to get her, she was helping him do his math homework.

“That was awful nice of you,” Big Roly had said as they walked back out to the Lincoln. Everybody knew how Gabriel’s dad had abandoned him to his uncle and aunt. Big Roly didn’t think too much of the aunt; a battle-ax if there ever was one. No wonder the boy kept running off. People were always finding him, bringing him back home.

Christina shrugged. “I have to help him anyway,” she’d said. “Mrs. G. has me tutor kids because I’m so far ahead.”

“Really?” Big Roly said. Just out of curiosity, he took all the rents they’d collected that day, stacked them in her lap. “How much have we got here, Scoot?” he said, and she’d tallied them up, just like that—no paper, no pen.

On rent Saturdays, Suzette always slept in. Big Roly rousted Christina out of bed around eight, and the two of them fried a pound of bacon and scrambled a dozen eggs into the grease and ate the whole mess in front of Bugs Bunny. Then, when they’d finished their coffee—he fixed Christina’s special, with sweetened condensed milk—they headed out. Usually they didn’t get back before three: After the Fair Mile Crossroads, there were the duplexes in Ambient to inspect, the weekend houses by the Killsnake Dam to check up on, stops at a couple-three businesses on North County O (the oldest one, the Moonwink Motel, was about to fall to Best Western), and then, back at the Solomon strip, they drove past Big Roly’s apartment complexes, checking for vandalism, trash, graffiti. The graffiti was a recent thing, and Big Roly carried a can of beige paint and a roller to wipe everything clean. He was proud to say each of those units had a waiting list, and unlike his units in Ambient, these rented mostly to locals. The old farmers liked the convenience of the strip; young people worked at the fertilizer plant, or at the Badger State Mall just up the road, or at the various outlets and stores and restaurants scattered along the way.

People who weren’t moving out of state were moving into town, and Big Roly bought their property when he could. Wealthier folks from the cities actually preferred old to new—they liked nothing better than a broken-down farmhouse to restore. And land that fell around the intersections was better than gravy, good as gold. The McDonald’s at the Fair Mile Crossroads, for instance, had a twenty-year lease, and Big Roly had signed several other leases along the strip: one to Wal-Mart, across from the Kmart; one to a Morrison’s Cafeteria franchise. Someone else had landed Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Southern restaurant called the Cracker Barrel. Lucy Kimmeldorf and the rest of the City Council could holler till their throats bled, but development was what Free Enterprise was all about. You bit or got bitten, and those toothless little overpriced businesses on Main could move someplace else if they didn’t like it. Why shouldn’t people enjoy the variety and low, low prices of a Wal-Mart, a walk-in optical center, a Jiffy Lube?

Big Roly himself was an old farmer at heart. He saw more beauty in an inexpensive place to buy necessities, in plenty of free parking, in all things handy and hassle-free, than he’d ever find along a pothole-ridden, bass-ackwards country road. People sometimes asked why he and Suzette still lived near the fertilizer plant when they could afford something by the millpond, or a big country farmhouse with a view of the river. “Convenience!” Big Roly told them, and it was true. Most days you couldn’t even smell the plant, and when the wind was wrong—well, you barely noticed it after a while.

“Is this where they took those kids who got kidnapped?” Christina said as they pulled back onto the highway.

“Naw,” he said, though it occurred to him it might be. He wondered how she’d heard about that business. Mel Rooney, the assistant chief of police, had kept it out of the Ambient Weekly despite old Stan Pranke’s grumblings. Mel understood how a thing like this could hurt community growth, snuff a burgeoning tourist industry. Mel was pro-development, an active member of the Planning and Zoning Commission, a man with a vision that paralleled Big Roly’s. It couldn’t be much longer now before the old chief retired and Mel—who had been, for all practical purposes, running the police department—finally claimed the title. Already he’d managed to nudge Buddy Lewis, one of his fresh young officers, onto the City Council. Another election or two, and Lucy Kimmeldorf wouldn’t have enough weight left to squash a daisy, despite the campaign money downtown business owners kicked her way. “You worried about kidnappers?” he said.

“Nuh-uh.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Cuz there’s nothing to worry about.” But he did think about those kids, scared half to death, slipping and sliding back to town through the snow.

The first kidnapping—if you could really call it that—occurred just after the summer festival in July; Sammy Carlsen had been playing in a vacant lot when two high school boys forced him into their car, drove him around, and finally dumped him somewhere off County O. The second had been one week ago; this time it was Joy Walvoord, out walking with her sister. Joy said there were high school boys and girls in the car, but she couldn’t say how many, and they’d taken her only a couple of blocks before they let her go. Descriptions of the car itself were contradictory, and the single thing both kids were sure of was that the driver had had very short hair.

Frankly, Big Roly thought it was for the best that the kids couldn’t ID anybody. It was just a stupid teen prank, the sort of thing that’s blown out of proportion once the media get a whiff. The sort of thing that winds up costing good people business. When Mel asked Big Roly’s opinion one night after a Planning and Zoning meeting, Big Roly had told him as much. It wasn’t like they hurt those kids—just drove ’em around and scared ’em a bit. High school kids, they got out of hand. Big Roly remembered how it was; who didn’t? There was something about a cold winter night, maybe some girl with her hand in your pocket, maybe some liquor to warm you wherever she wouldn’t or couldn’t and a full-lipped moon in the sky—not that Big Roly had known too many of those nights. He had been the fat freckled kid, the boy whom girls managed not to see unless they needed change for the pop machine. And certainly, he didn’t mean it was OK to snatch a grade-school kid off the street. But punishing those high schoolers was the parents’ job, not the job of the community, not the job of the police or the courts. God knows, they had enough of government nosing around their lives already.

“If it were me,” Big Roly told Mel, “I’d remind the parents of those kids who got nabbed that they should thank their lucky stars it wasn’t a real kidnapper. Who in this day and age lets an eleven-year-old out to play after dark? No way would me or Suzette let Christina do a thing like that.”

Besides, if anybody tried to grab her, Christina knew just what to do. “Don’t be shy about it, either,” he told her. “Right in the nuts, no questions asked.” She hurt a little fella at school, but what was he doing? Lifting up her skirt. Big Roly said, “Mrs. Graf, if every girl was raised like Christina, you women wouldn’t be tying up the courts with all this sexual harassment.” And then he took Christina out to the McDonald’s for a Big Mac and fries and a hot apple pie.

“Daddy,” Christina told him, “I like driving.”

“Me too,” he said, and he reached over and flipped her pretty ponytail. They had just passed by Tom Mader’s cross; someone had dug it out of the plow drift and left a fresh wreath of roses, startling as a flock of cardinals against the snow. Christina rubbernecked to look, and he wanted to reach over, cover her eyes. He would have been willing to spend his whole life beside her, shielding her from unpleasant things, if that were a possibility. But it wasn’t. Already her brow was furrowed; she was thinking hard about something.

She said, “Where do people go when they die?”

“Heaven,” Big Roly said without missing a beat. “Look at the odometer, Scoot. I believe you took us across thirty thousand.”

“Where is heaven?”

He changed tactics, shrugged and tried to laugh. “Beats me. You’ll have to ask your Sunday school teacher about that.” He and Suzette had joined the Lutheran church a few years earlier. When a child asked the kind of hard questions Christina did, it was important to have some handy answers.

“It doesn’t matter,” Christina said. “I don’t believe in it anyway.”

“You don’t?” Big Roly said.

“Do you?”

Now he was stuck. “Do you remember where the odometer is?” he asked.

“Right here.” She pointed. “I don’t believe in God, either.”

“Well,” Big Roly said.

“I believe in angels, though,” she said, brightening. “Gabriel Carpenter says he’s seen the river angel.”

“Imagine that,” Big Roly said, relieved. He supposed it was better for a child to believe in angels than nothing at all.

“That’s why the other kids hate him,” she said. “They pick on him all the time.”

“But you never pick on him, do you, Scoot?” he said.

Christina shook her head.

“That’s good,” he said. “Everybody picked on your daddy when he was a kid, you know.”

That got her attention. “How come?”

Big Roly rubbed his big stomach self-consciously, swiped at what was left of his carrot top. “Well,” he said. It hadn’t taken long for some wise child—he couldn’t even remember who—to modify Roland into Roly-Poly and, later on, Big Roly. But it was more than his weight. For some reason, he’d been born with his incisors missing. One of his ears was slightly lower than the other. How many hours had he spent in front of the mirror, trying to tug it into place? His dad had caught him there, told him not to worry. Make something of yourself, and nobody’ll care what you look like. It was good advice, though it had taken Big Roly another twenty years to realize that. How did the old joke go? The older I get, the smarter my old man gets? These same kids who’d once made his life a misery now came to his office with their hats in their hands. They still called him Big Roly—in Ambient, childhood nicknames stuck—but the way they said those words had changed. He sold their properties at a profit. He held mortgages on their family homes. He collected rent from them once a month, evicted them if they couldn’t pay it.

“It’s like this,” he finally told Christina. “Your daddy’s kind of funny-looking, if you think about it. Kind of like Gabriel.”

She studied him closely. She did not contradict, the way Suzette would have done. “Oh,” she said, and then, “Did you ever see an angel when you were a kid?”

“No, Scoot,” he said. “I’m afraid I never did.”

“Me neither,” she said.

He sure was happy to see they were coming up on the Fair Mile Crossroads. “Maybe you’re just not looking hard enough,” he said. “Say! You ready to visit Auntie Ruth?”

The old Pump and Go sat in the crux of the J road and County O, catty-corner from the little outdoor mall called Riveredge, which had been one of his first developments. Originally, he’d had his real estate office in the space currently occupied by Ye Olde Pet Shoppe, but he’d long since moved into downtown Ambient, across from Jeep’s, where visibility was better. Here, there was nothing but fields that sprawled behind the buildings in all directions, though a few ranch houses—some of which Big Roly himself had sold—now dotted the horizon, and a new supersize grocery store was under construction. The contractor had fallen behind, and the ground froze before he could pour the foundation. Now the whole project was on hold till spring: steel beams rusting beneath ill-fitting tarps, the crane’s open jaws bearded with ice. Hickory trees marked the line between this land and the acreage owned by the Farb family; a homemade sign boasted the Farbs’ stud service in a childish scrawl: Bulls, milch cows with the Guts, Buts and A—— to Do the Job! The Farbs were still dairying, but on a smaller scale than in the past. Big Roly heard they’d been having success with organic crops and were starting to concentrate on that market. He made it his business to know who was farming what, who was showing a profit, who was having tentative, restless thoughts.

Ruthie’s rusted-out Chevy Nova stood in front, along with a couple other cars. Big Roly recognized Maya Paluski’s bumper sticker: GOD IS COMING, AND BOY IS SHE PISSED! He’d barely parked the Lincoln before Christina was running for the front door; she slipped inside without waiting for him to catch up. Christina loved Ruthie, had started calling her auntie without prompting, even made her little gifts at school. The woman had a sweetness about her, plain and simple; she made you want to sit right down and talk about things you didn’t even know were on your mind. True, she was religious as the day was long—and not exactly a rocket scientist, if you wanted to be truthful—but she never made Big Roly feel uncomfortable about where he did or did not stand with God almighty, a topic he never liked to dwell upon. The fact was that he understood the meaning of the universe, and it was simply this: Work hard. Provide for those you love.

He got out of the Lincoln, stretched, walked leisurely up to the door. Except for the gas pumps, he would not have recognized the place. Whatever you ladies want to do, he’d told Ruthie when she signed the lease, and she’d taken him at his word. First thing she did was paint the outside green, with yellow flowers all around the door, and the inside—well, when he walked in, there was a half-finished painting of Jesus on the opposite wall, tall as Big Roly and skinny as Christina, his arms outstretched like a glider plane. His face wasn’t filled in yet, though he had a full head of hair. His arms and legs just ended, as if someone had hacked them off with a cleaver. Angels swirled around his body like a cloud of gnats, and not regular angels, either. They looked just like ladies you might see on the street in Ambient. Except for the wings poking out of their shirts and dresses.

Some folks laughed at the Circle of Faith, it was true, but no one could deny all the work these women did. They planted flower gardens at the nursing home in summer and ran a Women’s Crisis hot line ten hours every week. They’d organized crime watches in downtown Ambient, day care at the fertilizer plant. It was said that tragedy could bring out the best in a person, and in Ruthie’s case, that certainly was so. She was always cheerful, always smiling. “The best cure for trouble is helping someone else with theirs,” she’d told Big Roly more than once. Over seven years had passed since the day Tom Mader was found dead beside the road; the coroner had counted one hundred broken bones. For weeks afterward, church leaders asked their congregations to pray for the hit-and-run driver, that he or she might have the courage to step forward. But no one ever did. Big Roly figured it had been one of the new people, maybe a tourist, somebody passing through.

“Roland!” Ruthie said, as if the very sight of him had just made her day. The room was covered with piles of clothing, sorted according to size. Stan Pranke’s wife, Lorna, and Maya Paluski were busy folding everything into boxes, while Ruthie’s daughter, Cherish, ironed a pile of shirts. Cherish Mader was so goddamn beautiful it hurt Big Roly’s eyes to look at her. But he stared at her anyway, for just a few months earlier, he could have sworn he’d seen her behind the McDonald’s with some tough-looking kids, digging through the dumpster for the warm bags of burgers the kitchen tossed at closing time. They scattered at the sight of his Lincoln, dropping foaming cans of Pabst. Big Roly notified Mel Rooney; still, the manager complained he’d arrive in the morning to find the parking lot littered with wrappers. Once, he’d padlocked the dumpster, but the lock got shot clean off. It had crossed Big Roly’s mind that he might be forced to pay for a security guard, someone who’d be visible in the evenings and on weekends. It made him angry just to think about that extra expense.

“Hello, Mr. Schmitt,” Cherish said politely. She met his gaze without flinching. Perhaps it had been another girl he’d seen. The parking lot had been dark. And Cherish Mader—it just didn’t figure. No one had a negative word to say about the girl. When she wasn’t at church on Sundays, she was right here at the Faith house, helping her mother out.

“Morning, Cherish,” Big Roly said. “Ruthie. Ladies. Any of you seen my daughter under one of these piles?”

“She’s in back, helping herself to a doughnut,” Ruthie said. “You’re welcome to do the same. The Salvation Army closes at noon, and we’re rushing to get these things over there.”

“Lorna made those doughnuts from scratch,” Maya said with admiration. She wore paint-spattered bib overalls, like a man, and if you asked why she’d never married, she’d tell you women needed men like fish needed bicycles. It was the sort of thing Suzette found amusing.

“My mother’s recipe,” Lorna said, pleased. She wore a nice blue pantsuit, a sparkly pin in the lapel. “Cinnamon and sugar.”

“That so?” Big Roly said, hiking up his belt. He tried not to eat sweets in public, because of his size. It embarrassed him to be caught smacking his lips over some dainty confection. “Nonsense,” Suzette always said. She, too, tended toward the heavier side of the spectrum, but if she wanted to walk over to the Dairy Queen for a banana split, that’s what she did. Sometimes Big Roly worried about Christina: Right now she was slender as a willow, but perhaps their fatty genes were ticking inside her like a bomb. Ruefully, he looked down at his belly. By tilting forward slightly, he could see the tips of his boots. Perhaps he’d lost a few pounds. He could taste that doughnut, the buttery slush moving over and under his tongue.

“’Fraid I’ll have to pass,” he said.

Christina marched in from the back room, her mouth full of doughnut. “They’re still warm,” she said blissfully, sputtering crumbs.

“Say thank you,” Big Roly said.

“Thank you.” Powdered sugar drifted down the front of her jacket. “Why don’t you eat that outside?” Maya said, in a voice that made Big Roly remember she taught school. “We’ve spent the past two weeks washing these things.”

“OK,” Christina said. “I’m going to look for angels.”

“Isn’t she sweet,” Ruthie said.

“Keep back from the highway,” Big Roly said. “And don’t go too far into the field.”

Cherish told Christina, “There’s fort back under the hickory trees. Me and a friend used to play there when we were kids.”

“Cool,” Christina said, and she headed out the door.

“I remember that fort,” Ruthie said. “You and Lisa Marie spent hours out there.” Cherish didn’t answer; Big Roly watched her flip the shirt she was ironing with a light, practiced movement of her hands. Christ, that girl was a knockout! Long black hair falling halfway down her back. High cheekbones. Full red mouth. She was the spitting image of her grandmother Gwendolyn, whose looks had gotten her in trouble way back when Big Roly was barely old enough to understand the whispered talk. Now he was thinking it was Cherish he’d seen behind the McDonald’s. And yet how could that be? He remembered how Tom used to show Cherish off in that rusty little Bobcat, mail lights flashing. He’d bring her along on his Saturday route; if you came out onto the doorstep, she’d run right up with your mail. People shook their heads a little at a man who’d give his daughter a name like Cherish, but that was Tom; it was just how he was. He loved that girl, loved her as much as Big Roly loved—

—dread lapped the edges of his heart. But nothing was going to happen to him, or Suzette. Nothing was going to happen to Christina.

“I do believe I’ll try one of those doughnuts,” he said.

By the time he returned from the back room, still licking powdered sugar and cinnamon from his lips, Cherish was holding the door for the women, who were busy loading the taped-up boxes into Lorna’s minivan. Big Roly helped, trying not to huff. Across the street, beneath the Riveredge marquee, a man sifted through the trash people had thrown from their cars. His face was copper-colored from wind, anonymous as a penny, but the whites of his eyes were curiously bright when he looked up to watch Big Roly watching him. Big Roly glanced out into the field, but Christina was circling one of the hickory trees, whacking it with a stick.

Lorna’s van was full, so they moved on to Maya’s Escort. Still, there were three big boxes left, and as Maya and Lorna pulled away, Big Roly found himself volunteering to drop them off.

“I’ll just throw ’em in my trunk,” he said. “I pass almost right by there on my way to Ambient.” As he spoke, he glanced back at the marquee. Now the man was leaning against the pole the marquee was mounted on; it shook a little whenever he shifted his weight. Big Roly thought again about the possibility of a security guard—not that he’d use that title. Greeter, maybe. Welcomer. Some nice retired person in a bow tie and a trim uniform, who’d say hello and help with packages and discourage loitering. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen drifters at this intersection, begging change from shoppers, aiming thumbs toward the I-90/94 split.

“That’ll save me the trip,” Cherish said, more to her mother than Big Roly. “I need to work on a paper for school.”

Ruthie said, “We don’t want to inconvenience Mr. Schmitt.”

And though, in fact, it wasn’t exactly on his way, he said, “It’s no inconvenience.”

“So I’m done, then?” Cherish said. “I can go?” Big Roly looked at her. Her face was the same smooth beautiful mask. But there was something in her voice that reminded him of a dog whining at the door to get out. That high, straining note.

“But, honey, you promised to work on the mural.”

“I know, but I have a paper,” Cherish said. “History.”

Ruthie sighed. “OK. Just be back to pick me up at two.”

“Keep the car—I’ll walk,” Cherish said, and she started across the parking lot, zipping her coat.

“I don’t like you walking by the highway,” Ruthie said. “Cherish? Take the car.”

Cherish was walking backward. She took a pair of mittens from her coat pocket, jammed her hands into them like boxing gloves. “But Lisa Marie is picking me up.”

“What are you going to do with Lisa Marie?”

“I told you,” Cherish said. “We’re working on this paper, OK?” She spun around and kept right on walking. Ruthie sighed, a quiet, helpless sound, and Big Roly was embarrassed for her.

“Teenagers,” he said foolishly. What did he know about it? But Ruthie nodded.

“It’s a hard age,” she said. “That’s what everybody tells me. And she misses her father so. More than she used to, it seems to me. Though she won’t talk to me about it.”

Big Roly didn’t know what to say.

“She was so good about everything after he died. When people offered condolences, she’d say, My daddy is living with God. A child’s faith is truly something to witness.”

“That it is,” Big Roly said awkwardly.

“Well,” Ruthie said. “I suppose I should fetch you that rent.”

She led him into the small back room, where her desk was wedged between the refrigerator and the wall. There was a hot plate, and a microwave too; a space heater stood beside the bathroom door. All these things had been donated, and Big Roly felt a small bubble of guilt when she pulled the cash box out of the top drawer and began counting out fives and singles. True, he was renting this place at a fraction of what he could get for it, but that was a result of the verbal agreement she’d given him two years earlier. She’d taken out a second mortgage on her land—one hundred acres running alongside the Onion River—and when Big Roly heard about it, it didn’t take much to put two and two together. She had Tom’s pension from the post office, sure, and a small income from renting out her fields, but Cherish was probably looking at college, and taxes had just gone up and were set to go up again. Ruthie made a few dollars from her sheep; in addition to selling the meat, she sheared them, carded the wool, and spun it into rough, beautiful yarn she used to make sweaters and scarves and blankets she sold in the craft tent at the summer festival. She tended a huge vegetable garden; made and sold wine from each fall crop of grapes; kept a roadside stand in the summer, stocked with apple butter, spiced pears or tomatoes, homemade cheese from her nanny goats, fresh eggs from her Rhode Island reds, ground-cherry pies. Ten dollars here, five dollars there—clearly, Ruthie’s financial condition was troubled.

So Big Roly stopped by one day, sat down on the couch in Ruthie’s living room, and drank the tangy rose hip tea she served him. The old dog Mule sprawled at his feet, groaning with dreams; the cats blinked sleepily along the windowsills; the good thick odor of baking bread wafted in from the kitchen; but as she talked, Big Roly took in the cracked plaster over the fireplace mantel, the patched front window, the sound of the utility room toilet running nonstop, and the faint musty odor he knew meant a problem with the septic tank. He observed the paintings Cherish had done over the years—inspirational scenes, mostly, with a couple-three sunny landscapes—and noted that all were unframed, stuck to the walls with pushpins. If Ruthie was forced to sell—and he understood she did not intend to—but. If she was forced, she would come to him, let him work out a civilized offer. Keep everything simple. Quiet. In exchange, she could have the gas station for her ladies’ meetings for fifty dollars a month. It was just an agreement between old friends, he assured her, nothing anyone else needed to know about. Especially not the city, he’d thought to himself. Buddy Lewis had reported the council wanted to purchase land for a second public park; if the Mader farmstead went on the open market, eminent domain gave them first dibs. So Big Roly stuck out his hand to shake on the agreement, and then Ruthie said, perfectly friendly, “You’ll never get this land.”

And, perfectly friendly, he said back, “What makes you so certain?”

“Because I’m going to pray for a miracle,” she said, and the way that she said it, he believed it might be true. Part of him hoped it would be true—he had no desire for Ruthie Mader to experience any more unhappiness. He even felt a small flutter of joy when, last year, she’d won that Bingo pot. But he could afford his joy, his generosity. She was only delaying the inevitable. And gracious God—that river view, barely a mile beyond the city! That gentle swell where her house and outbuilding stood, high enough to be out of the floodplain! Those fields sloping gradually down to the water, cleared and sown with sweet peas—unbuildable floodlands, of course, but scenic as all hell. Big Roly had already spoken to an architect. The condos would be tasteful, authentic to the “river town theme” the City Council itself had told the Planning and Zoning Commission to encourage.

When Ruthie turned and held out the money, Big Roly took it, and the little bubble of guilt went ping and disappeared. “You still praying for that miracle?” he said, quite sincerely, and she said, “Absolutely.” Big Roly could not imagine believing, with such certainty, that God or anybody else was out there listening to your prayers.

“What else are you ladies praying for these days?”

“A little of this, a little of that,” Ruthie said. It was what she always answered. Big Roly had heard that the women discussed deeply personal things. It was said that they had visions, even talked with the dead. Every now and then, they’d hold an evening meeting, and when they got to praying and singing, you could hear them halfway to the highway bridge and back.

“I guess I better be going,” he said. “Me and Christina got a long day ahead of us.”

Ruth nodded at the window. “Look at her,” she said. Out in the field, Christina stood beneath the trees, staring up into the dead black branches. How small she was against the backdrop of all that white, beneath the wide blue cradle of the sky! Yet in six years, she’d be driving for real. In eight years, she’d be gone. Somehow eight years didn’t seem as long a time to Big Roly as it once would have.

“When Cherish was that age,” Ruthie said, “we’d walk to the cemetery every Sunday after Mass. We’d take turns telling Tom everything that had happened during the week, and so I heard what Cherish was doing at school, and with her friends, and around the house—in a way, I knew her better than if Tom had been alive.”

“She sure is a pretty girl,” Big Roly said, hoping this was the right thing to say. “Prettiest Festival Queen we ever had.”

“That’s when she started seeing this new boy, Randy,” Ruthie said. “I don’t think he’s good for her. She hardly talks to me anymore.”

“Aw, Ruthie,” Roly said helplessly. He wasn’t any good at conversations like these. He thought of telling her he’d seen Cherish behind the McDonald’s, then dismissed the thought. The worst thing you could do in a situation like this was get involved. And besides, maybe it hadn’t been her. It couldn’t have been. “A pretty girl like that, she’ll have another boyfriend soon. You wanna get the door while I carry these boxes out?”

Outside, he dropped the boxes into the trunk. The man wasn’t under the marquee anymore; Big Roly glanced up and down the highway, but he was gone. Vanished. Big Roly hit the horn, waved Christina toward him, patted his pockets for his gloves. In spite of the sunshine, it was damn cold. So much, he thought, for all that global warming hoopla.

“Hurry up, Scootie!” he called, waving again, and he was about to get into the Lincoln to wait for her there, out of the wind, when he was struck, again, by how small she looked, how insignificant. Vulnerable. Like a field mouse or a rabbit. And with that thought, his gaze swept the sky, looking for the hawk. A terrible fear rose in his throat. “Come on!” he shouted, and he began walking toward the edge of the parking lot where the snowmobile path led out into the field. But this was ridiculous. She was absolutely safe. No predator would plummet from the sky and snatch her away. No drunken teenagers or drifting men would carry her off in broad daylight. No lightning could strike in the middle of winter. He surprised himself by breaking into a wild, clumsy run. She reached the edge of the parking lot just as he did, and he wrapped her in his arms, amazed by the sudden, solid safety of her body, living and real and whole.

“You must be half froze,” he said into her hair, trying to disguise his emotion.

“I think I saw an angel!” Christina said. “I think I maybe saw one in the trees!”

“I think I’m maybe seeing one right now,” Big Roly said, and he kissed her hard on the forehead, smothering her giggles. The field looked no different than it always did. In the distance, at the slumbering construction site, the jaws of the crane swung slightly in the wind. There was nothing in the sky, nothing coming down the road. The wind felt warmer too. It was a lovely, clear March day.

Ridiculous, Big Roly thought.