SIXTY-NINE
Angela was glad that she had stopped to see Barry. He’d already had one operation on his face, and he would need several more, but he was in good spirits to have survived.
He was glad that those four men hadn’t managed to find Angela and harm her. He felt tremendously ashamed for telling them where she lived. Angela convinced Barry that it was all right, that no one could have stood up to what they were doing to him without talking. She told him that she was far more worried about him and wished that he had told them what they wanted to know before it had gone as far as it did.
He asked what had happened to the men. She told him that they’d gotten into a fight with someone and they had been shot and killed. He was surprised to hear it. She smiled and told Barry that karma was a bitch. He laughed a little, and said not to make him laugh because it hurt.
He knew about Angela and the rest of the girls keeping the bar open for him. They had all been visiting him. He thanked her over and over for that. She’d told him that she only did it because she needed the money, not because she was keeping it open for him. He’d laughed again, and winced in pain again.
He hadn’t been too keen on the ladies’ night thing, but after Tiffany had let him know how much money it had brought in for the bar, he was warming up to the idea, especially since Nate was there to keep things under control.
Angela turned in to the trailer park just before the MILFORD FALLS KOZY KOURT sign. The road in had once been blacktop, but very little of that paving still showed through the dirt and gravel.
A man named Al, in a dirty white T-shirt, sitting in a rusty blue metal chair in front of his trailer, watched her drive by. Angela remembered Al sitting in that chair watching the world go by back when she had lived with her mother. She’d heard that he was on disability of some sort. He had seemed harmless enough but never spoke to her as she had walked past him on her way home from school.
Nearby, a heavyset woman in a flowered dress stretched up to hang laundry on a line. At another trailer, an old couple sat together on their small porch. Angela drove past a man in shorts and flip-flops leaning in under the hood of a beat-up car.
Behind a group of mobile homes she saw thick brush where she used to hide at night rather than go home. At least until Boska had put an end to that. Seeing the all too familiar place where she had grown up gave Angela a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
A lot of bad things in her life had happened in this place.
Ages ago, in the beginning, it had probably been a nice place to live. But in Angela’s lifetime it had always been an overgrown, run-down, squalid area on the wrong side of the tracks infested with meth and all the criminal activity that went with it. A lot of people who lived here were nice enough, but they had nowhere else to go, so they had no choice but to put up with all the trouble.
Angela had been one of those who’d had nowhere to go and who had to put up with a lot of bad things.
She drove past mobile homes all parked at the same angle to an ancient master plan. Some had no skirting, so the wheels were exposed. All of them were up on blocks of some sort to make them level. Most had broken lattice panels covering the space under them. Others had corrugated metal skirting.
A lot of places had dogs on chains. The dogs tended to live in the dirt under the mobile homes to stay out of the sun, or the rain, or the snow. Cats roamed freely. When she’d been little, Angela used to feed scraps of food to some of the cats to get the opportunity to pet them.
Because most of the mobile homes were up off the ground on blocks, they all had elevated porches with steps up to them. Some of those steps were wooden, with rickety railings, while others were made of concrete blocks. Most of the elevated porches had corrugated metal awnings overhead, some held aloft with wrought iron, some with a couple of two-by-fours.
Most of the mobile homes were a rust-stained off-white, but there were some that were weather-worn turquoise, mint green, and sky blue. Those with color also had areas of white for contrast.
Mature trees stood among the homes, providing shade. Uncut, dusty weeds grew everywhere. Derelict vehicles sat up on blocks as they were slowly cannibalized, or used for junk storage. Old barbecues and lawn chairs sat around outside many of the homes.
Angela turned down a street with water-filled potholes that looked like bomb craters. Her truck bounced through the unavoidable potholes until she reached her mother’s faded pink and white trailer. The white door and trim were streaked with decades of water and rust stains. A corroded brown air conditioner jutting out a front window was propped up with a scavenged board.
Sally’s faded, maroon Pontiac GTO sat at a crooked angle beside the trailer, one of its back tires long flat. A newer economy car was parked there, too.
After parking, Angela sat for a long moment before she tapped her horn.
Her stomach roiled as she climbed the sagging, gray, wooden steps to the porch. A pair of little, dirty white dogs next door yapped at her. She knocked on the bent aluminum screen door and stood to the side, waiting.
When the door opened, an older, short, round woman peered out. She had on a clean, neat, pale blue dress.
“Hi, I’m Angela.”
The woman immediately broke into a warm smile as she held the door open with one arm and motioned Angela in with her other, as if they were old friends.
“Angela—I’m so happy to meet you at last! I’m Betty. We spoke on the phone. My, but aren’t you a pretty thing, and so tall.” Her face suddenly creased with concern. “How are you, dear? Are you okay?”
This was a woman who was sincerely concerned for the well-being of others. She had a warm heart. Angela found it refreshing, but also troubling. She was the kind of person who often ended up, because of their kind nature, being victimized by evil people.
“I’m feeling a lot better,” Angela said as she stepped through the doorway.
She had used the excuse of her hospital stay as the reason for not being able to come by sooner. It was more believable than saying she had been away gunning down terrorists.
Seeing the inside of the trailer made her insides feel like they were twisting into a knot.
The far wall still had the same wrinkled wallpaper with pink flowers lifting at the seams. It was coming up in more places, now. In one corner a triangle of wallpaper hung down. The wall to the left still had the multilayered brown stain down the middle from years of a leaky roof. The beige linoleum flooring had a missing section in the kitchen corner, leaving the subfloor exposed, the same as when Angela had lived there.
She had forgotten about the off-putting smell of mold. It made her want to hold her breath or at least cover her mouth.
The kitchen table with the tubular chrome legs was still there, but the sagging, blue velour couch was gone, as was the brown vinyl and plaid cloth reclining chair, its bursting seams held together with duct tape. There had always been baskets of dirty clothes lying around, and a lot of clothes that had missed the baskets. Those were all gone, now.
The place seemed so much smaller, so much less threatening, than Angela remembered.
The room had obviously been cleared out to make space for the hospital bed provided by Hospice. There was a heart monitor over the bed as well as a stand with an IV drip.
Hospice provided all the pain medication Sally needed or wanted on the condition that if her heart stopped, there would be no resuscitation. With cancer that had spread through her internal organs there was nothing that could be done for her, and resuscitation would be a pointless exercise of merely gaining a few more pain-filled, delirious, semiconscious hours of life. Hospice meant to make the end of life as dignified and pain free as possible in the comfort of home. In return, the family had to accept it when the patient’s time had come.
Betty hurried over to the bed. “Sally.” She shook the skeleton’s arm. “Sally, your daughter is here. Angela came to see you.”
Angela’s mother rolled her head from side to side, mumbling something as she worked at opening her eyes.
“That’s right, your daughter Angela is here.”
“The girl in the moon?” her mother said in a thin, moaning voice. “Is it really the girl in the moon?”
Betty beamed a smile back over her shoulder at Angela as she motioned for her to come stand next to her mother.
Angela did as instructed. Betty put a comforting hand on Angela’s back, urging her a little closer.
“Hi, Ma.”
Her mother was so thin Angela could make out all the bones in her hands and arms. A nightdress—one of her mother’s favorites, the one with the leopard print—covered her sunken chest. Her face was hardly more than a skull covered with waxy, blotchy skin. Her eyes were set deep into their nearly hollow sockets. She had only a few white wisps of hair over a scalp covered with irregular, dark spots. She had lost a few of her remaining teeth since Angela had seen her last. Now there was only one yellow, rotted tooth on the top, and three on the bottom.
She had the smell of death about her.
When Sally held her arm out a little, opening and closing her fingers, Betty knew what she wanted. She put a plastic glass of water in Sally’s hand, helped guide it closer, and put the straw between Sally’s cracked lips so she could take a sip.
A towel lay beside her shoulder. It was obvious that she used the towel to spit up blood. Betty snatched it away and replaced it with a clean one.
“It’s time for her pain medication,” Betty said in a low voice.
“No!” Sally said, her eyes opening, suddenly more alert. “Not yet.”
She reached out for Angela’s hand. When Angela offered it, she grasped it in frail, cold fingers. Wrinkled, paperlike flesh clung to bone.
Betty leaned to the side so she could speak to Angela confidentially. “She’s a little more lucid when it’s time for her pain medication, which is good, but it also means she’s starting to have a lot of pain. Even on the medication, she’s still in pain, but for the most part she’s not conscious enough to feel it. We give her the medication every four hours, but if she is feeling pain she can have more as often as she wants.”
“That’s good,” Angela whispered back.
“It’s powerful narcotics. Very addicting,” Betty confided. She cast a sidelong glance at Sally. “But that’s not something to worry about at this point. I thought you should know.”
“Sure, thanks.” Angela didn’t think there was any point in saying anything about addictive drugs and her mother.
Angela thought it was ironic that Sally would die as she had lived—doped up and stoned out of her mind.
“I’m going to go in the kitchen and get your next round of pain medication ready,” Betty told Sally in a rather loud voice as she patted her frail arm. “You have a nice visit with your daughter.”
Angela’s mother nodded.