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“Lady Sky really is an angel, Mommy,” Joe said to her.
“If you say so,” Katie said, shutting the door.
Da
SIX YEARS LATER, the early-morning traffic had subsided on Iowa Avenue. Yi-Yiing had long been back on Court Street-she was home from the hospital. (She’d probably told the cook about seeing Da
“Why would you have died, too-if I’d really been hit by a car?” the eight-year-old asked his father.
“Because you’re supposed to outlive me. If you die before I do, that will kill me, Joe,” Da
“Why don’t I remember her?” the boy asked his dad.
“You mean your mom?” Da
“My mom, the pigs, what happened next-I don’t remember any of it,” Joe answered.
“What about Lady Sky?” his father asked.
“I remember someone dropping from the sky, like an angel,” the boy told him.
“Really?” Da
“I think so. You haven’t told me about her before, have you?” Joe asked.
“No, I haven’t,” Da
“Then what happened?” Joe asked his dad. “I mean, after Mom got out of the car downtown.”
Naturally, the writer had told young Joe an edited version of the pig roast. After he drove the two-year-old home from the farm, there was less that the storyteller had to censor from the tale. (No doubt because Katie hadn’t come home with them.)
In the early evening-it was just after dark-only the occasional passerby, and not one of Da
“Can you still smell the pigs?” little Joe had asked his dad, as they came inside.
“Only in my mind,” the writer answered.
“I can smell them, but I don’t know where they are,” the boy said.
“Maybe it’s the throw-up you smell, sweetie,” Da
It was warm in the apartment, though the windows were open. Da
Later, Da
There was some vodka-it was what Katie drank when she didn’t want her breath to smell like she’d been drinking-and some rum from Barbados. Da
He was wondering what his life might have been like if he’d met someone like Lady Sky instead of Katie. Possibly, the skydiver had been closer to Da
Da
He thought he’d better have a look at Joe before he staggered off to bed, and perhaps he should put some pajamas on the boy, but Da
Joe couldn’t have fallen out of bed with the rails in the lowered position, and the boy was that age when he could climb out of the bed if the rails were in either the raised or the lowered position. Sometimes the rails weren’t securely latched in either position; then the rails could slip, pinching the boy’s fingers. Da
He left Joe’s bedroom door open, to be sure he would hear the boy if he woke up and cried. Da
Whenever Da
“There’s a baby in the road!” some idiot was yelling.
Da
“Whose baby is this?” the man was shouting. “This baby’s gotta belong to someone!”
Maniacal shouting would occasionally reach them from the noisy sorority house farther west on Iowa Avenue, or from the downtown area, but not during what amounted to the morning rush hour.
“Baby in the road!” the maniac kept repeating. It was cold in the bedroom, too, Da
“It’s not our fucking baby,” Katie said; her voice was slurred, or she spoke into her pillow. “Our baby’s in bed with us, fuckhead!”
“He is?” Da
“Well, he was,” Katie said; she sat up in bed, too. Her cheeks were a little roughed up, or red-looking-the way your face can get when you’re kissing someone with a scratchy beard, the writer supposed. “The kid was fussing about something, so I brought him into bed with us,” Katie was saying.
Da
The traffic was backed up on Iowa Avenue -all the way east, to the bend on Muscatine -as if there’d been an accident in the avenue, directly in front of Da