Angels Unaware

and left them laughing at me.
It was real surprising the next day to find out that Reverend Hamilton had hanged himself in his own house. Or I should say, all of us, excepting Luca and Jewel, were surprised; Luca, because he had never met the reverend; and Jewel, who just nodded when I told her, as if it was something she’d been expecting all along. I just couldn’t figure it out, but like all things I couldn’t figure out, I didn’t dwell on it, but let myself be happy that there was one less person in the world to be making trouble for us. My only worry was that the old bastard’s suicide would mean Aaron and Seth would return to be with their mother, and Aaron might come after me again. But I needn’t have worried because when they buried the reverend a few days later, we heard that neither Aaron nor Seth had been in attendance. Maybe they were too embarrassed to come. The Christian cemetery would not take him, pastor or no pastor, because he’d died a suicide and he would have to rest—if God let suicides rest and common wisdom held he did not— in the unhallowed ground next to the cemetery where Galen buried its indigents and others without bonafides.
If I’d had any feeling for the reverend’s widow, Gale, I might have felt sorry for her. People paid their respects at the funeral, at least most people did, but then everybody in Galen pretty much shunned her. People don’t much like being around widows, especially not new widows because in their hearts, they believe widowhood is contagious. And all people avoid the grieving as they can, lest something inside them be similarly stirred to grieving. At least, that’s what I’ve observed.
I didn’t have much time to brood on all this though because it seemed no sooner was the reverend in the ground than preparations began for the Christmas Dance, the very same dance to which Caroline would accompany Luca. As it happened, a boy named Tom had asked Jolene; so the four of them were going together. Caroline wore blue—to match her eyes, of course, because she believed the secret to a well-lived life was to match one’s eyes with one’s clothing as much as possible. Jolene’s dress was white. I wasn’t the best seamstress in the world, but I’d cut the patterns and sewn the seams, and between me and Jewel, we hadn’t done a bad job of it. The girls looked pretty, and as we stood on the porch and waved goodbye, I felt proud and proprietary. We watched them walk all the way up the road, until it turned, and we couldn’t see them anymore. Then we went back inside, and I made coffee, while Jewel rolled herself a cigarette. The Camels had come to taste bland to her and she had taken to blending her own tobacco. I thought the smell of tobacco foul, but at least Jewel didn’t chew, like most men, women, and children in Galen.
“Sit a minute, Darcy,” she said to me. “We haven’t talked together for the longest time.”
“What’s on your mind?” I put a cup of coffee, thick as mud, just the way she liked it before her. “Things aren’t so bad,” I told her, assuming she wanted to talk business. “Four rooms are let. The guy who rode in on a horse drinks, but he pays; the couple in the back room fight, but never after nine o’clock. So I suppose—”
“I don’t want to know if the inn is all right. I want to know if you are all right.”
I considered this question pointless, which was why I never asked it and didn’t consider it worth answering. If I wasn’t all right, there would be nothing Jewel could do about it, and if Jewel wasn’t all right, there would be nothing I could do about it. So why inquire? I waved her away. “Fine, fine, right as rain.”
She sighed. “Yes, I guess you are. People like you always come out all right in the end.”
Jewel was trying to sound deep and philosophical and it annoyed me. “What do you mean, ‘people like me’?”
Jewel always got nervous when she thought she was being pinned down for an answer and she shifted in her chair, clearly hoping that would redirect the conversation. “I don’t know quite what I mean.”
“That’s not unusual.”
Jewel leaned forward earnestly. “Wait. I do know what I mean. You were never like Jolene and Caroline as a baby, Darcy. You never let me hold you or comfort you. Even when you were little and you fell down and hurt yourself, you’d go off like an old cur dog to lick your wounds…” Or to find a place to die like a deer, I thought. “…And I knew that things would never come easy for you, that everything would be a struggle. And yet no matter how scared I felt for you, I always had the feeling that in the end, somehow, you’d be able to walk away, and everything would be all right. I don’t know. Maybe if I’d known who your father was—”
“Oh, please,” I said, disgusted. “You’re not going to start that again. What difference could it make now?” I’d long since lost whatever curiosity I’d had about my paternity.
“A lot of difference maybe. I should have lied to you. I should have said that your father died but he loved you very much.”
“I’d have known you were lying. You can’t lie, at least not in a way that anybody would believe.”
“I guess you’re right,” she admitted. “And it’s not because I don’t want to lie about some things or that I’m above lying. I just don’t know how to do it right. That’s why it’s a good thing you talked to the sheriff that day instead of me. I’d have spilled the beans about Jesse for sure if—”
“You promised never to talk about that again.”
“I know I did,” she said