Angels Unaware

the secret we later shared. In mind, heart, and soul, I felt much older than my mother. I suppose that experience embitters some and educates others, but Jewel remained undaunted by life’s challenges; inside, she remained the naïve, innocent Margaret Mary Willickers, sixteen years old and fresh from Texas.
Once I asked her why she hadn’t married the justice of the peace.
“Because his name was Elwood,” she replied.
“Well, if that isn’t the stupidest reason I ever heard!” I exclaimed impatiently. “You could’ve married him and called him anything you liked.”
“No. No matter what I called him, Darcy, I’d still be thinking Elwood up here,” She proclaimed gravely, tapping her head.
I wondered sometimes if she’d ever had “anything up there.” She had made up her mind against marrying Duncan—even if he’d had the notion of asking her—because she’d come upon him tweezing his nose hairs in the bathroom mirror. It proved to be an image she couldn’t shake, Jewel declared. No romance, she told me, could endure scrutiny. She seldom spoke in this manner to Caroline or Jolene, even when they were old enough to hear it. She was afraid to make them cynical, she confided. Even then, she knew it was too late for me.
For all our differences, Jewel and I got along harmoniously enough, except when it came to the justice’s money. She was forever thinking up ways to spend it, and I was forever thinking up new ways to hide it. Finally, I suggested we save it for Jolene and Caroline’s college fund. If my sisters stayed in Galen after graduation, I told Jewel, they’d surely end up mothers married to miners, and Jewel—who was never able to settle upon anything for more than an hour or two, though she was always most sincere at the time—agreed. Then, however, we were free to argue about how to raise money going forward. My brilliant idea came to me one night as I lay in bed, just on the verge of sleep. I sat bolt upright, leapt from the bed, flung open the door, and raced down the hallway to Jewel’s room.
“I’ve had a brilliant idea,” I told her excitedly. “We’ll take the train to Philadelphia and find Duncan.” At her perplexed expression, I reminded her. “The art student, remember? The father of your children? We’ll remind him of his responsibilities and, in exchange for a cash settlement, we’ll promise to keep quiet about his two illegitimate children.”
“That’s blackmail, Darcy,” she said reprovingly.
“No, Jewel, that’s raising funds.”
“I would never, never, never in a million years—”
“Why the hell not?”
“It’s immoral, that’s why.”
This, from a woman who’d born three illegitimate daughters. I went back to my room in a snit.
We might have made a go of the inn if only we’d had more than one bathroom. But for another toilet, my life might have turned out completely different. As it was, we had just the one, and when the toilet got stopped up, and my plunging was of no use, we’d have to use the outhouse. The North Pole could scarcely be any colder than that outhouse on a February morning, when piss froze before it hit the bottom.
If the one bathroom wasn’t problem enough, our lobby was dull and old and faded. The draperies were thin, the rugs were threadbare, and the sofa’s springs were sprung. Even the bell on the front desk failed to chime. Besides that, the roof leaked in spots, dripping brown water into metal buckets when it rained. Floors had rotted out in patches. Once Mr. Lillicrap fell from the second floor—the one Jewel liked to call “the mezzanine”—clear down to the lobby and busted his leg. Good thing he had no money to pay his bill in the first place, or he might’ve sued us.
Lillicrap had his peculiarities, but he was by no means our most peculiar guest. That contest would have been too close to call. He was an old gentleman who owned one double-breasted white suit of which he was very proud. He wore it every day winter and summer, and it was always cleaned and pressed. Doubtless he must have cared for it in his room every night as if it were a firstborn son. It was a formal kind of suit, though he never went anywhere more formal than the whorehouse in the woods, and I don’t believe dressing up was required, since their clients were mostly miners. Lillicrap was a drunk, and even though he owned a white suit, and his speech never slurred, and his gait never staggered, he was a drunk just the same. We could always tell when he was drunk because he would take his pillow off his bed and sleep in the claw-foot bathtub. Jewel never cared much one way or the other where the guests slept, until one night when Miss Mahoney, a spinster with skin as white as her hair and razor-thin fuchsia-painted lips, went to use the toilet. She had just arranged herself on the seat when Mr. Lillicrap came out of his stupor. I’d never heard a woman scream so loud or so long. Miss Mahoney woke up all the other guests in clear defiance of the signs I’d tacked up in the hallway requesting absolute quiet after nine o’clock.
My sympathies were entirely with Mr. Lillicrap, who was even more startled than Miss Mahoney, having taken the old maid for a ghostly apparition. After that night, I wanted them both evicted but Jewel wouldn’t let me.
“I’m surprised you don’t want to wait for a blizzard so you can throw them out in the snow, Darcy,” she said. Evicting anybody, Jewel felt, would be tantamount to tampering with the workings of fate, and if there was one thing she would never do above all others, it was tamper with the workings of fate. There was no getting around it. Jewel was simply not cut out to be a landlord, and I would have to think of other ways to make money.
It was