News from Heaven by Jennifer Haigh Page B

Her very knowability charmed him. In the year he’d been Vera Gold’s lover, she’d confided almost nothing. Her dark complexity fascinated and repelled him. With Vera, nothing was what it seemed.
    Yet a few crucial things had been simple. Without consulting him, Vera had taken precautions, or perhaps at her age, none were necessary. He’d grown used to the freedom and, with Marnie, was careless. For weeks he crept out of her room at dawn, careful not to wake the landlady, as though it were the worst that could happen.
    I nside, he found a phone booth and lit a cigarette. Vera answered on the first ring. Television in the background, Vera nursing a highball in front of the late news. Like Sandy, she was nocturnal. Her husband slept like a bear.
    â€œAre you up or down?” she asked. “Dumb question. If you were up, you wouldn’t be on the phone.”
    â€œMarnie lost the baby.” On purpose, he could have added but didn’t. He had never said it aloud.
    With Vera, he didn’t have to. As always, she heard the words he was too cowardly to say. “Ah, geez. Listen, Sandman: what else could she do?” The line went quiet, Vera switching off the television. “Think about it. Poor kid still thinks she can make it in this town. Hell, maybe she can. What do I know?” Ice cubes clinking in a glass. “But not with a baby, she can’t.”
    Sandy had never thought of it in those terms. “I didn’t tell her to do it,” he said.
    â€œYou didn’t tell her not to.”
    â€œIt could have been different,” he said.
    â€œTell me how.” A click, a slow inhale: Vera lighting a cigarette. “What, you were going to marry her? Take her back to Bakersfield?”
    â€œBakerton.” The town he’d fled, whose mines had killed his father; the bleak small-town life a prison from which no one escaped. And yet he had considered it: driving back east with his bride beside him, having stopped off in Vegas for a different purpose entirely. It was a task easily managed—no blood test, no waiting, the ceremony over in minutes and cheaper than breakfast. For a time it had seemed a real possibility, the right thing to do.
    â€œI couldn’t make up my mind,” he said. “I guess she got tired of waiting.”
    â€œSmarter than she looks,” Vera said.
    B ack at the table, the tide had turned. Sandy felt it immediately, the juice seeping from him like blood from a wound. He bet big and then bigger, a strategy that sometimes worked. The juice was fickle; she punished you like a pouty girlfriend. Sometimes you could win her back with a show of bravado. It was worth a try.
    He fingered the cheap silver-plated medal in his pocket—Saint Anne, patroness of miners—his father had been wearing when he died.
    The juice was jealous. Like an angry lover, she knew when his attention was elsewhere. And tonight his mind was crowded with other women. Marnie passed out in the cheap motel room; Vera Gold sleepless in the Hollywood Hills, lying next to the husband who owned his soul. Back in Bakerton, the sister who loved him more than anyone, dying in childbirth, for all he knew.
    In his new wallet were the two twenties, Joyce’s gift to the brother who rarely called and did not visit, who always had something better to do. Money sent without her husband’s knowledge: it was, he knew, the only lie in his sister’s marriage, the only secret she kept from Ed.
    It was enough to cover the motel, a tank of gas to get them back to L.A., expenditures Joyce would approve.
    Forty bucks was enough, probably, to pay for a wedding.
    It was ten to midnight, the last breath of his birthday. Sandy Novak was thirty-three, the same age as Jesus. The two twenty-dollar bills were all he owned in the world.
    W ith the time difference, it was three in the morning, a fact he put out of his head.
    â€œEd,” he said into the phone. “It’s