Angels Unaware Read online

  Contents

  Angels Unaware

  Copyright © 2021 Lisa Deangelis. All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  Quot

  Bitter Fruit

  A Checkerboard of Nights and Days

  Lighting a Little Hour or Two

  Kindle to Love or Wrath

  Like Snow Upon the Desert’s Dusty Face

  Some Corner of the Hubbub Couch’d

  The Rest Is Lies

  Turns Ashes

  Back In The Closet Lays

  And Like Wind I Go

  Angels Unaware

  Lisa Deangelis

  Regal House Publishing

  Copyright © 2021 Lisa Deangelis. All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  Raleigh, NC 27612

  All rights reserved

  ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646030699

  ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646030941

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020941111

  All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

  Interior and cover design by Lafayette & Greene

  lafayetteandgreene.com

  Cover images © by Ure/Shutterstock

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  https://regalhousepublishing.com

  The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  for my husband, Al,

  and for my children Kate, Luke, and Lily

  Quot

  e

  “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

  – Hebrews 13.2.

  1.

  Bitter Fruit

  It was to be a strange life, though we didn’t know it then, and rich in a poor way, and sadder than we could have imagined, and happier than we would have dreamed. And I guess you could say that of every life, but we didn’t know it then. There was a lot we didn’t know then. Do we ever know what it is that we’re about, and when we do, is it ever in time to change anything? Too late. Deep, black words, these are. Deep as the quarry where we swam one summer and black as the water in it. A child drowned there once. His body never surfaced, and since nothing starts a legend faster than a missing body, some mystical-minded locals began saying that he’d dived so deep that he’d stumbled upon a secret place of such exquisite beauty and peace that he hadn’t wanted to come back to Galen anymore and would remain in his watery world forever.

  The truth is: The child drowned. I told Luca the story one day while we were in the quarry, and he looked so serious that I dove under the water and held my breath as long as I could, and when I came up again, I arranged my face in a ghostly way and tried to scare him. He wasn’t really scared, but all the same, he got out of that black water and told me he didn’t like being where somebody had died. I said that I bet there wasn’t a square foot of ground anywhere on earth where somebody hadn’t died sometime. It never occurred to me until years later that the quarry would have been a better place to hide Jesse than the orchard where the dog kept trying to dig him up.

  If Jewel were alive, she’d say, “Oh, shut up, Darcy, can’t we talk about something besides dead people?” And she would remind me that the dead boy had drowned a good thirty years before I was even born, and to stop telling it like I’d got the information first-hand.

  Memory can be a funny thing. Past and present entwine like a braid of human hair, until you can’t be sure what happened thirty years ago and what happened yesterday, what you knew and what you only heard about. And sometimes, without trying, you can even remember something that hasn’t happened yet. It was like that with us. One day, while I was sitting out on the front porch, as the sun was going down, I remembered that I would love him. If only I’d remembered sooner. But as it was, I wasn’t any better than the blind woman who had passed through Galen once. She had the gift and could tell you what color the next man who walked down the road would be wearing, or what you’d wind up eating for dinner on the third Tuesday of next month, but nobody was much interested in what they’d be eating, and the blind woman never could prophesy anything more important than dinners and an occasional lunch.

  What I mean is that all the things that really matter are mixed in with the things that don’t matter at all, and you can drive yourself mad trying to tell the difference. Jewel knew a man once who’d done just that. His wife had just had a baby and left him with his father while she went out. The father got the idea of going in the house to get some chewing tobacco, and he left the baby in the hammock in the yard. When he came back, he found the baby crushed to death under the bough of a fallen tree. Twenty years later, he was still telling whoever would listen that he’d only left the baby for a minute, just a minute and not a second more. The point is that being crushed to death is an important thing, and chewing tobacco isn’t, but there they were side by side. Anyway, they finally had to get some men from the madhouse to come and take him. Even in the asylum, he kept telling his story over and over again, but at least in there, he found new people who hadn’t heard it before and showed more interest than us here in Galen.That’s why I always tried not to think about things too much. The madhouse is full of thinkers, whose eyes went bad squinting, trying to read more into their lives than ever was there.

  But sometimes, summoned or unbidden, images come to you and catch you unawares, snatches of things that used to be and aren’t anymore; one such for me was a July day when I watched him chopping wood in the heat, his tanned skin taut over muscle, shining with sweat, and I could hardly look at him for fear of giving myself away. Other times, I can feel him on top of me, the sweet heaviness of him; and I can smell him, his skin scented with woodsmoke and heather. Or it’s his voice I hear, a velvet voice like the dress that Jewel used to wear on Christmas day. She gave me a puzzle one Christmas with a thousand pieces to it, and no picture on the cover to show what it was supposed to come out to be. “You’ll figure it out,” she told me, but she was wrong.

  If Jewel was here with me now, she’d say, “When you can’t figure a thing out, go back to your earliest memory of it. What was the first thought you can remember thinking? For heaven’s sake, think, Darcy, think….”

  My earliest observation about Galen Creek, Pennsylvania, was that there wasn’t much to live for there, at least not much that you could tell right off. The women in Galen were mostly mothers, and the men were mostly miners. Mothers and miners, except for a few who farmed for a living. They shared something more than bitterness and something less than sympathy. They weren’t often kind to each other, and certainly never to us. But in Galen, no one expected kindness. Things were too hard for that, or maybe not hard enough. Everybody watched over their own miserable little lives and left everybody else to do the same.

  Jewel thought them poor in spirit and said that wa
s why they couldn’t be kind to anyone but their own. It was being kind to people who you didn’t even know that counted most. Jewel said a lot of things that didn’t mean much, and only a fool would have listened too closely.

  Jewel was born someplace in Texas to the Reverend Roy Willickers and his wife, which probably accounts for her early distrust of men of the cloth. She had an angelic face and a shapely body, and boys tended to sniff around her worse than dogs. At sixteen, she was so popular that when she got pregnant, she couldn’t be sure just who of the three boys had made her that way. Honest to a fault, she told them so. Her candor took all the romance out of the situation, and nobody was too interested in marrying her after that.

  The Reverend Willickers soon got wind of her predicament and he took her to a woman who gave abortions. But Jewel, unimpressed with the woman’s filthy back room, soured on the idea. Besides, she liked babies and wasn’t averse to having one. Her father, enraged by her refusal, beat her black and blue. So that night, she left Texas for good. Or at least that’s how Jewel told it. You couldn’t always believe her, not because she lied, but because she often embellished or omitted details so as to make the story move faster and be more interesting. In fact, the only thing she ever found intolerable in another human being was their inclination to tell too long of a story.

  Jewel was vague about how she’d ended up in Galen, and I wonder sometimes if she really knew. She claimed that she had just been “following destiny.” Jewel was fond of words like destiny. She liked telling fortunes with picture cards and told everybody more about their futures than they ever wanted to know, but she was never as accurate as the blind lady who foretolld dinners.

  I was born in a hotel, just off the turnpike, and Jewel named me Darcy after her mother who’d died young. Jewel hadn’t any money to pay for her room, but the hotel clerk, seeing how pregnant she was, let her stay the night anyway. He even found a midwife to help her. That was the night, Jewel said, that persuaded her to go into the hospitality profession, on account of that clerk’s kindness to a stranger.

  A week later, Jewel was arrested for vagrancy and me along with her. Anybody else might have seen that turn of events as a major setback. But Jewel said her arrest turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to her. The police brought her up before the justice of the peace, who took one look at her and fell desperately in love. He not only kept Jewel out of jail, but he brought her home with him to his house in Galen Creek. The justice was an old man, but Jewel wasn’t one to hold age, sex, or even species against a person. She liked men, women, children, and animals with as much discrimination as a whore has for sailors. The old man was a widower who’d never had any children, and he doted on Jewel as both the wife he’d lost and the child he’d never had. When he died a year later, he left her a goodly sum of money and his ramshackle old house, so that she might turn it into an inn and fulfill her dream of joining the ranks of innkeepers of America.

  I was barely a year old when the old coot went and not one for talking. If I could’ve talked, I’d have told Jewel then and there to be frugal with the justice’s money. As it was, by the time I was six or seven and old enough to advise, she had gone through half of it in frivolous ways. Her most ridiculous extravagance, and the one that never failed to make me mad, was the massive sign she had printed that hung on the side of the dilapidated house, placing a heavy burden on the shingles. It read: The Hospitality Inn. And underneath, it had a slot for a smaller sign to read either: Vacancy or No Vacancy. In all the years I would live at the inn, we never once were able to show the No Vacancy sign.

  I was three when Jewel got her first boarder, Duncan—an art student on summer break from college. He’d discovered Galen while searching the countryside for landscapes to paint. Later I found out he came from rich people who lived in Philadelphia, and he proclaimed both Jewel and the inn to be “delightfully quaint.” That was my second observation about life. Rich people always find poverty picturesque. Duncan’s summer break turned into a two-year “hiatus” to learn about “the quintessence of life.” I don’t remember Duncan very well, but I think he must have been an idiot. It was said I bit him once. How else was I to demonstrate my feelings toward guests? This formed the foundation for my lifelong attitude to innkeeping in general and the Hospitality Inn in particular. I hated the loss of privacy, the constant wearying need to make pleasant conversation, maintaining the pretense of caring about the minutiae of other people’s lives.

  When I was four, Caroline was born, and I found myself saddled with a sister I welcomed as much as smallpox. Caroline had Duncan’s blue eyes and black hair, and she was the most beautiful baby anyone had ever seen, just as she would grow into the most beautiful girl the residents of Galen had ever seen. Jewel’s second baby by Duncan was comparatively plain, but Jolene would grow up to be a genius, so it didn’t matter so much.

  After Jolene was born, Duncan decided he’d had about enough of our quaintness, and that life in Galen wasn’t any more meaningful than life in Philadelphia, so he went back to his family and his money. Poor Jewel, ever the good sport, kissed him goodbye and wished him well.

  “How could you let him get away like that?” I demanded later when I was old enough to demand. Missed opportunities always made me cross.

  “What else could I have done?” she answered nonchalantly. “He wanted to go.”

  “Dammit all! You could have made him pay for the trouble he caused you, not to mention two years’ room and board.” It still gnawed at me twenty years later that that little Philadelphia turd had ate and drank and slept and got his pole greased for a whole two years free of charge.

  “Oh, Darcy,” Jewel exclaimed, waving me away. “What’re you so mad about? The man gave me happy times and two beautiful daughters. Why, I’m the richer for having known him.”

  I never understood Jewel. Sometimes I even wondered if she was my real mother or if roving gypsies had left me to her when they broke camp. I looked nothing like her, and everything she did, or failed to do, made no sense to me. Her name for instance. Once, while rooting in the attic, I came across a birth certificate for Margaret Mary Willickers, and another document that legally changed her name to Jewel Willickers. I could understand her dislike for her first name, but why keep Willickers, which was just as silly as Margaret Mary. There were no answers to questions like that. It could only be chalked up to Jewel being Jewel.

  My mother could remember in detail events of ten years ago, but completely forget what had happened the day before. And she could not seem to recall that which I most wished to know—the identity of my father.

  “One of those boys must have looked more like me than the others,” I persisted.

  “No,” she mused. “I can’t say as they did. And they didn’t have your mean streak either. No, not one of them. What’s so important about fathers anyway? The reverend was the only sour note in my otherwise sweet existence. You should be glad you don’t have to be bothered with one.” (Jewel always referred to Willickers as ‘the reverend,’ and never as her father.)

  Perhaps it was that Caroline and Jolene had the same father, while mine was not only different but unknown, that divided us from the very beginning. That, and my need to be obeyed and respected. Even as a child, I refused to play games with my sisters. Less than four years seperated us, and I figured they wouldn’t respect me if I indulged in childish games, so I hung back, aloof, and watched a little contemptuously, just to show I was a cut above. My strategy worked because they always paid attention when I told them to come into the house or to do their chores. Jewel said I was born with a natural gift for intimidation, and it was certainly true enough with my sisters. But there were people in Galen who were a lot harder to scare off.

  Just about everybody in the town believed that Jewel was a whore, which struck me as funny since after the art student, Jewel had sworn off men for good. She still liked them all right, and she had no regrets, but m
en made more problems than solutions as far as she was concerned, and she didn’t want any more problems than she already had. I guess people thought she was a hussy just because she looked like one. She had wild hair that was always messed up, no matter how many times you combed it, and made her look as if she’d just gotten out of bed. And she had a tart’s way of walking, with her pelvis out and her hips swaying. Galen had a whorehouse, but it was out in the middle of the woods and the girls pretty much kept indoors, so I’d never seen one close up, and couldn’t say for sure how they walked. Or maybe, it was the railroad men who came to the inn for dinner, often staying overnight, that convinced the people of Galen of wrongdoing in the Willickers’ household.

  Jewel liked the railroad men; she liked their inclination to enjoy the moment that maybe was the result of constant sojourning, and their ready acceptance of whosesoever’s company they found themselves in. I liked the railroad men because they were good for business. At ten, I’d decided that it would be best if we didn’t rely solely upon the justice’s money, and I made up my mind that the inn would be a profit-making venture. The trouble was that Galen wasn’t exactly known for its tourism. In fact, even if people had heard about us, it was unlikely they’d ever find the inn on their own. That’s where the railroad men were useful. They met weary travelers every day and had the opportunity to direct them wherever they wanted. After we started regularly having them for dinner, the railroad men began sending people to us. Though we never filled our rooms to capacity, the finances improved a little.

  Matters would have improved still further if Jewel and I could have agreed on a management policy. Our typical guest consisted of some vagrant who had little or no money to pay for lodgings, and had, by some process that would forever remain a mystery to me, found his way to our door. Clearly, the poorest of persons possessed an incredible sense of direction because no rich man ever managed to include the inn on his travel agenda, not after Duncan anyway. Mostly, we accommodated men without jobs, pregnant girls without husbands, and dogs and cats whose ribs showed beneath mangy fur. That was how we came to get Old Sam. I was thirteen when Jolene brought him home, a flea-ridden bag of bones, ugly as sin, and with a big appetite. I was all for pushing him out the door and telling him to get, but they all whined and pleaded (Jewel the loudest) until I gave in. Of course, bathing the mutt fell to me. Jewel and my sisters were afraid his ticks would give them fever; and when the dog ate a rabbit the following day, and threw up his meal all over the carpet, I cleaned it up. Jewel and the girls protested that dog vomit was entirely too disgusting to deal with so soon after breakfast.