The Ranger - Ace Atkins [69]
“What you gonna call her?”
“I hadn’t set on anything,” she said.
“How about Wanda?”
“That’s a terrible name.”
“That’s my momma’s name.”
He stroked the little girl’s face and looked up into Lena’s eyes and said, “We gonna be a family.”
“You told me to go to hell when you was in jail.”
“I ain’t in jail now.”
“I don’t see how that changes anything.”
“We’re getting out of here.”
Lena didn’t say anything, her damn breath had caught in her throat, and she turned to look out the window, searching for the birds in that dirty water. She didn’t want Charley Booth seeing she was about to cry. But son of a bitch, it was comin’ on.
“How long till they turn you loose?” Booth asked. She saw where he’d nicked his slim, slight chin while shaving off that peach fuzz.
“This isn’t jail. It’s a hospital.”
“When are you gonna get well?”
“I’m not sick.”
“This isn’t how I thought things would be,” Charley said. “You got to believe in that.”
“Let’s take a walk,” Lena said, propping herself up from the pillows, finding her feet on the floor. “My ass hurts something terrible.”
They found the hallways bare and open and wandered down one end to another, this hospital nothing like the places she’d seen on soap operas. She looked the big black nurse in the eye, this time nodding a hello because she had the father with her and wasn’t just a no-account girl with no damn sense or plan on bringing a child into this world. Charley nodded, too.
He carried the baby, and they all made their way down to the vending machines. He punched up a couple Coca-Colas and some Little Debbie snack cakes. “Can she have one of these?”
“Do you have a lick of sense?”
They sat down in that small, silent room with no windows, just a narrow door. It smelled like burnt coffee and sugar. Someone had left a Bible and a Danielle Steel novel on the table, and Lena thumbed through both of them, searching for a name for the baby, thinking maybe the books had been there for a reason. Her whole life felt like it was coming together.
“How about Raphaella?” she asked.
“A what?”
“For her name?”
“That doesn’t sound like a Christian name,” Charley said.
“Says here that it’s a name of Mediterranean aristocracy.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Or we could call her Ruth. That’s right here in the Bible.”
He opened the snack cakes and pulled out one for himself and pushed the package toward her, biting off half and chewing while he rocked the little baby, touching her little nose with the edge of his finger.
“I want to take you down to Florida with me.”
“You got money?”
“I will have money,” he said, dropping his head into his hand. “Reason I treated you like that was to push you away. I know you could do better.”
“We’re already in this thing.”
“I got money coming,” he said. “Can you hold tight for a couple days?”
“I don’t have no money,” she said. “I don’t have no insurance. I get one more day here.”
“You stay with me.”
“Back at Gowrie’s?”
“I got my own trailer,” he said. “I can’t leave without my money. Then we go to Florida. I already got it all planned out in my mind.”
“What’s in Florida?”
Charley Booth smiled, sticking the rest of the snack cake in his mouth and chewing in deep thought. “I’ve always wanted to open up an ice-cream stand.”
Lillie drove Quinn out to the old McKibben place, a thousand-acre parcel that had been the envy of everyone in the county. Original hardwoods and big thick pine trees, three creeks that had sprung off the Big Black River and ran through the land adjoining a National Forest. The McKibbens had kept it in their family since after the Civil War, the southern edge of the property the site of a cemetery where hundreds of soldiers who had died after coming to the hospital in Jericho were buried. Quinn had hunted the land many times with Judge Blanton and his uncle, even his father on occasion. An invitation out to the land was an entry into the old times