Read Angels for Free Online

was definitely over. “Guess nobody’s going to Philly now,” the driver said.
    Jamie ran out of the bus. Bill Houston watched her. “Now look what happened,” he told the driver, flabbergasted, leaving.
    They stood on the sidewalk surrounded by a windswept and desolate shopping mall in Lincoln Park. It looked like a nice place to drive around in, in the daytime, if you had a car. Jamie had saved thirteen dollars. She was seized with a desire to run back to the dingy bar and find the man who had valued her at fifty. Bill Houston was experimenting with his Bic butane lighter, holding it upside down and trying to keep it lighted. “The gas wants to go up,” he explained to her, “but then it has to go down before it can go up. It don’t know what to do.” When it exploded in his hand, he stared at his torn fingers through eyes spattered with blood, looking like he didn’t know what to do. He turned to her, astonished, wanting some kind of endorsement, some kind of confirmation. “Did you see that?”
    â€œYour fingers are all tore up,” she said.
    â€œThat’s what I mean. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
    â€œDid you burn your hand, too?” Jamie said.
    He said, “Did I burn it? Yeah I burnt it.”
    â€œDoes it hurt?” she said.
    â€œDoes it hurt?” he said. “You can’t imagine.”
    He blew on his fingers and then shook them as if trying to get a bug off his hand. Then he held his hand in his other hand and pretended he wasn’t crying. Jamie took wadded pieces of Kleenex from her purse and tried to straighten them out and administer them to the wounded fingers, but the wind blew them away and they went scudding along the sidewalk. “This kind of shit just keeps happening until you’re dead,” Bill Houston told her. They took a cab to the nearest Emergency Room. Bill Houston took up the middle of the seat, chuckling now and then in disbelief, staring at the injured hand in his lap as if to find any kind of hand there at all was unexpected and portentous. Jamie leaned up against the left-hand window, snuffling and crying and looking out at the shut avenues hard, as if only a little while ago she had owned them.
    E very time she did the laundry she threw away some of the clothes. One of everything: less to wash, less to carry, less to know about. She threw four pairs of socks into the trash. One of her bras didn’t look right: she threw it away. “Listen, you want this suitcase?” she told a man standing there. He looked like a bum who was on vacation from destitution. But he didn’t want her suitcase.
    She was looking at her children and hating them when a black woman opened up one of the big driers and took out her child, a little boy about three. “More, Mama?” he said. “More? More?”
    The woman sat him on the floor and he staggered about. Jamie couldn’t believe it. The woman tried to fold her clothes, but her little boy grabbed hold of the hem of her skirt as if he would climb right up her. “More, Mama? Mama? Mama? More.” Annoyed, the woman picked him up with one arm and put him back into the drier. She slugged in a dime and shut the door and went back to folding clothes.
    Miranda approached her mother, wide-eyed, looking ready to speak, pointing to the driers. “Don’t even think about it,” Jamie told her. “I’ll let you know when it gets that bad.”
    Jamie lay flat on her back on the green table. If she stared at the white acoustic tiles of the ceiling and kind of let her eyes go loose, the pattern would shift and the tiles would seem to draw down on her until she was inside of them. There was nothing else to do right about now.
    She was the only woman in this row of tables. In the entire room, which was the size of a ballroom, there were four women and nearly fifty men, each stretched out on a green table with a green