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,
