Wiley cricked his neck to spy her from one eye. “As much as you want,” he said. “Pretend that I'm on the run and don't want anyone to recognize me. Pretend I'm a desperado in need of a new identity.”
Drawing the hair together in a thick rope, Mee-Maw sawed through the hank, and after separating the final strands from his scalp, she raised the coil into the air like a warrior claiming her coup. Una gasped at her grandmother's audacity and the realization of the time it had taken the boy to grow such a pelt. With a final flourish, Mee-Maw tossed the hair on the newspapered floor and, steel slicing through air, set to shaping the uneven ends, all the while humming a lullaby. The frenzied blades slowed to a more calibrated pace, and when she heard her grandmother turn on the razor, Una ran off to herald the news to Erica but could not find her in the bedroom or the bath, so through the front door burst the breathless child.
Una shielded her eyes against the sun with the flag of her hand. “Miss Nancy, Miss Nancy, come see.” But her friend was not sitting on the porch as usual. The girl called again twice and, receiving no reply, launched an elliptical orbit around the cabin. Under a willow, leaves silvered and clinging to weeping branches, Erica perched on the beam of an ancient sandbox. As soon as she saw her there, Una stopped short, anxious that her next step might be off the edge of the earth. She had not thought of the sandbox in ages. Her father, or so she had always heard, built it for her before she was born, hauled the white sand and lumber braces, now weatherworn to gray. As a toddler, Una spent many hot summer days under the willow, watching the feathery leaves and graceful limbs dance in the breeze. By six years, she had forsaken the spot altogether and its sway on her emotions. Rain and wind had flattened the sand into a bowl-shaped depression, and lichen and woodworms had claimed the timber. The tips of the branches overhanging the sandbox had burrowed into the surface, as though desperate for water beneath a desert. Some old toys lay in the sand—a red plastic bucket bleached on one side to salmon, a doll stretched out and staring blindly into the sun, a rusty watering can with a sunflower nozzle. As she approached, Una noticed that her friend was using the shard of a broken china dish to carve lines in the sand.
“I loved that tea set,” she said, her voice tinged with longing.
“I had the same pattern,” Erica said, then bent her face back to the sky and closed her eyes. “Wonder what's become of my old toys.” She had taken off her sweater and knotted it around her waist, exposing her bare arms and shoulders to the sun. Una sat down beside her, skin against skin, and aped her pose, lifting her face to gather in warmth. The willow branches broke the sky into a mosaic as blue as the shattered dishes. “I'll bet you were out here every day in the summertime. I used to set up my tea service with all my dolls and stuffed animals in these teeny, tiny chairs, then I'd make my daddy come to tea, and you should have seen him try to sit there—his knees would be sticking up over the tabletop—and the little bone cup in his big hand.”
She glanced over at the child, who seemed on the verge of tears. “Miss Nancy. I've something to ask you, if I dare.”
“We have no secrets, you and me. You've been taking good care of me these past weeks.”
“Lest I do you further wrong, I should ask.” Her voice quavered. “Are you an angel? An angel sent to us?”
The willow shivered in the breeze. Erica averted her gaze to the fractured sky. “What makes you ask such a thing?”
“Your wings.” She fingered the tattoo on Erica's bare shoulder. “And Mee-Maw says.”
“This? This is just a symbol me and Mr. Wiley had done. A sign of our love for each other. But what has Mee-Maw been saying?”
The girl did not want to answer. She picked up a china cup and flicked at the sand clinging to its edge. “She said maybe you was sent from heaven to deliver us a message about my mama and daddy. That's why we have to keep you here till you give us word and not let you go lest you leave without us knowing.” Una frowned and drew a spiral in the sand. “But I don't believe her, though I do as I am told.”
“Knowing what, Una?”
“Knowing where they are. My mama and daddy.”
“You said they would be coming back soon. What happened to them?”
Una shook her head. “That's what Mee-Maw told you, but I know better. They run off when I was a baby, run off to Canada because of the Vietnam War, and left me with my grandmother to watch over till they come back.”
“I didn't know.” Waves of empathy and confusion rolled over her. “The war's over, though. They'll be back soon.”
“No, they're dead, ain't they? They'd have sent for me if they were alive. Or called or wrote. That's why you've come to us. You are an angel of truth—”
“I'm not sure there are really such things as angels.”
“I prayed for you to come. And to tell me why. And to stay with me.”