Angel Falling Softly by Eugene Woodbury Page B

matter?” She was sitting in the passenger’s seat, wearing her Oshkosh denim overalls and a Tigger T-shirt, the clothes she’d worn the day they had taken her to see the doctor, the last good day before everything went so terribly wrong. She hugged Carl’s Dilbert dragon to her chest.
    “Jennifer—”
    “You have to remember, Mom.”
    Rachel told herself to breathe. “Remember what, darling?”
    Jennifer’s expression grew taut with concern. “About Milada. All you have to do is remember, and then you’ll know what to do.”
    Somebody tapped on the driver’s side window. “Oh!” Rachel exclaimed. A kid was standing there, a Chevron cap pressed down over a mat of curly brown hair, the name Dale stitched across the pocket of his stained white overalls. She lowered the window. The kid said, “Can I, um, help you, Ma’am?”
    She had pulled into the full-service lane, which she never did. But she didn’t want to think about it right now. “Sure,” she said, “fill it up, regular.” She reached down and pulled the gas cap cover release.
    When she looked again, her daughter was gone. The box containing the Dilbert dragon sat alone on the seat.
    This wasn’t dinner table conversation. Not that Mormons didn’t believe in miracles. But nobody spoke in tongues and cast out devils by smacking people on the forehead and hollering, “Be healed!” Carl was right. Too many pragmatic Scots in the family tree to tolerate that sort of nonsense. Nobody saw visions that didn’t go through the chain of command. There had to be a reason, and the Mormon God was big on “working it out in your own mind.”
    “You have to remember, Mom,” wasn’t much of a reason. A ghost in the front seat wasn’t subtle at all.
    Instead Rachel said, “I saw Carl today.”
    Her husband stiffened noticeably, a purely Pavlovian response.
    “Don’t worry, dear. He came for some expo at the Salt Palace. He’s flying back tonight.”
    “I wasn’t worried.”
    “You were worried.”
    Laura said, “Uncle Carl is weird.”
    “Laura,” said her mother.
    “He is! He’s always swearing at stuff. Uncle Phillip doesn’t swear. Dad doesn’t swear.”
    Her father beamed at her.
    Rachel sighed. Her brother, the bad influence. Laura had spent two weeks over summer vacation in California with her cousins. She had since derived a certain syllogism to explain the experience: her uncle was rich, her uncle was weird, so rich people were weird.
    The Dilbert dragon. That would rescue Carl’s reputation for the time being. She retrieved the box and handed it to Laura to open. “Something Carl and Liz and the kids made for Jennifer.”
    Laura opened the box and lifted out the dragon. “It’s so cute!” she exclaimed, swooping it through the air like a kid playing with a model airplane.
    Even her father was impressed. “So,” he said, still trying to prove that the mere mention of his brother-in-law’s name didn’t bother him, “Carl still threatening to quit Digital Moviola?”
    “He never stops.”
    “So why doesn’t he?”
    “Because then he wouldn’t have anything to complain about.” Except the cost of living, the cost of raising five kids, the general state of the universe. For a silly, insane moment she considered alluding to Carl’s vasectomy. But that definitely wasn’t dinnertime conversation.
    Not bedroom conversation either. Not a subject you casually brought up with the man you still dreamed might father another child someday. And lying on her side of the bed, she saw Jennifer clearly in her mind’s eye, sitting there in the car. She was so real, her voice exactly what Jennifer would sound like. But what did she mean about remembering? Why would she imagine Jenny saying something like that?
    Her husband emerged from the bathroom, brushing his teeth. She said, “David, have I forgotten something?”
    “Forget something?” he mumbled, trying not to drool toothpaste. He ducked back into the bathroom and rinsed. He