Heaven Should Fall by Rebecca Coleman

walls, that’s for sure.”
    He laughed wickedly and slapped me on the backside, and we hurried back up the stairs, the can of beans rattling all the way like a children’s toy.
    * * *
    The whole family was already assembled around the dinner table when Cade and I walked in. Leela, sitting at the opposite end of the table from Cade’s father, threw me a shy smile, and the family fell silent as Cade and I took our places. Cade bowed his head for the prayer, and I followed suit. The man who was evidently Candy’s husband, a tall and sturdily built man I had immediately pegged as a PSN like the ones I trained at camp, intoned a singsong blessing. This was Dodge, the King Jackass of the Universe who had caused me to spend Christmas fending off Drew Fielder’s slimy attempts at flirtation. The mere memory gave me a shiver.
    “Tell your father about what you learned today, Matthew,” said Candy, breaking the awkward silence that followed the blessing.
    Dodge loaded his plate with chicken casserole and passed the dish across the table to Cade, who looked at him with thinly veiled contempt. Matthew’s reedy little voice replied, “The Declaration of Independence.”
    “What about it?”
    Matthew squeezed his fork between both hands as he rolled his eyes upward in thought, crushing noodles and sauce through his fingers like Play-Doh. “Um…that it was wrote by President Thomas Jefferson to tell the world that we had gotten independent from all our enemies.”
    “That’s right,” said Dodge. He forked in a mouthful of chicken. “Enemies like who?”
    “Tyrants. Like the British and judges and foreigners, and the merciless Indian savages, and the Muslims.”
    “Very good.” He nodded to Candy. “Nice work there, Momma.”
    Candy beamed.
    Cade took a long drink of his iced tea. Then he said, “I don’t think the Muslims were a big threat to the colonies at that time.”
    “There were Muslims back then,” Dodge said.
    “There certainly were,” agreed Candy. “The Muslims have been around since the time of the Jews. Ask Elias—he was just over there fighting them.”
    “You want to straighten her out on that one?” Cade prompted his brother. Elias looked up, and Cade tipped his head imploringly. “Who are we fighting over there? The Muslims, or al Qaeda, or what?”
    “The Taliban,” Elias answered. He picked around in his dinner with his fork and added, “And ignorance.”
    “Ignorance?”
    “People not knowing any better way.”
    “See,” said Cade, “now, that makes sense. Let’s hope we’re making progress on that one.”
    “We aren’t,” said Elias.
    “You want to talk about enemies,” Dodge said, and jabbed his fork in the direction of the front window. “Drove down to the rental property today to fix the dishwasher, and they wouldn’t even let me in. Gonna put those people out on their ass, first of the month.”
    “You can’t do that,” Cade told him. “There’s a process. They’ve got a lease.”
    “Lease that says I’m the landlord. I can go in whenever I feel like.”
    Cade nodded toward his father. “ Dad’s the landlord.”
    “Doesn’t matter.”
    “Legally, it does.”
    Cade’s mother stood up and lifted the iced tea pitcher from the center of the table. “Stop your arguing. Let’s not turn a nice supper into one of those TV programs where everybody bickers at each other.”
    “So as I was saying,” Dodge continued, “they wouldn’t let me in. Girl there said her father told her a man has to be home before she can let me in. Don’t think I don’t know what that’s all about.”
    Leela’s brow creased. “Nothing wrong with that, really. They’re religious, remember. Don’t they belong to that church down the road apiece? The nondenominational one?”
    “Uh-huh. Randy’s church.”
    I looked from Cade to his father and back again. Randy was the uncle they never spoke to because of some old argument about a gun club. But Cade only said, “What does that