Metal Angel Read Online Free Page B

Church of the Holy Virgin and ran it out of a former lingerie shop. His theology oscillated somewhere between sugar-scoop Brethren and total-immersion Baptist, but also threw off sparks of mystic Mariolatry. Under her feet Angela felt the relentless uplifting confines of the pedestal on which he had placed her.
    â€œCall me and I will pray with you.”
    â€œStop worrying,” she told him. She kissed him on his flat cheek, sent him on his way, and waited patiently, like a rabbit flattened in the grass, until she felt sure he was gone. Once she considered it safe, she scrawled the next verse of her song, then took the half-finished thing and hid it under the old bedsheets at the back of the linen closet. Most of her efforts she flushed down the john like the dregs of Michael’s diaper pail, but this one she would keep. It smoked in her, heady and illicit as brandy, while she took laundry downstairs and continued the exquisitely boring routine of her housework.
    For an hour while the boys napped she listened to her radio, even though listening was sweet suffering because she had to keep the volume down and the music made her want to do just the opposite, made her feel wild to turn up the fizzy old thing and scandalize the neighbors, tuck a flower in her hair, walk in the rain, kiss a stranger, do something . Almost anything.
    She had married straight out of high school, at age seventeen. She was only twenty.
    Ennis, her husband, did not get home until late. In the summertime he worked until dark, hammering, fitting homes together, earnest, steady, sober. He wanted to have his own construction company someday. Angie felt no doubt that he would, and that when he did he would work even harder and leave her even more alone.
    â€œ ’Lo, hon.” He kissed her because he knew she wanted it, but awkwardly, with closed lips. Kissing did not come easily to Ennis. Even a Dagwood peck at the door made him faintly blush.
    â€œHave you eaten?”
    â€œNope. I worked straight through. I’m starved.”
    She had fed Gabe and Mikey their dinner but had saved her own hunger for Ennis. She had given the children their baths and their bedtime story, cuddling them one in each arm in a hundred-year-old rocking chair, their small heads and wispy hair warm against her neck. After tucking them in amid kisses and hugs and teddy bears, she had settled down to wait for her husband, her belly growling. Now she put out the cold chicken, the apple salad, the sweet-and-sour pepper slaw.
    Ennis sat at his place. Even across the kitchen she could whiff the good workingman smell of him. If he had touched her, even sweaty as he was, she would not have pulled away … He waited until she sat, then steepled his big hands and said a quick grace. He was a member of the Church of the Holy Virgin, of course, like his parents before him. Angie had known him all her life, and looking at him across the table she could not say for certain whether he was handsome. Her eyes were so accustomed to him that she could not tell. And the loose-fitting Sears work pants and work shirt he wore did not help her. But certainly he was not ugly … and she was no beauty, she reminded herself, certainly not attractive in any fashionable sense, sitting there in her round-collared blouse and scrubbed face and bunned hair and prayer bonnet. She had never been able to feel sure he desired her.
    They ate in near-silence. Ennis asked how her day had been, then looked at the mail. It was mostly junk, but it served to occupy him. He had never been one to talk much. Even less during the past year, since his dad had died.
    An hour later, after he had showered and Angie had done the dishes, she undressed in the bathroom, taking off with relief the prayer bonnet with its irksome hairpins—at least her father and his God did not require strings that tied under the chin! Taking off with supreme relief the chastely sheathing pantyhose, the white, constricting