Fallen Angel

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Fallen Angel

By Plot Roach

The little white ceramic angel stood silently on the counter as the mourners wandered the house around her. They murmured condolences while shoveling food from paper plates into their mouths. Sandra, already numb with the loss of her grandmother, stood nearest the door while men and women wandered up to her, shaking her hand and conveying their condolences. And while each second surrounded by these people seemed to be torture, the day moved too fast into night. The last guest left and Sandra began to collect the plastic cups and paper plates, scraping the food into a plastic bin before throwing the rest into the trashcan.

For all their kind words and false smiles, not one of them had offered to stay and help clean up the mess left behind.

I should have known what they were like before they smelled the free food, she thought to herself. When her grandmother lay dying in the hospital, none had come to see her or send her flowers. When she died, none of her so-called friends had offered to help plan the funeral or add a bit of their own money to cover the expenses And now that the last crumb of food had been consumed, the last sad story told, the last hand shook, they passed away into the night like ghosts of the past.

Sandra looked to the sad walls of her grandmother’s home. In her lifetime she had given birth to five children, three of which were still alive. And when Sandra’s parents had died in a car accident, her grandmother stepped up to claim her grandchild, never once shirking her duties, though she was already old and frail. She raised Sandra as if she were her own daughter, never once making her feel like a burden. But out of all the family that had been left, none had taken care of her grandmother like she had taken care of them. None except for Sandra.

The walls were lined with peeling wallpaper, cracked ceiling tiles and pictures of all who had graced her grandmother’s life. She remembered sitting on her grandmother’s knee as a girl, when on hot summer nights they sat in the kitchen drinking ice cold lemonade and sitting in front of the fan. Her grandmother telling her stories of all the people in the pictures. Most she remembered, but had never met, until the funeral. And despite the stories of love and laughter that her grandmother had told her about them, none seemed as vibrant in life as their stories from her grandmother’s lips.

The bin of food she emptied onto the compost heap. No sooner the back door closed and the light turned off, then she could hear the raccoons digging through the trash of the heap looking for their own food for the night. Her grandmother had fed the ’bandits’ well over the years, claiming that they were as much kin to her as much as any that had stepped foot in her house.

Sandra listened to them scamper across the back patio, drink from the birdbath and fight one another over the best scraps of food. Her mood sobered as she realized that another fight would be breaking out all too soon as her grandmother’s things would be divided amongst her surviving relatives. Her grandmother not yet cold in the ground, some had even had the nerve to approach her during the wake to ask for her grandmother’s jewelry. Some had expressed interest in the will and what she had left them. Sandra would have given everything to the slavering beasts, hungry for anything to pawn, if he could only hug her grandmother one more time.

She knew that the home she had lived in would go to her Uncle Dennis, though he had only spent is childhood in it and nothing more. As soon as he was of legal age he enlisted in the Army and never looked back, only sending flowers on mother’s day and calling her on her birthday. Sandra’s Aunt Mildred had been just as bad, only expressing an interest in the old woman’s life when it seemed that she had fallen ill and might pass away. Aunt Mildred would get the car, most of the furniture and the collectables that sat on the mantle piece.

Various odd bits were to be given to one family member or another. And as for Sandra? She would be given her grandmother’s bureau and the ceramic angel that stood guard in the living room. Her grandmother had always said that there was a special angel watching over her that would care for her for the rest of her days. But as Sandra wiped clean the table and counters of her grandmother’s home, she felt more alone than ever.

Tears flooded her vision and she felt as abandoned as she had the night that the police had told her that her parents had died. Now she had lost the only person who had ever loved her as much as her own parents and she could find no end to her sadness. In her grief, she tossed the towel onto the table, inadvertently knocking the ceramic angel off of its pedestal and onto the floor, shattering it in the process.

“No!” she yelled, falling to her knees to pick up the pieces. “Why now?” she yelled. “What else are you going to take from me!” With bleary eyes she scooped the shards into a box and went to the junk drawer to get the superglue.

Maybe I can put it back together again, she thought. Maybe I can fix it and it will all be fine in the end.

She laid the pieces out before her on the kitchen counter, and pulled the top off the tube of glue. The first piece, the base, weighted heavier by far than the rest of the pieces, and when she fitted the first broken bit to it, she saw what had made it so heavy. An envelope had been curled up and shoved into the bottom of the angel. She pulled it out and opened it up.

“My angel, watch over me and mine. And as I set this aside, let it keep my girl, Sandra, safe. I have asked forgiveness for my past, but know that I can never ask forgiveness from Sandra should she find out about my ‘indiscretions’. Watch over her and keep her safe and I will abandon my life of sin.”

It was in her grandmother’s handwriting and came with a key. Sandra tried it on every lock she thought would fit in the house, finally finding its match in the bureau drawer in her grandmother’s bedroom. A drawer that her grandmother had said had been locked long ago, the key lost forever.

Inside the drawer were sets of old passports, at least a dozen or more, all bearing a photo of the same woman at various ages. In the bottom of the drawer was a batch of bank books in a box accompanied by a journal listing the account numbers, places and names under which a small fortune had been deposited. The second half of the journal contained a note.

“Sandra, if you are reading this, I am dead. The rest of this journal will tell you why I did what I did. As for why I stopped. Well, child, it was because of the night that your parents died. I knew that I couldn’t take anymore chances if I was going to raise you. If I got caught, you’d be in a foster home faster than I could blink. And I wasn’t about to let that happen to you. So I locked everything away the day that you came to live with me. I’m sure that you have some questions, and those will be answered in time. But first you’ll want to contact the banks listed in this book. They’ll know that you are going to collect the money that I left you. I only hope that it makes you happier than it did me.”