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"That woman has never been an angel," Katie told them.
JOE WAS SICK in his car seat on their way into Iowa City. A Johnson County sheriff's car had followed them the whole way on U.S. 6. Danny was afraid he might have a taillight out, or that he'd been driving erratically; he was thinking about how much to say he'd had to drink if the police car pulled them over, when the sheriff turned north on the Coralville strip, and Danny kept driving into downtown Iowa City. He couldn't remember how much he'd actually had to drink. In his boxer shorts, Danny knew he wouldn't have been very convincing to the sheriff.
Danny was thinking he was home free when Joe threw up. "It was probably the potato salad," he told the boy. "Don't worry about it. We'll be home in just a couple of minutes."
"Let me out of the fucking car," Katie said.
"Here?" Danny asked her. "You want to walk home from here?" He saw she'd already put on her sandals. They were still downtown.
"Who said I was coming home?" she asked him.
"Oh," Danny said.
Just before dark, he'd seen her talking to someone on the phone in the farmhouse kitchen--probably Roger, Danny now decided. He pulled over at the next red light, and Katie got out of the car.
"Lady Sky really is an angel, Mommy," Joe said to her.
"If you say so," Katie said, shutting the door.
Danny knew she didn't have any underwear on, but if it was Roger she was seeing, what did that matter?
SIX YEARS LATER, the early-morning traffic had subsided on Iowa Avenue. Yi-Yiing had long been back on Court Street--she was home from the hospital. (She'd probably told the cook about seeing Danny and young Joe on Iowa Avenue at such an early hour of the morning.)
"Why would you have died, too--if I'd really been hit by a car?" the eight-year-old asked his father.
"Because you're supposed to outlive me. If you die before I do, that will kill me, Joe," Danny told his son.
"Why don't I remember her?" the boy asked his dad.
"You mean your mom?" Danny asked.
"My mom, the pigs, what happened next--I don't remember any of it," Joe answered.
"What about Lady Sky?" his father asked.
"I remember someone dropping from the sky, like an angel," the boy told him.
"Really?" Danny asked.
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"I think so. You haven't told me about her before, have you?" Joe asked.
"No, I haven't," Danny said.
"Then what happened?" Joe asked his dad. "I mean, after Mom got out of the car downtown."
Naturally, the writer had told young Joe an edited version of the pig roast. After he drove the two-year-old home from the farm, there was less that the storyteller had to censor from the tale. (No doubt because Katie hadn't come home with them.)
In the early evening--it was just after dark--only the occasional passerby, and not one of Danny's neighbors, had seen the writer in his boxer shorts carrying his two-year-old into the ground-floor apartment of the duplex on Iowa Avenue.
"Can you still smell the pigs?" little Joe had asked his dad, as they came inside.
"Only in my mind," the writer answered.
"I can smell them, but I don't know where they are," the boy said.
"Maybe it's the throw-up you smell, sweetie," Danny said. He gave the boy a bath, and washed his hair again.
