Angels Burning Read Online Free PDF

roles of both parents; she barely showed up for her own part. It was because my siblings and I had survived without one, and we couldn’t miss what we didn’t have.
    However, society dictated that there were certain milestones in a daughter’s life that required a father. A dad taught you how to ride a bike, took you on your first camping trip, walked you down the aisle, and gave you driving lessons.
    I had never known my father, but at least I knew his name: Donny McMahon. He denied he was my father from the moment Mom informed him she was pregnant. This was back in the days before blood and DNA testing. They weren’t married, and Mom already had a bit of a reputation. There was no way to make him or the rest of his family accept me, although Grandma told me he came to see me when she was babysitting me and we were alone. My mom’s pride prevented her from allowing me to have a relationship with a man who spurned her and, more important, refused to pay up. Grandma insisted my dad loved me as long as no one was looking.
    He died two years after my birth, on a sleety day in March in the first Pontiac Sunbird our town had ever seen. The accident left him too mangled for an open casket. I have two photos of him that were taken before his face would become unrecognizable to his loved ones: a wallet-size senior picture from high school where my resemblance to him is painfully obvious, and a faded Polaroid of him grinning and posingnext to the car that would be the instrument of his death a month after its purchase.
    Neely’s father was “passing through.” This is the only information we were ever given about him. We used to come up with all kinds of scenarios for who he was and how he and Mom met. Our favorite was to paint him as a masked hero along the lines of Zorro, or the Lone Ranger, or Batman. He broke into Mom’s bedroom one night, got her pregnant, and continued passing through before she was able to discover his identity.
    Champ’s father, on the other hand, was someone Mom knew well. He was a respectable guy with a wife and kids, or so Mom told us one drunken dateless night when she was stuck at home feeling sorry for herself. She went on to say she could never tell Champ his father’s name because she had promised him his bastard son would never try to contact him.
    Unlike Denial Donny and Passing Through, Champ’s principled father gave Mom a stack of ten-dollar bills once a month. It was hush money and that meant it was more reliable than traditional child support because he would’ve never dreamed of missing a payment. We called him the Envelope.
    I always felt bad that Neely and Champ were saddled with an added burden that I had been spared. Throughout their childhoods they were forced to wonder about their dads and knew they could see them in the street and never know. It could have even happened to Neely. If her dad had passed through once, he could pass through again.
    I didn’t have these lost-father worries. I had a name, two photos, and I knew exactly where mine was at all times: the cemetery behind the Buchanan Methodist Church.
    After I change and make a sandwich, I drive to Neely’s before I head back to work. I don’t know why I feel the urgency. Even if Lucky was ambitious enough to try and find her, he’d never get anywhere near her unless she wanted him to. I don’t think he’d try to physically hurt her, and if he did, it would be bye-bye Lucky or at least good-bye to Lucky’s balls. I’m also not worried about any potential emotional damage hecould cause her. Neely put away her feelings about Lucky a long time ago. I envy her that ability.
    I need to tell her now because otherwise I’ll spend the rest of the day thinking how wrong it is for me to know something big that Neely doesn’t know.
    The drive to her place raises my spirits and helps turn my thoughts away momentarily from the dead girl who’s lying