Free The Confessions of Frances Godwin by Robert Hellenga

little-known Sandburg poem, “Circles of Doors,” that was so different from his usual stuff that you’d hardly recognize his hand. Doors with knobs and doors with no knobs, doors that opened slow to a heavy push, like the big front door, so big we couldn’t find a replacement for the old wooden storm door, and doors that jumped open at a touch and a hello, like the door to the little balcony off our bedroom. French doors framing the piano, a shot of the little door in the basement wall that opened into a crawlspace beneath the side porch, painted white, the paint long chipped away. A shot of the open bathroom door, taken from the second landing, halfway up the stairs. Somehow the angle made the toilet and the sink look classy, romantic, glossy. And I hoped that Paul could hear me, whispering, like the speaker in the poem, I love him, I love him, I love him and sometimes only a high chaser of laughter, four or five doors ahead, or four or five doors behind.
    Paul and I were looking back. Stella was looking ahead. “All I want for Christmas,” she said, “is tuition money for the truck driving school in Iowa City.”
    Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was too upset. “You know,” I said, “I always read Ann Landers in the Register-Mail. It’s somebody else now—‘Annie’s Mailbox’—but it’s the same thing. Doctor Wallace, too. He went to Knox, you know.”
    “I know, Ma.”
    “I keep reading the same thing over and over, the same letters. ‘My boyfriend is a great guy, but if I get out of line he hits me sometimes. I know I deserve it, because I really know how to push his buttons. He doesn’t want me to go out with my girlfriends . . . ’ The letters aren’t signed, but half the time I can hear your voice, Stella. What’s the answer? Counseling? Get professional help? What I’m thinking is, get the hell away from this guy. What I’m thinking is, It’s as plain as the nose on your face. And what I’m wondering is, What are these buttons anyway, and where are they? What I’m wondering is, Where do these dopey girls come from? And why do they make me think of you and Jimmy and the guy from the workshop who knocked you up and left you in Brooklyn? It all goes back to Howard Banks. We practically had to lock you in your room that night.”
    Howard Banks, Jack Banks’s son, had asked Stella to the senior prom but Howard’s reputation was such that Paul had absolutely refused to let her go. That night—the night of the prom—Howard drove his father’s hearse into the path of a BNSF freight train in nearby Cameron, where the Burlington Northern tracks cross the Santa Fe tracks, killing himself and three of his classmates.
    “Howie? You’re still mad at Howie?”
    “If your father had let you go to the prom with Howard Banks you’d be dead now.”
    But Stella didn’t see it that way. “If I’d been with him he’d be alive now. He would have been wearing his seat belt.”
    “A lot of good a seat belt would have done when the train hit the hearse.”
    “Well, if I’d been with him he wouldn’t have tried to beat that train.”
    “Why do you pick these losers? Howard Banks, the visiting writer—I can’t even remember his name—who took you to New York. Brooklyn. I can’t remember them all.”
    “Howie was not a loser. He was smart and he was fun and he was sexy and exciting, and he didn’t take any shit from anyone.”
    “He got kicked out of school for cheating,” Paul said, “more than once, and he got arrested for breaking into the school one night and fucking with the bell system.”
    “It was great,” Stella said. “In the morning the bells kept ringing every five minutes. Nobody knew what to do. Mr. Collins and the dorky assistant principal kept running up and down the halls shouting at everybody, trying to get us to stay in our classrooms. You should have seen Mr. Collins. His big moon face was as purple as a grape.”
    Stella stopped talking and looked