Free The Longest Night by Andria Williams

got to her feet. Her bra sat upright on the floor as if inhabited by an invisible woman. She couldn’t find last night’s underpants so she fished a new pair from her dresser and stepped into them.
    The girls’ whispers were gaining in volume. When she opened the door they toppled into the room, looking startled for a moment and then grinning. “Oh!” Sam said with delight, as if her mother were stopping in unexpectedly for tea. “Oh, good
mor
ning!”
    “Good morning,” Nat whispered, smiling. Sam’s hair was sleep-frayed out around her head and ratted into a firm, walnut-sized nest in the back.
    After bread with peanut butter and some apple slices and a game of “I Spy” in their box-filled kitchen, it was still only seven A.M. Nat wanted to let Paul sleep in: because he had driven so far and then worked for the past few weeks, but also in a wifely indulgence she always allowed him after lovemaking, as if the strain of her seduction weakened him and he needed, like Samson, to sleep his way back into strength.
    “Can we go for a walk?” Sam asked. Her cheeks glistened with peanut butter and bread crumbs; she looked like she’d been smeared with suet and set out for birds in cold weather.
    “Sure,” Nat said, wiping Sam’s face and then Liddie’s. She got the girls dressed, tried to wet Sam’s hair down flat, and led them out into the cool morning air.
    The neighborhood was quiet; only crows and cats were out. They made slow progress, Sam hopping ahead and Liddie toddling behind, Nat always somewhere in the middle. The soles of the girls’ Mary Janes made little gritty skips on the pavement.
    Theirs was a modest neighborhood, clapboard prewar houses with pointed roofs, small windows, milk-delivery boxes built into the wall near the front doors. Each house was about eight hundred square feet—smaller than her parents’ home had been, but perfectly comfortable. At that moment, on the cusp of summer, with the street still fresh and the girls not arguing and her love for Paul snuggled happily in the back of her mind, she felt they could do fine in this new place.
    They wandered along several blocks and she realized that they were nearing the Richardses’ neighborhood. Here the houses were changing: Instead of humble little triangles they were newer, ranch style, each with a hedge and one rosebush planted just to the right of the front door. Everything felt a little cleaner, a little classier, and it occurred to Nat that she’d walked out her front door in the dress she’d slept in, looking like an unmade bed.
    “Girls,” she said, “maybe we’ll walk to the end of this block and then turn back.”
    “Aw, Mama,” said Sam.
    Nat hadn’t thought back to the previous night’s party since she’d awoken and now, seeing the Richardses’ well-kept white house on the corner, she found it strange that she’d been there just hours ago in this same dress, nervous, her hair up, pearls heavy on her neck, Paul nursing his fatigue and his frustrations as if they were hard candies, her holding that stupid regrettable meatloaf. She was relieved that there was a different feeling between her and Paul now, the old feeling, and she hoped it would hold. It made her care less about Master Sergeant Richards hanging boozily in her face, pawing at her collar (Paul was right; he had pawed) or whether Jeannie Richards thought she was plain and friendless.
    Cars had begun to pass by on the road, here and there. A line of four boys filed into a sedan at the end of the street while their father looked on. Nat guessed it must be about eight o’clock. The day stretched endlessly before them. She was just about to turn the girls around when she heard a commotion.
    “What’s that, Mama?” Samantha asked.
    “Sam, shh,” she said.
    What Nat heard were the deep, irregular shouts of a man’s voice. She swiveled her head, trying to tell where it was coming from—inside one of the houses, she thought. There was something almost