All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 137

137

Saint returned to Monta Clare and dragged him out of one old house and into another, where he sat with her grandmother on the porch and listened to the old woman alternate between blowing her harmonica and sucking on a cigarette, one time losing her rhythm and sending a plume of smoke through the mouthpiece. Norma coughed as hard as Patch laughed, till Saint came out onto the frozen porch and ripped into them both because the neighbor girl had a new baby and did not want a geriatric and a jailbird waking the thing.

Sometimes he sat and listened to Saint play the piano, and only in those moments did he feel anything at all.

That first month his life hummed along, not reaching a roar, but Saint and Sammy keeping it from falling to a whisper. The snow remained, and before long they were closing in on the ’78 record; kids pressing their faces to windows each morning, praying the old heating system at Monta Clare High was not up to the job. The terms of his parole meant he had to find gainful employment, so he took to sitting at the gallery in a reflection of time past, only now people wandered in and stared at his work, sometimes inquired as to the price, which he answered by pointing them in the direction of another gallery fifty miles south that carried better pieces.

“I’m adding each lost sale to your debt,” Sammy said.

“What’s the count?”

“Two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars.”

From deep in the lungs of the gallery he watched the first shoots of spring as the great thaw began.

In Green’s Convenience Store he picked up coffee Sammy ordered in special, and beside him watched a small blonde girl swipe a candy bar and stuff it into her pocket.

“You’ll get caught doing that,” he said.

She tilted her small chin up. “Fuck off.”

He crouched low. “You want to go up the sleeve, kid,” he whispered.

She watched close as he demonstrated, noted the ease of his technique, and watched him stroll out.

He stalled at the alley beside, the memory catching him so sharp he pressed a hand to his stomach. As he walked on he saw a cluster of purple beardtongue sprouting from a tear in the concrete and noticed the violet trumpets, the white throat that called summer.

And then, through the window of the dressmaker, he saw her.

She stood beside her mother, and though she wore a cream shearling bucket hat, he saw the nape of her neck, the pale white of her arms, the pinch of her waist.

He stood mesmerized, not hearing the pass of traffic.

And then she turned.

And he had almost forgotten how Misty Meyer’s smile could slow his world.

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