All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 153

153

That night he sat with Sammy on the small balcony above the gallery.

Distant thunder rolled in from the St. Francois Mountains as they waited on the gales that would twist through the state, plucking trucks from the roads, roofs from farmhouses, the families beneath hunkered in their shelters. It would kill ninety, injure a couple of hundred more, and fade only fifty miles from them.

Patch did not dare think of Charlotte as his daughter, because she was only in the way that counted least. He had told Sammy, who opened a bottle of Rhum Clément 1940 to wet the baby’s head.

“She’s seven years old,” Patch said.

“Dalí started at six.”

The first rain fell. They sat unmoving as the heat still clung. Sammy protected his drink with the flat of his hand. “You’re worried.”

“I don’t have a right to worry. To know her. To speak her name.”

Sammy smiled. “How long have I known you?”

“Too long.”

“And I never paid you a compliment. Agreed?”

Patch thought a little, then nodded.

“I won’t start now. But I will say this. The little girl, she’s got a father I’ve watched turn from a boy into a man. And I don’t know many of them.

You already made half your life a search for someone who needed you.

Maybe now is the time to take a little of it back. Not for you, but for what you could give to her.”

“Misty said she needs stability. She needs roots.”

“So you give them to her.”

Patch watched the rain. “I don’t know how.”

Sammy drank. “You do. You’re just afraid to let go.”

“I think of her genes, of Misty’s father and how he looked at me.”

“Franklin Meyer was a cunt, and not the gentleman kind. Franklin’s father was a cunt, too. As kids they were cuntlets. A line of cunts, each one cuntier than the last.”

“I wonder what the collective term for—”

“A cuntet,” Sammy said knowingly.

Patch took a drink and watched the rain. “Grace needs me. More than Charlotte needs me.”

Sammy reached over, placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and let it rest. “Don’t worry too much. I never knew my father, and look, I turned out just fine.”

The next day Patch instructed Sammy to sell half a dozen paintings.

He would put down roots in Monta Clare.

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