All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 166

166

That first night they ate pizza that he made himself because he worried there was too much salt in takeout.

“You cook like my mother,” she said and pushed it away.

He fixed her orange juice but did not know to dilute it a little, so she left that too.

“You want a sweet? I could fix banana splits?”

“What the hell is a banana split?”

He peeled a banana and added two scoops of ice cream for her and watched her frown and push it away. “You might want to call it a banana shit.”

He ran a bath for her, then called Sammy because he did not know what

time she went to bed.

“Midnight.”

“Is that not a little late?” he said.

“Eleven-thirty, then. Fuck. What do I know?”

He had picked up a new television.

“You want to watch TV? You have your own television in your bedroom.”

She stood abruptly and went up the stairs.

He waited fifteen minutes then found her in bed, her small body turned

away from him.

“You want me to tell you a story?”

“Stories are for children.”

“You want me to tell it anyway?”

She did not reply.

He told her a story of a mad man who drove the backbone of California, from Lake Tahoe through Mammoth Lakes to the boutade of the Badwater Basin because a lost girl had once told him of tufa towers and a bristlecone pine forest that held the oldest living things on earth. And of a hundred hours on the Alaska Highway, sleeping outside of gas stations, waiting for them to open because the next fill-up was more than a tank away, and because that same girl once told him that the Muncho Lake was the exact same emerald as her eyes.

He took a small wooden chair and placed it outside her door, sat and strained to hear her breathing change.

Patch might have sat there all night had it not been for the knock.

He opened the door to Sammy, who walked through the house and out into the backyard, where lanterns fixed to the double skin of brick, lighting the coping warm.

Patch knew the routine well enough to grab a glass from the kitchen and follow him.

They sat together as Sammy poured from a bottle of Blue Label.

“You’re not joining?”

Patch nodded toward the upstairs window.

“Ah yes, the princess hath arrived.”

“Is there a reason for the Blue Label?”

“New York calls.”

Patch sighed.

“Grace Number One. You don’t want to hear what the offer is? Humor

me.”

“I don’t much care, and you know that.”

“Does it stop now?” Sammy said.

The question hung in the cool evening air.

“I see myself in the girl,” Patch said.

Sammy blew out his cheeks. “So you’ve got some parenting to do.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You once did not know how to paint.”

“You showed me.”

Sammy laughed softly, still disarmingly handsome though the years had added grays. “You must know that isn’t true.”

“But you don’t believe anything is God given.”

“To do that I would have to believe in God.” He lit a cigar, and Patch looked up to make sure Charlotte’s window was closed tight. “Do you ever think of Marty Tooms?”

Patch knew the appeals were running out, the stays, the pleas. Before long the only person who could lead him to her would be gone.

“They got a new governor today,” Sammy said. “His name is Mark Conrad Bracklin. People are tired of walking their dead men. It’ll be a

bloody time under him.”

“Tooms should die for what he did.”

Sammy smoked. “I don’t know where I land on that. It changes depending on how much I’ve had to drink. Will you paint again?”

“No.”

“Well then I won’t ask again.”

That night Patch climbed his stairs and saw the low light from his daughter’s bedroom. She slept deeply, the remote in her hand. He was about to cut off the TV when he saw the news of the young man who took a Mak- 90 into an air force base hospital and opened fire. Four dead and more than twenty injured.

Patch stood there and felt the acute weight of keeping another person alive against such ruthless and random odds.

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