All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 168

168

Charlotte did not speak much that first month.

He took her to the small public library, surprised that such a reader had not been before.

“So other people have touched these, maybe even read them on the toilet, and then you just go ahead and take them home?” she said.

His surprise waned.

She watched other kids with their mothers, awkward until he crouched beside her and made selections and ushered her over to the beanbags where she sat straight backed for a half hour, the book closed beside her.

He chose four books, from Louisa May Alcott to Robert Louis Stevenson, remembering Grace’s favorites.

At the Mad House she left them on the kitchen counter, and he took to reading aloud each afternoon. At first she declared him insane, told him to use his inside voice, to shut the fuck up. He continued, bringing Jim Hawkins and Smollett to life, the mutineers and the Hispaniola.

Charlotte would not sit near him; instead he caught her reflection in the window as she curled behind the sofa and listened. The next day he placed the fine woolen rug down in front of the blazing hearth as snowflakes floated outside the window. She lay like a cat, unmoving, eyes closed, trying not to gasp when the murderer, Silver, struck.

She would rise early like he did, and before breakfast they would walk down to the foot of their land in silence where she gathered the ash and he chopped it. They filled a wheelbarrow so big he struggled till she took a side and together they wheeled it back toward the house.

She decided she liked the smell of birchwood better, though it burned quicker and the gum deposits were a wretch to clean.

After breakfast they would walk to Main Street and spend a little time at the gallery, where Sammy would stare at the girl as if she were some kind of bull, flinching each time she aimed her horns in the direction of a painting, insisting she remove her boots before she came in, one time even suggesting she might like to wear white handling gloves after returning from the bathroom. Charlotte dispatched each request with a savagery that left Sammy quietly impressed.

Patch set her up in the studio, lowered the easel and stool, and ignored the glowers as he squeezed a little oil paint onto the board and gave her his first brushes.

“Jesus,” Sammy said, biting a fist before topping up his glass.

“How else will she learn?”

“Fucking Crayola,” Sammy hissed.

Patch had not worked in a year, despite the calls, the endless haranguing from New York dealers desperate to maintain a long distant wave.

They took lunch at Lacey’s Diner, where Charlotte tucked into new delicacies each time. Pork patty breakfast sandwich, home fries, corned beef hash, biscuits with sawmill gravy.

“She has food around her mouth,” Sammy said, a hand to his own at the

horror.

“She’s a kid,” Patch fired back.

“I don’t think I like this,” Charlotte said, looking up from her beef chili.

“And yet you licked the plate clean,” Sammy said, still smarting from his attempt to teach Lacey how to prepare a croque madame. “I think the béchamel is mayonnaise,” he said to no one in particular.

Each afternoon Charlotte would spend time with her grandmother while Patch sat in the yard beneath the cover of an ornate gazebo Misty’s mother had once imagined her daughter marrying beneath.

Sometimes Charlotte would head up to her mother’s old bedroom and nap, leading Patch to question whether she was in fact allowed to stay up until midnight.

Mrs. Meyer would pour them coffee, and they would sit in the grand kitchen, looking out over the snow-topped St. Francois.

“You’re doing well,” she said, quiet.

“She still hates me,” he said, quiet.

“She’s angry. I’m angry.”

“I worry that she doesn’t talk about Misty,” he said.

“Have you tried?”

“She changes the subject. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t want to visit the grave.”

“Time changes our ability to view the things that hurt us.”

“But not the pain.”

“No. Not the pain.”

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