All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 2

2

He heard the mailman and ran for the door in case there was another letter from the school, but she took the envelope from him and closed her eyes and kissed it. “It’s got a St. Louis postmark.”

A month before, she’d interviewed at the botanical garden while Patch smiled at symmetrical families in the shade of Tower Grove House.

He held his breath till the sag of her shoulders.

Their Monta Clare rental was the kind of temporary already growing roots, the foundations knotting around his mother’s ankles no matter how hard she hacked at them with declarations of women’s lib, or how loud she played Dylan to remind herself that times were changing.

“We take something from every knock,” he said, and screwed up the letter. He scanned the empty shelves in the refrigerator. “Black Bart Roberts took near five hundred ships in his time. But he started out when he was captured himself. A legendary navigator, his captors spotted his potential and let him live. Before long they voted him captain.”

Sometimes she looked at him like he was the sum of her failings. Each night he lifted rusted dumbbells until his skinny arms burned, grinding his childhood away.

She noticed the bruise by his cheekbone as she removed his waistcoat and fixed his pants and licked her palm to smooth his hair down.

“Fighting, Joseph. Try to remember you’re all I’ve got.” She went to move the eye patch but he gripped her wrist and she softened.

“Then it sucks to be you.” He added a smile.

Sometimes he took the album from beneath her bed and mapped the rise and fall of her.

“You need to eat breakfast,” she said, as he pushed the plate down toward her.

“They give us something at school if we forget,” he lied too easy.

“You nervous? My little pirate. No more trouble from here on. No stealing and no fighting. New school, new start, right?”

“Show me a pirate that never got in some kind of trouble.”

“I’m serious, Joseph. I don’t need the school on me. That woman who stopped by, she looked at me like I can’t even care for you.” Ivy cupped his face. “Promise me.”

He could’ve told her he didn’t ever start it. “No more trouble.”

“You walking in with Saint?”

He nodded.

Ivy would go through this with the first responder, and then Chief Nix.

She’d tell them she didn’t notice anyone hanging around. Or see a dark van.

Or anything much beyond the slow wake of Rosewood Avenue.

And later, when it got worse, she’d wonder how much of her son’s life she had missed.

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