All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 60

60

He found the envelopes in the ice compartment of the freezer.

FINAL DEMAND There were threats of debt collection, legal action, eviction.

That afternoon he called the agency and told them his mother would work again.

That night as his mother lay dead to the world, he pulled on sweatpants and an old T-shirt and ball cap, and in the small garage beside their house he found her supplies and set off toward Main Street with her keys.

He’d tagged along once or twice before because some nights he could not fall asleep before she left the house and he did not want to sit up and hear the chirr of summer crickets or jump each time the trumpet creepers rattled the windowpane.

He started in the law office of Jasper and Coates, knew to use extra polish on the mahogany because his mother bitched that Ezra Coates liked to see the reflection of each bank note as he counted them out. Files littered each surface, spilling muted town secrets. Patch learned that Mitch Evans was suing the Missouri Ladder Company after taking a fall that Patch could only surmise was entirely his own fault, and that Franklin Meyer was involved in an appellate case Patch could not begin to understand.

“We look at others with fucking trivial problems, and we think how long they’d last with a taste of our childhoods.”

He vacuumed the carpet, shined the windows and the brass of each switch and plaque, emptied the trash and wiped piss from around the toilet.

At midnight he moved onto J. Asher Accountancy and stood beneath towering binders stamped with an assortment of company names. He

poured neat bleach down the basin because a note told him it was blocked.

In the small kitchenette he ate a single biscuit from an open tin.

He hooked dust from cornices, brushed out a fireplace in an office bigger than the ground floor of his home. On a desk he picked up a photo frame and looked at the blue-eyed boy and girl. He did not dwell on fair and just as he emptied their father’s ashtray of cigar ends, the plume of ash kicking up because he did not know to mist it first.

Four offices, a craft store, a typewriter shop. It was four in the morning by the time he finally made it to the last stop, his arms burning fiercely.

Monta Clare Fine Art occupied a double fronted stucco building at the head of Main Street.

Through large glass windows he stared at a painting of a Gettysburg battlefield, pressed his face so close his breath fogged the slayed, the smoking guns and frayed flags, a hundred shadows leaned like dominoes on Culp’s Hill.

Patch took a deep breath and pushed the heavy door open into another world. White walls rose to lines of light that dropped stark bright without shadows to dull the heavy gilded frames. He stepped carefully, not wanting to cast an echo as he stopped before a series.

The floor was dark wood, shined deeply, the place so immaculate he could not imagine it would need cleaning for a hundred years.

“You’re the boy that saved the Meyer girl,” Sammy said.

Patch turned.

Sammy leaned on a cane though was not near old enough to need it. His shirt unbuttoned low, his jacket tweed and his feet bare and his hair a mess of curls. Handsome though he carried an air of fallen-from-grace.

His cuffs were turned back to show a thick gold watch. He held a glass, crystal facets catching the light as he sloshed brandy and fixed Patch with something like amusement in his eyes.

Patch looked past him, at a haunting painting, so large it took half the rear wall. Patch imagined the artist using a ladder to reach it. Up close he could not have seen what he was creating.

“The only good thing I ever did,” Patch said.

“There’s still time.”

“Just not for me.”

“People have short memories when you do something good, and long

when you fuck things up,” Sammy said.

“So—”

“So you either keep doing good…”

“Or stop giving a fuck what people think.”

“You don’t use chemicals to clean here,” Sammy said. “You don’t touch any of the pieces. You don’t dust their frames. You don’t breathe within three feet of them.”

Patch glanced to his left, at to the small portrait of a girl no more than ten, her face streaked with surprise or maybe fear, like there was a

difference between the two.

“The Memphis Girl.”

Sammy did not draw his eyes from her. “Addison Lafarge painted her near two hundred years ago. She was to be sold to a merchant and knew this, and in her eyes you can see that she is about to be gutted of her

childhood.”

“It’s—”

“Nothing on this earth more beautiful than sacrifice, kid. You’ll do well not to learn that yourself.”

Patch knew that look, sometimes worried that he now carried it, too.

He worked with more care, traced the baseboards with his cloth and swept imagined dirt and held his breath as he passed the little girl who watched each of his moves. When he was done he sat cross-legged. The floorboards breathed, and he closed his fingers over gaps to starve them.

Behind him was a painting of an old ship wedged on stagnant water.

The memory came back startling.

“Tell me something about pirates,” Grace said.

“In 1701 Sam Thompson captured the Cursed Star. He fitted it with twenty-eight cannons. A couple months later a storm off Cape Cod sank her.

More than a couple hundred years later they found her wreckage. You can go see artifacts in Provincetown. We should do that one day.”

“If I’m still here.”

He sidled close and felt her tears drop hot onto his bare shoulder.

Patch reached up and this time he gently felt through the dark and found

her cheek and her tears.

“I hate it when you cry,” he said.

“You take your hand away, and you paint me smiling then. In the dark we’re always smiling. We’re all the same. We’re all well and happy and

shining.”

“I don’t know how to paint.”

“Art is feeling, nothing more. You know how to feel, Patch.”

In a back room he found a set of pencils and an empty pad and stole both.

When he finally turned the key in his own door he was too tired to sleep and so sat and sketched.

She was fluid and rigid and lay just at the tip of his reach, his fingers bumping along the edge of her.

She was constellations he could not map.

She was beautiful and hateful, thunderclouds and summer rain.

He worked and reworked and discarded and built out, shaded and lightened. They would be the first sketches. He balled them so tight he felt pain in his knuckles as he tossed them into the trash.

The stars vanished as he climbed weary onto the mattress.

His alarm would wake him in one hour for school. He would switch it off and cut, his priorities shifting daily.

He hugged his knees to his chest.

He missed her.

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