All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 64

64

That afternoon Misty Meyer climbed onto the bus with him, and Norma did not smile or nod, just let them take their seat and did not ask for the fare.

They bumped along, their legs pressed together as they watched the greens through the wide windshield, the road rolling past Kentucky bluegrass dried and tan before clapboard houses that clung to brittle shelves of hillside.

“I’ve never been on a bus,” she said. “It’s just a long car, really.”

Norma frowned.

They got off at Branton, and Patch took the posters from his bag and tacked the first to a southern pine utility pole.

The heat climbed as they worked, and when they were done they sat at the bus stop on a bench carved from fluted cedar, their sneakers in the gravel. He plucked a dandelion, ran his fingers over the blowball as she pulled a soda from her bag, drank, and passed it to him. She talked. He learned she collected snow globes. She had no siblings but liked the idea of having someone to pass wisdom to. She had two dogs and thought they were related till she caught them mating.

“They still might be related,” Patch offered.

“We’ll know when the litter is born. Two tails and missing eyes and

stuff.”

He touched his eye patch.

She caught it. “Not implying you were the product of such…”

He scratched his head.

She bit her lower lip.

They rode back in silence, drawing the occasional glance from Norma, and in Monta Clare found their way to the edge of the lake. They lay out till dark fell, and Patch watched the stars edge into the water.

“My father can’t talk about it. And nothing even happened, not really.

He talks about you like you’re a hero and a cancer. You came back taller, and people say you need sunlight to grow,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Plants.”

“You’re kind of pretty, Joseph Patch Macauley. I mean, your eyelashes are too long. Maybe because your body gave them all to the one eye.”

He frowned.

“It’s damn wasteful on a boy.” She quieted for the wave of cicadas.

And then she cried.

When her shoulders gently shook, he moved toward her and before long held her soft hand in his.

“We have this thing between us. This man and this thing. People keep wanting to know how I felt. I was just scared. And I left you there.”

He watched ripples in the stillness. “You had to run. There was no choice at all.”

“When Chuck took me to a movie. When Laurie Beth asked me to go to the salon. I wanted to fucking scream at them because you were out there, this person that kept me with them.”

Patch kept hold of her hand. “The shrink they make me see, she taps her pencil and frowns at me. And she talks about how we construct our ideals out of our own past mistakes. And I wonder what exactly a mistake is. A thing we should not have done, right? But if learning is built on trial and error there can be no mistakes, only rungs on a ladder to someplace better.”

He walked her to town and they stopped across from the Palace 7 where her group waited outside.

“Dustin Hoffman is a doll,” she declared, as she pulled a pocket mirror from her bag and fixed her makeup, working the smears from her cheeks.

He saw Chuck watching them, and Patch imagined their future. It was then he saw himself fully, the smudge on their history, her time spent with him nothing more than penance.

“Are you okay?” he said.

She smoothed her pleated dress, and he thought of her sitting beside Chuck, taking his hand, laughing and gasping as she ate popcorn and the light flickered in her eyes.

She sprayed her wrist with a small bottle of perfume. “This is my Friday night. For a long time yours were spent somewhere so bad I cannot even imagine it. My nights and my days. Every bite of food. Every movie I watched or book I read. Every time I laughed or my mother hugged me.

Everything, Patch. It was stolen from you.”

He watched her turn to cross the street.

Right then Patch wanted to tell her not to waste her time. She hadn’t stolen all that much. He never had anything to begin with.

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