All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 88

88

Patch spent more time at the big house on Parade Hill. One time Misty’s mother took them to the Lakeland Mall. Mother and daughter led him into a department store where they browsed rows of Oxford button-downs, plaid sweaters, and polished dress shoes.

Misty grabbed armfuls, thrust them at the clerk and told Patch they were an early Christmas present. He flat-out refused, Misty close to tears as they left empty-handed, her mother looking on like Patch had failed some kind of test he had never agreed to take. He tried not to see himself as their project, an extension of her mother’s charity work.

—

Spring ’79 and Saint’s grandmother drove her last route. She’d wanted to go on, though the DMV held stringent rules on age and necessity. Norma had bitched them out, then bitched out Patch who rode with her each morning.

She threatened to sue, took a meeting in the law offices of Jasper and Coates, who told her the case had no merit. Norma threatened to sue them as well.

He grew to know everything about Misty Meyer. The way she laughed when he wore a flat cap. The other girls began to notice him, perhaps it was the feted company he kept, the consensus he was now a man in a sea of boys, the eye patch he wore, or the fact that he had once risked his life to save another. Whatever it was, the cocktail proved heady enough for Anna Blythe, Christy Dalton, and Heather Baxter to show their hands, each making their play within days of each other, appearing at the gallery while a

bemused Sammy looked on. Misty dispatched them with a barrage of curse words so profane Patch almost flinched.

“You don’t fuck with a honey badger,” Misty said, as Heather fought back tears and sloped away.

“Pretty sure that makes you the honey,” Sammy whispered to Patch, who carried more than a little fear in his eye.

Some days they took her old red Sting-Ray and rolled the sloping twists toward Pike Creek, the sun cropping a pretty horizon as she sat on the handlebars.

They sunbathed by the lake, where he worked up the courage to remove his eye patch because the cotton frayed and bothered him, only for a breeze to send it into the water. Misty balled up her dress and waded in after it, stood there dripping wet and slipped it back over his head before kissing him.

They spoke of Grace often, but never in the kind of terms that threatened Misty. He knew that Misty wondered in what way she had to compete with a girl so much of ghost.

And after he chased another dying lead and withdrew into the place she couldn’t reach him, he knew that she fretted, though perhaps also drew comfort from his failures. And so the wretched circle was completed.

—

They had their first fight on a frigid May afternoon. She’d bought them tickets to a movie at Palace 7. He’d taken a call from a lady over in Loess Hills who’d seen his poster. He knew deep inside it was nothing, but he’d gone all the same. Misty had worked herself up, that he did not react at all only made her madder. As the bus moved away she chased it down and kicked the side of it so hard her father had to write a check to city transport.

“She’s full of fire,” Patch said.

Sammy raised his glass. “Just like her mother.”

They sat on the balcony, facing Main Street.

Sammy had lost a little weight and credited it to seeing three different women at once. “That last one stopped by, and I’d run clean out of fluids. I had to feign orgasm. And people say I’m a misogynist.”

Patch completed another painting, conjuring images from every word he could recall her speaking.

“So that’s the house?” Sammy said, staring at the painting. The white house beneath soft morning light, loose swirling brushstrokes meeting dapples of unblended color. Yellows of a meadow behind, the beginnings of a rolling hill. The sense of place was staggering, the detail, the fabrication of Grace’s family home.

“I’m showing your paintings,” Sammy said.

“To who?”

“My empty nut sack. Buyers, moron.”

“They’re not for sale.”

Sammy topped off his glass and drank a little more. “Don’t make me remind you what you owe me.”

Patch cleared his throat, his eye anywhere but on Sammy as he spoke.

“You know there’s an art school in St. Louis. I figure if I’m good enough then more people will see the paintings. That’s got to be a good thing, right?”

Sammy waved him off, sending a glug of bourbon down his forearm.

“Fucking art school is the scourge of origination. You might as well take those hundred-dollar brushes and wipe your—”

Patch raised both hands in surrender.

“What about the blonde? She doesn’t mind you working in a pit?”

Sammy said as he calmed.

“She’ll finish school. And then college. And this thing will meet its

end.”

“And until then?”

Patch placed the cold soda to his head and closed his eye. “What the fuck am I doing, Sammy? Pretending to be normal. I’ve got a girl. We go to the movies and grab burgers, and I pretend it’s not a clear waste of my time.

Each second should be devoted to finding her. Instead I’m—”

“You’re pressing pause, kid.”

Patch nodded, though knew a pause by its very definition was a temporary thing.

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