Misty bought a bottle of wine from Green’s, and together they walked up the hill to the edge of the road, sat back on the grass, and looked out high over the light of Monta Clare to the dark of the mountains, lined up like an audience waiting on their encore.
“I know it was a long time ago, but we loved each other, right? I need to know that.”
Above, they watched the showers, the lumps of rock that had traveled a million miles only to die in their world.
“Sure, Mist. We loved each other.”
She shivered and he slipped his arm around her, his finger in the gulley of her ribs.
She asked him about his life. He spoke for a long time. She gasped when he talked of being shot at by a guard in the Merchants National Bank, limping into prison and staring down a twelve-year sentence. How he might not have made it through but for a prison guard who stopped it before it began, a man big in every way. He told her of life imprisoned. Some nights he saw flashlights beaconing the new toward isolation chambers because they’d tried it and failed and would now be watched so they could not try it again. At eight he would leave his cell and see an old man mopping blood spilled from that freshly cut wrist. Into the communal bathroom where forty men washed up, cleaned their teeth, tried not to breathe shit from the toilets.
He told her how he ate oatmeal then worked the penitentiary’s industrial laundry. Eight hours each day; each month tending a million pounds of linen from surrounding hospitals and institutions. He learned the machinery, checked the filter screens and fill hoses, changed frayed belts and blistered brushes, and wiped down gaskets.
The menu changed with the seasons, food nothing more than fuel after a couple of rotations.
And then he talked of Grace. Of those first years when he mourned, when each evening he read the books she had spoken of. From Heathcliff and lost love to Holden Caulfield and his rail against phonies. He would close his eye and drift by the tropical island watching the scraps of Ralph’s savaged ideals. Laugh at Scout and hear Atticus Finch in Grace’s noblest rants.
But it was then, when the lights cut and sleep would not come, that he truly missed her, and Saint, and, of course, Misty.
“Did you paint?” she said.
“I lost my reason to.”
“I’m so sorry she’s gone.”
“I think about it, and I can’t see it. Tooms and her. Thurley State Park…Saint took the dogs there. A team. She drove back each month. I want to go there. And I don’t. I don’t think I’ll find her or nothing, but I need to see it.”
“So let’s go see it then.”