“That’s why you dropped out of school,” he said, as they sat side by side on the swings.
“Yes.”
“You could have told Sammy.”
Misty laughed, but it was not cold. “And drag you back to handle a responsibility you were clearly not ready for. Shit, Patch. I wasn’t ready for it. My mother…”
“Does she know?”
“She doesn’t want you around Charlotte.”
He could summon no reply.
Misty took his hand. “I wanted to tell you. But I wanted to know you again first.”
“What’s she like?” he said, daring to ask, like he had a right to.
Misty smiled again; this time it was whole. “She’s…I don’t even know where to begin. She’s tough. Smarter than me. She likes animals. Her favorite place on earth is the Culpepper Zoo. She curses, which makes me laugh and my mother die a little. We don’t even know where she picks up the words. And she…steals things. We don’t know where that comes from either.”
He frowned.
“Candy bars mostly. Sometimes trinkets. I used to sift her pockets and find it all.”
“Outrageous,” he said, keeping his eye low.
“I think it’s just a phase since I haven’t found anything of late.”
He would not tell her to try the girl’s sleeves.
“She’s you, Patch. Sometimes she’s so you I can’t even bear it.”
“Don’t tell her,” he said, sudden and desperate.
She squeezed his hand. “She needs certainty, not a father who drops her each time a letter arrives, or the telephone rings, and then heads halfway across the country, her not knowing when she’ll see him again. She needs roots she can take hold of. Stability.”
“I have no…I’m not anything she can be proud of.”
She went to speak, but he shook his head.
“That’s not anything but the truth, Mist. She’s this perfect thing, with this perfect mother, who is everything. Please don’t tell her.” His breath came short, so he looked to the sky. Right then mammatus clouds sagged like pockets of rainfall, the framing sky detonated like it could no longer hold blue.
Misty called to Charlotte, who came out and stood beside her mother, their heads tilted back, the gardens so beautifully tended, the house painted a new shade of yellow.
Patch knew a storm would come, and for a while they would have to hunker down and ride it out, waiting on a break.