The following fall Patch was as good as his word and threw the doors open to his vast and empty house. Norma took care of the invitations, and near three hundred turned up, including Daisy Creason from The Tribune, who ran a front-page piece, which Patch only allowed because it might somehow find its way to her.
Sammy declared himself the only dignitary worthy of cutting the ribbon, and he stood there in his tux and tails and slurred his way through a speech so rambling people checked their watches and shrugged at one another. He spoke of red tape, bureaucracy, and the cunts at the town planning office. There were tuts, an outright gasp, and the raucous laughter of Charlotte, who drew a scolding from her mother.
Sammy decreed it the Mad House, at which Patch almost broke a smile.
Misty took charge of the catering herself, leading locals to scratch their heads at creamed shrimp vol-au-vents and turkey pizza.
Sammy had decided to hang a couple of paintings, which generated a little buzz and led a handful of single ladies to seek out the artist and ask him if he might get lonely rattling around such a large house on his lonesome.
“Oh boy,” Misty said, linked his arm in hers and took him out through the French doors into the yard where fairy lights had been threaded through hands of ninebark.
They sat on a bench carved from a single piece of oak with a chainsaw Patch had discarded afterward for fear he might one day regain his sanity and begin hacking at the foundations of the Mad House.
“This house,” she said, looking up at the turret.
“What do you see, Mist?”
“A purity of execution. It looks like the painting.”
“Somewhere out there is a house just like this one. And inside it she lived.”
“You think people like my pizza?” she said.
“How could they not?” he said, the couple of slices she’d thrust at him now mulching in the flower beds.
“Half our lives, now,” she said.
Through the grand window they saw Chief Nix talking to Saint and her grandmother.
“Why did you come back, Misty?”
“So Charlotte could have what I had. So my mother could know her. Why did you come back?”
He placed his empty beer bottle on the grass. “It’s too big out there. If you lose someone, you’ll likely find them again if they stay in one place, right. But both of you moving…”
Patch stood.
“There’s something else,” she said.
He turned and from her face he knew that something was not good.
“I’m sick, Patch.”
“Sick?”
He looked at the shape of her, at the colors he knew better than any other. Beneath the moonlight he saw the delicacies that made her, the fine strokes and boldened shades. He saw her in mixes: her skin titanium and singed umber and alizarin; her Prussian eyes; her hair would be lain darks softened with sienna before light layering. In all her blinding glory. She could not be sick. The world would not allow such a tragedy.
“The kind of sick you don’t get better from.”
He took her in his arms and knew he could use each color he owned painting Misty Meyer, and they would still not come close enough.