Patch was not prepared for the speed at which the cancer ravaged Misty’s body.
In the summer of 1993 he heaved her bed across the room to the large bay window so that she could watch the fall approach before winter swept colors into memory.
He spent his time at the big house on Parade Hill, where he existed mostly in the background of scenes that began their dim. Charlotte curled beside her mother, sometimes reading from her schoolbooks, other times listening to Misty speak of their shared past, how Patch had once stood up to a bully near twice his size.
“Chuck Bradley? Is he the bald guy who works in the Ford dealership?” Charlotte said.
Patch nodded. The same dealership where he took his new F-150 to be serviced.
The television ran a background of an Amtrak train derailment that would claim forty-seven lives and leave more than a hundred injured. Patch stared at the wreckage of the Big Bayou Canot Bridge. The reporter was young and stood before the tragedy in a shock that quavered her words, but in them he heard something so familiar he held transfixed till Charlotte yelled at him to fetch her grandmother as Misty’s fever spiked.
Through the coldest summer and colorless fall, those hard-bitten months chased the promise of a Christmas where he could buy his daughter a proper gift, though by then Misty was in such pain that Patch would take a brooding Charlotte down to the gallery each evening while the nurses came. The damage to Misty’s nerves could be dulled with morphine; the prescient mourning in their daughter could not.
He taught her to paint, locked Sammy out of the small studio and encouraged her to find her center and work out from it. In the locker he found brushes he had not used in near twenty years.
As she washed up, Sammy emerged, looked at the canvas and shook his head. “Fucking awful.”
Charlotte scowled and he flipped her off, almost causing a smile to form on a face so resolutely troubled.
They turned when a woman emerged and walked down the stairs, glanced quickly at Charlotte before leaving.
“Was that my choir teacher?” Charlotte said.
Patch looked to Sammy, who shrugged. “She could certainly hit a high note.”
“Jesus,” Patch said.
“Mentioned him at one point, too,” Sammy said.
“As in Jesus get this old bastard off of me?” Charlotte said.
Sammy turned and both watched his shoulders shake as he tried hard to stifle his laughter.
At the turn of the new year the three sat on Misty’s bed and watched the Monta Clare sky light with fireworks. Charlotte pressed her face to the glass as rockets streaked their paths and fountains glowed from a Main Street display Sammy had agreed to fund during a drunken stupor, to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of Audrey Hepburn, the first lady I blew my load to.
A little after midnight, when the sky cooled and only starlight remained, Patch left mother and daughter sleeping and found Mrs. Meyer on the sweeping terrace.
“Joseph,” she said, and he walked up the stone steps and joined her.
The grounds lit, the same spot he had once sat with Misty’s father all those years before.
“You’re good with her…with both of them.”
“I’m not, but thank you.”
She was so much her daughter, elegant and dignified though altogether iced. Her hair still blond, her skin alabaster, like she deflected the harmful rays with her cold. “Will you stay…after?”
“Yes.”
“But will you really? Will all of you stay, or just the part that belonged to my daughter? I wonder that. I wonder what you can ever be to someone else. Does that seem harsh?”
He shook his head.
“I don’t miss him. Franklin. I know how that sounds, but the way he saw the world, and the way he chose to deal with problems. It’s a Meyer tradition: throw money at it and make it disappear….”
“I was a problem,” Patch said.
“Oh, the biggest,” she said, adding a smile. “He never made me laugh. And I knew, before I met him. I knew love and laughter and how sweet life could be.”
“You still married him.”
She looked at Patch like he was a child, like he did not know how the world kept turning. “Sometimes people reserve so much of themselves. It’s like saving a fine wine for an occasion that never materializes.”
“So just drink it then. On a Tuesday when the sun is shining, or when a storm cloud hovers, just drink it,” he spoke, thinking of Sammy.
“For so long it was just the three of us. Charlotte is everything, she has to be.”
“I know.”
“I’m not sure that you do, but I hope in time that you might.”