shoulder.
“Sam.”
“Yeah?”
She caressed him, dribbling her fingers down the length of his arm.
“What, Pat?”
“It’s important to me.”
“What?”
“Samuel’s visit.”
“I know.”
She paused, the words caught in her throat. She swallowed, straightening them out.
“No, listen.”
Sam rolled back to face her. “What?”
She swallowed again. Lord, how many times had she rehearsed this in her own head? How many ways had she looked at this breach with the child she loved and yet didn’t understand? All she really knew is that she felt incomplete. It had happened as Samuel pulled away from them by degrees out there in Missoula and then extended the distance when he moved to California. Three years ago, the rupture came, and she’d spent the intervening months and years trying to mend the broken ground. She needed help, and only Sam could give it to her.
“Make time for him this visit,” she said. “He’ll be here by noon, he said. Come home for lunch. Will you do that?”
Sam thrashed in the bed to sit up and to face her again. “Good lord, Patricia, I’ve got a to-do list longer than the Missouri River. Send him to me. I’ll put him to work, and we’ll talk then. I could use the help. It’s gonna be hell for me and Omar to get it done alone.”
“Sam, I need you to be gentle with him.”
“Gentle!” The word leapt from him, ready to thrash away at her. She leaned back, aghast, and listened to him strangle on the others trying to get out.
Finally he spoke, softly, as if to compensate for the things he had nearly said.
“He’s not a delicate flower, Patricia, he’s our son. I love him, but I am not going to pretend that I understand him, and I’m not going to let him disrespect us just because he’s . . .” He fumbled about for the closing, and Patricia silently filled in the blank he’d left in a dozen uncharitable ways.
“I’m done,” he said. “I’m wiped out. Let’s talk in the morning.”
He flopped over again, for good, and found the groove into sleep faster than he had any right to. Patricia lay on her back, listening to the rise and fall and blinking into the darkness, her mind scattered to the wind. This funny life, she thought. Sometimes it shows you everything you love and everything you’d leave all in the same moment .
THE MAYOR
Nowhere else did John Swarthbeck feel at home the way he did in the inner room of his Main Street office, a shame because only a few of the six hundred or so people in town had ever visited the temperature-controlled sanctum. Coltrane’s A Love Supreme —on vinyl, the very copy Swarthbeck’s own father had given him back in ’65—made the rounds as he tallied the cases. One hundred four prime bottles of River City Select, his one-of-a-kind, homemade hooch, sat waiting for delivery this weekend into waiting hands. And Swarthbeck would, of course, hold back five bottles for his own use, to bestow upon those friends, old and new, who tickled his fancy over the next couple of days.
Tonight, though, he fondled his usual glass of port as he wound down his business. He lifted it in a toast to the framed-and-mounted centerfold of Jenny McCarthy from the June 1994 Playboy , which hung over the desk. He’d paid 125 clams for that at a brothel in Nevada, and so on price alone it was deserving of a place of honor. It stood, too, as a symbol of class, as Swarthbeck was inclined to define it. These kids today can see any number of vulgarities with a quickie Internet search. Miss McCarthy represented a better era and a more respectful time. It pained him to say that honor and respect were mighty hard to come by these days, and getting harder all the time.
Take that mouthy dame from the newspaper. She’d come sniffing back around, seeking him out after the trip up Telegraph Hill with Sam Kelvig. She said she wanted to let the mayor know that she’d just been messing with him, asking those questions about the bear cub and the
Dan Bigley, Debra McKinney