Patchwork by Bobbie Ann Mason

Author:Bobbie Ann Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2018-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

The music from the night before was still playing in Beverly’s head when she got home Sunday afternoon. It was exhilarating, like something she knew well but hadn’t thought of in years. It came soaring up through her with a luxurious clarity. She could still hear the henna-haired waitress saying, “Are you talking about my big hoofs?” Beverly’s dad used to say, “Oh, my aching dogs!” She clicked “Radar Love” into the cassette player and turned the volume up loud. She couldn’t help dancing to its hard frenzy. “Radar Love” made her think of Joe’s Fuzzbuster, which he bought after he got two speeding tickets in one month. One time, he told the children his razor was a Fuzzbuster. Speeding, she whirled joyfully through the hall.

The song was only halfway through when Joe arrived with the kids—unexpectedly early. Kerry ejected the tape. Sports voices hollered out from the TV. Whenever the kids returned from their weekends, they plowed through the place, unloading their belongings and taking inventory of what they had left behind. Tammy immediately flung all her toys out of her toybox, looking for a rag doll she had been worried about. Joe said she had cried about it yesterday.

“How was the dentist?” Beverly asked Shayla.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Shayla, who was dumping dirty clothes on top of the washing machine.

“Forty bucks for one stupid filling,” Joe said.

Joe had such a loud voice that he always came on too strong. Beverly remembered with embarrassment the time he called up Sears and terrorized the poor clerk over a flaw in a sump pump, when it wasn’t the woman’s fault. But now he lowered his voice to a quiet, confidential tone and said to Beverly in the kitchen, “Yesterday at the lake Shayla said she wished you were there with us, and I tried to explain to her how you had to have some time for yourself, how you said you had to have your own space and find yourself—you know, all that crap on TV. She seemed to get a little depressed, and I thought maybe I’d said the wrong thing, but a little later she said she’d been thinking, and she knew what you meant.”

“She’s smart,” Beverly said. Her cheeks were burning. She popped ice cubes out of a tray and began pouring Coke into a glass of ice.

“She gets it honest—she’s got smart parents,” he said with a grin.

Beverly drank the Coke while it was still foaming. Bubbles burst on her nose. “It’s not crap on TV,” she said angrily. “How can you say that?”

He looked hurt. She observed the dimple on his chin, the corresponding kink of his hairline above his ear, the way his hat shaded his eyes and deepened their fire. Even if he lived to be a hundred, Joe would still have those seductive eyes. Kerry wandered into the kitchen, dragging a green dinosaur by a hind foot. “We didn’t have any corny cakes,” he whined. He meant cornflakes.

“Why didn’t

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