14
Patty stood by her window for a long time, trying to remember if Monk had actually called, or if that had been a dream. She was almost positive she’d fallen asleep in one of the chairs. The time on the wall clock didn’t match her memory. If it was right, then the customer was gone and out the door three hours ago. She was pretty sure it had to be less. Half an hour. That’s how long ago it felt like he’d been there. The clock kept being an asshole and telling her different.
“I’m tired,” she said to the empty room. “I’m blown out and burned down.”
Even her voice was tired. A slur.
Time for a catnap?
Her body needed one, but Patty hated naps. They always left her feeling like she’d been mugged—logy and stupid and usually a bit anxious. Like she hadn’t prepared for a test in school and now the teacher was handing out papers.
The clock on the wall was an ancient retro Marilyn Monroe. It, along with the three barber chairs and some termites, had come with the place. A spike was drilled through the bridge of Marilyn’s nose and crooked black hands kept telling Patty the wrong time. The motor hummed and the second hand ticked.
Had Monk called?
She could have picked up her phone, checked the call log. Or, fuck it, called him back. Didn’t.
Just stood there.
Her tattoo shop was on a corner and both streets seemed empty even though there were a lot of people out. But she wasn’t feeling particularly social. Never had felt less social, in fact. So they were just figures in motion. Not real in any way that seemed to matter.
If her store had been something other than a tattoo studio, then maybe people would do that small-town thing—stopping by to introduce themselves. To say hi. To be neighborly. The exact opposite of how people were in New York.
Not the same as back home in Tuyên Quang, where she’d grown up. In small-town Vietnam everyone was pretty much born knowing everyone else. You never went very far from home. She hadn’t been farther away than ten miles until she was nineteen. After that … well. After that she’d gone to hell. And back, just not all the way back.
After that was the fire and everything that went with it. The big soldier. The other tattoo women. The little girl—what was her name? Patty tried to remember as her thumb went round and round on the back of her hand.
15
Owen Minor stood in the shadows and the rain. That fact that he kept shivering had nothing to do with the cold or wet.
He was so goddamn turned on he couldn’t bear it.
Owen leaned against the alley wall behind Patty’s store, his coat pulled tight around him, head cocked to listen. Blowflies, some as thick as the last joint of a woman’s little finger, crawled all over his face and throat and down into his clothes. His hands deep in his pockets, pushed through the slits he’d made so he could touch himself. As he did now. The wind had been blowing steadily all day and into the evening, but the shivers began as soon as he’d touched her hand. The little Vietnamese woman. That broken doll with all those memories inked onto her skin. And after her, the psychic. He had so many things to play with, so many memories to devour.
First, though, was Patty Cakes. Her. Her. For sure, her.
His hand moved frantically beneath his clothes.
Her memories were wonderful. So deeply awful. So beautiful.
The shivers continued all the way through his orgasm.
Aftershocks of it lingered long after Owen Minor got into his car and drove away.
16
It took Patty a long time to shake it off. Whatever it was. She couldn’t come up with any label for the fuzzy, detached way she was feeling.
Focusing on the town helped, because moving here was part of a personal salvage operation. Raising her sunken hopes from the bottom of the muddy river that was New York.
Pine Deep was nice, but she wasn’t sure it was home. She desperately wanted it to be, because New York had never really been that. Or, maybe, it had been home for a while and stopped. Like a battery running dry. Wherever she lived and worked had to matter to her on a lot of deep, important levels. And so far, Pine Deep seemed to hold that promise. The street where she’d set up shop seemed like it might be the kind of street in the kind of town where Patty felt she could breathe.
Moving here hadn’t been an accident. When she lived in New York, there always seemed to be a reason to come down to Pennsylvania, to Bucks County. It always seemed to be autumn in this part of Bucks County, as if the rest of the year and all the other seasonable changes were nothing more than garments it wore briefly and then discarded. It was an October kind of place, even when the sun was blistering its way through an August sky or snow heaped up on the pumpkins left unharvested in remote fields. October people lived here, and although Patty was born in a place where it was never cold and always green, even during the grayest monsoons, that climate had never defined her. It was always October in her heart.
Bucks County, and particularly towns like New Hope and Pine Deep, felt like they should have been where she was born. Maybe Pine Deep more so because it was a little strange. Darker and less obvious than her town in Vietnam. Beautiful, too. It invited the artist’s touch, drew the artist’s eye. She drove down here at every opportunity. To shop at the organic farms and coast the fringes of happy crowds at the apple festival. To drum up business at the biker rallies and the fringe festivals. To be where there were people who were all alike because none of them was alike. It was the first place where she didn’t feel like she was actively fleeing from somewhere else.
Life in New York had been a lot like washing your hands in acid. You got clean, but there’s such a thing as too clean. Her tattoo parlor there had been a refuge, but Boundary Street was home.
Cold, strange, broken, but home.
The sign in the door was turned to CLOSED, but Patty didn’t notice. She hadn’t done that. Had not seen the customer do it.
She stood and watched the rain.
It was like the downpours back in Tuyên Quang. The kind of rain that looked like a wall. Her mother once said that it was like ten thousand arrows falling, but that was too poetic for Patty. To her it was a wall. Gray and unbreakable.
The kind no one could get through to touch her.
As she had been touched.
She liked the wall of rain.
But this wall, in this town, was translucent and Patty could see lights come on in clubs that opened early and stores that closed late. She turned off her own neon, except for the one right above the door. INK was all it said, in harlot red. The color was named that in the vendor’s catalog, and though Patty tried to explain to the salesman that it was offensive and old-thought bullshit, the man’s eyes glazed and he had no good comeback. She bought the sign anyway. It wasn’t harlot red to her. She was Vietnamese and that color represented happiness, love, and luck.
Putting it up over her door was like a talisman. It was like putting up a cross in vampire country. And it made her happy to know that it was burning bright, night and day, clear weather or storms.
Where was Monk? she wondered. But she still didn’t check her phone. It kept not occurring to her to do that.
She turned away and went through the studio, through the beaded curtain, past the customers’ bathroom and then into her apartment. Her bright-red raincoat and hat were in one of the unemptied boxes and she found them, pulled them on, and went out into the storm.