Dark Places(23)
He charmed the girls—he called them Baby Doll, Angelface— and even Ben watched him attentively, swooping in and out of interactions like a shark. Runner didn’t exactly engage Ben, but he tried to joke with him a little, be friendly. He’d include Ben as a male, which was good, he’d say things like, “That’s a man’s job,” and give Ben a wink. After the third week, Runner rolled up in his truck with an old fold-out sofa he’d found and suggested he camp out in the garage. It seemed OK. He helped her with dishes and he opened doors for her. He’d let Patty catch him looking at her butt, and then pretend to be embarrassed. They exchanged a smoky kiss one night as she was handing him clean bedsheets, and he’d immediately been on her— hands up her shirt, pressing her against the wall, pulling her head back by her hair. She pushed him off, told him she wasn’t ready, tried to smile. He sulked and shook his head, looking her up and down with pursed lips. When she undressed for bed, she could smell the nicotine from where he’d grabbed her just below the breasts.
He’d stayed another month, leering around, starting jobs and leaving them half done. When she asked him to leave during breakfast one morning, he called her a bitch, threw a glass at her, left juice stains on the ceiling. After he was gone, she discovered he’d stolen sixty bucks, two bottles of booze, and a jewelry box that he’d soon discover had nothing in it. He moved to a decrepit cabin a mile away—smoke came from the chimney at all times, the only form of heat. Sometimes she could hear gunfire in the distance, the sounds of bullets shot straight up in the air.
That would be her last romance with the man who fathered her children. And now, it was time for more reality. Patty tucked her hair, dry and unwieldy, behind her ears and opened the door. Michelle sat on the floor right in front of her, pretending to study the floorboard. She assessed Patty from behind gray-tinted glasses.
“’s Ben in trouble?” she asked. “Why’d he do that? With his hair?”
“Growing pains, I think,” Patty said, and just as Michelle took a deep breath—she always gulped air before she said something, her sentences were tight, fast links of words that just kept coming til she had to breathe again—they heard a car coming up the driveway. The driveway was long, someone would pull onto it and they wouldn’t arrive for another minute. Somehow Patty knew it wasn’t her sister, even though the girls were shrieking Diane! Diane! already, running toward the window to look out. There’d be sad little sighs when it wasn’t Diane after all. Somehow she knew it was Len, her loan officer. Even his driving had a possessive sound to it. Len the Letchy Lender. She’d been wrangling with him since 1981. Runner had left by then, announcing this kind of life wasn’t for him, looking around like it was his place instead of hers, her parents’, her grandparents’.
All he’d done was marry her and ruin it. Poor, disappointed Runner, when his dreams had been so high in the ’70s, when people actually thought they could get rich from farming. (Ha! She snorted out loud, there in her kitchen, at the thought of it, imagine.) She and Runner had taken over the farm from her parents in ’74. It was a big deal, bigger even than her marriage or the birth of her firstborn. Neither of those had thrilled her sweet and quiet parents—Runner stank of trouble even then, but, bless them, they never said a thing against him. When, at age seventeen, she told them that she was knocked up and they were getting married, they just said: Oh. Like that. Which said enough.
Patty had a blurry photograph of the day they took on the farm: her parents, stiff and proud, smiling shyly at the camera, and her and Runner, triumphant grins, bountiful hair, incredibly young, holding champagne. Her parents had never had champagne before, but they drove to town and got a bottle for the occasion. They toasted out of old jelly jars.
It went wrong fast, and Patty couldn’t entirely blame Runner. Back then, everyone thought the value of land would keep skyrocketing—they’re not making any more of it!—and why not buy more, and better, all the time? Plant fencepost to fencepost—it was a rallying cry. Be aggressive, be brave. Runner with his big dreams and no knowledge had marched her down to the bank—he’d worn a tie the color of lime sherbet, thick as a quilt—and hemmed and hawed to get a loan. They ended up with double what they asked for. They shouldn’t have taken it, maybe, but their lender said don’t worry— boom times.
They’re just giving it away! Runner had howled, and all of a sudden they had a new tractor, and a six-row planter when the four-row was fine. Within the year there was a glinting red Krause Dominator and a new John Deere combine. Vern Evelee, with his respectable five hundred acres down the way, made a point of mentioning each new thing he spotted on their property, always with a little twitch in his eyebrow. Runner bought more land and a fishing boat, and when Patty had asked was he sure, was he sure? he’d sulked and barked about how much it hurt that she didn’t believe in him. Then everything went to hell at once, it was like a joke. Carter and the Russian grain embargo (fight the Commies, forget the farmers), interest rates to 18 percent, price of fuel creeping up and then leaping up, banks going bust, countries she barely heard of—Argentina—suddenly competing in the market. Competing with her back in little Kinnakee, Kansas. A few bad years and Runner was done. He never got over Carter—you heard about Carter all the time with him. Runner’d sit with a beer watching the bad news on the TV and he’d see those big, rabbit teeth flash and his eyes would go glassy, he’d get so hateful it seemed like Runner must actually know the guy.