the image of blood on Syd’s car out of my head and needed to get away from these people-but Patty Swain was sitting in one of the chairs across from my desk. She had one leg up over the arm, her other leg sticking out the other way, in a pose that was pretty provocative even though she was in a pair of jeans.
She’d dropped by nearly every day-if not here, at my house-since Sydney had gone missing.
Patty was the girl who comes home at dawn. The one who has no fear of walking through a bad part of town after having too much to drink. The one who wears skirts that are a bit too high and tops that are a bit too low. The one who has a couple of condoms in her purse. The one who curses like a sailor.
She worried me, but her independent streak was hard not to admire.
Syd met Patty last year at summer school. Sydney had failed math and had to spend four weeks making up the credits, squeezing in her dealership job around the classes. The thing was, Sydney had no trouble doing calculations in her head when it mattered. If you’d promised her five dollars an hour to clean up the garage and she’d spent six hours and forty-five minutes at it, she’d be able to tell you to the penny how much you owed her without the aid of a calculator. But no matter how good you may be with figures, if you don’t do the homework and don’t study for the tests, well, you end up at summer school.
A couple of days into her summer classes, Patty appeared. They ended up sitting together, and found they had more in common than their contempt for a system that would have them sitting in a classroom when everyone else was outside catching some rays.
Music, movies-they both had a closet love for Disney flicks from their childhood-boys, junk food. Everything seemed to click, with the possible exception of their backgrounds.
Sure, Syd was now from what she liked to call “a broken home,” but if ours was broken, Patty’s had been hit with a cruise missile. She didn’t have what you’d call a strong support system, from what I’d heard. Her mother, according to Syd, was pretty much an alcoholic. She had a hard enough time getting through the day herself, let alone monitoring Patty’s behavior. Her father, if I remembered right, worked in a liquor store, for now, but didn’t tend to keep jobs for long. Despite his sketchy financial situation, he still found different women happy to take him into their homes for varying periods of time. Sydney said Patty had told her he’d walked out on them when Patty was little. But he’d occasionally drift back into their lives for a few days or weeks, until her mother got tired of having him in her bed and kicked him out.
“I’m sort of glad,” Syd had said to me, “that when you and Mom split up, that was it. This getting back together and then breaking up, over and over, that would drive me crazy. You’d get your hopes up, and then everything would go to shit again.”
Evidently, it hadn’t always been that way with Patty’s parents. They’d started out living the American dream. Good jobs, a house with a rec room, a station wagon in the driveway, a week in Florida every year, a day at Disney World. But then Patty’s dad lost his job at Sikorsky after it was found he’d been stealing tools, and life was a never-ending downward spiral after that. He left Patty and her mother to fend for themselves when Patty was just a toddler. The mother started drinking. Patty learned early to look after herself.
Susanne and I-separately and together-offered Syd plenty of words of caution. This girl’s had a lot of tough breaks, we get that, but don’t let her lead you down the wrong path. Don’t let her get you into trouble.
Syd assured us we had nothing to worry about. And she insisted that despite Patty’s somewhat wayward behavior, she was a good kid, and a good friend. “She’s like this soul mate I’ve always been waiting for,” Syd told me once. “We say things at the same time. We finish off each other’s sentences. All I have to do is look at her and she cracks up. I’ll be thinking about her, and right then, swear to God, my cell will ring and it’s her.”
When Syd was staying at my house, Patty seemed to be there more than half the time. And when Syd was at her mother’s, Patty was often hanging out there. (I didn’t know whether this was true now that Susanne and Syd had moved in with Bob.) Patty, for all her hard knocks and cynicisms, devolved into a little girl when it came to making a batch of chocolate chip cookies. It seemed Syd had a moderating effect on Patty, rather than Patty having a negative influence on Syd.
“I like it here,” I heard her tell Syd when they were at my house. “No one’s screaming at each other or falling over pissed.”
My heart went out to her.
Despite her apparent recklessness, Patty had an instinct for survival. No rose-colored glasses for her. She saw the world for what it was. A cruel place where you couldn’t count on anyone but yourself. That was one reason I liked her and, at some level, admired her. She’d been dealt a bad hand, and was trying to play it as best she could.
I hadn’t seen her stroll in this time, but she usually turned heads when she came to visit, breasts bobbing and hips swaying as she wound her way through the roomful of Hondas. Patty knew what she had and didn’t mind using it to effect. Today, in addition to the low-cut jeans with rips at the knees and thighs, she was wearing a dark blue tee that didn’t come down far enough to hide her pierced navel, but did come down low enough to offer a tease of a lacy black bra. Her hair was dirty blonde with a few narrow pink streaks going through it, and she seemed to be without makeup except for some very bright red lipstick.
As I sat down in my chair she said, “Hey, Mr. B. You look like shit. You okay?”
I nodded. “Hi, Patty.”
“What’s going on? You look kind of pasty.”
“Just… nothing.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, it does.”
She wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”
“Manure,” I said.
Then, another greeting: “Hey, Mr. Blake.” I looked around, didn’t immediately see anyone.
“Jeff tagged along,” Patty said. “He’s over there.”
She pointed to an Accord. Patty’s friend Jeff Bluestein was sitting behind the wheel, touching the buttons on the dash, fiddling with knobs. Whenever he came by, he found a car to sit in and stayed there.
“Hey, Jeff,” I said, offering half a wave.
He smiled and waved back. Through the windshield he said, “Website still working okay?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Lots of hits?”
“A few.”
Jeff went back to looking at the dash. In the meantime, Patty had been taking in the showroom, looking at the posters for various models. “You think I could get a job here?” she asked.
“Doing?”
“Selling cars,” she said, the “duh” left unsaid. “I don’t know how to fix them or anything, so about the only thing I could do is sell them.”
I didn’t think it was her intention to suggest that if you were without any skills, this was about the only job left for you.
I said, “So you’re into cars now.”
Patty shrugged. “I guess not. And I guess I’d have to get a bit of a makeover. The whole crack-whore thing I’ve got going on might put off Mr. and Mrs. Upstanding when they come in for a minivan to take their tiny Republicans to the mall.”
“It might,” I said. Patty usually had a job, but it was rarely the same one she’d had a couple of months ago. She’d worked a lot of retail, usually in trendy clothing outlets frequented by similarly dressed clientele. Only six months ago, she’d been working at a sports footwear store in Stratford. Now she had something in an accessories shop where she sold cheap jewelry, hair bands, and scarves.
“Can I tell you something, honestly?” She was moving her jaw around, like she was chewing gum, but there was no gum.
“I’d expect nothing less, Patty.”
