Free The Bright Forever by Lee Martin Page A

Heights, a little girl named Katie Mackey. One night, he took a snatch of hair from her brush.
    “Ray, did he go into that girl’s house?”
    “I believe he’s capable of doing that, Clare. I really do.”
    “He told you all this?”
    “Darlin’, do you think I’d make it up?”
    I didn’t even wonder then how Ray knew all those names for what he claimed Henry Dees was, and when I finally got around to asking, he said, Well, you know, it’s just things you hear. It’s just talk.

         
    Mr. Dees
    W HAT I TOLD Raymond R. was this: I didn’t think of Katie Mackey, or any of my other pupils, with lust. I loved them the way I would have loved my own children, had circumstances allowed me a family. I loved them because I had no one else to love. My parents were both dead. I’d never understood the art of courtship. I wasn’t like the purple martin who could sing his croak song and attract a mate. The only affection I knew came from children. They found me to their liking. I prefer to think there was a kindness to me that they trusted, that made them overlook the fact that I let my hair grow too long, wore crooked glasses, sewed patches on my clothes. My students at the high school took note of such things, and sometimes I overheard a cruel comment or saw a piece of graffiti written on a desk, but the children like Katie were at an age when they could still see beyond a person’s oddities to the real person inside, and there, I believed that I was good-hearted and above reproach. I gave thanks for those children. They were all there was between me and the rage I felt because I was, at heart, a lonely man.
    But then they started to come to me in my dreams, Katie most of all. One night, I dreamed we were on her porch swing and she took my hand. Sweet child. What father hasn’t dreamed like this and woke feeling the joy of his love for his daughter? But when I woke I felt ashamed because, of course, I had no right to this dream.
    I told Raymond R. all this because it had become too much for me—too big, too frightening—and he was the one who had patched the cracks in my porch steps. Work the point in deep, he’d told me. Tamp in that mud. Fill that crack all the way up so the damp won’t get in and set in the cold and cause that concrete to heave open. He’d patched those cracks and now I could barely tell that they had ever been there.
    Sometimes all you can do is tell the truth. That’s what I was thinking when he showed me that fluff of hair in that envelope. I couldn’t have explained this then, but now I suspect that I had started to sense that he carried his own secrets, that he was expert in covering them over, that we were bound together by the dark lives we tried to hide.
    “You came into my house,” I said to him that evening. “I thought you were my friend.”
    “I fixed your glasses, didn’t I?” He folded the envelope and put it in my shirt pocket. “You loan me some money—like I said, a thousand, two if you’ve got it. Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone your secrets about that little girl. Teach, you give me that money, and I’ll be your friend all the way to the sweet by-and-by.”

         
    The Heights
    I T WENT WITHOUT saying in the Heights that Junior and Patsy Mackey were blessed. One look at their house, that Queen Anne with its gingerbread trim and its dramatic roof gables and its bay windows and that marvelous wraparound porch, said it all. Everyone anticipated the Holiday Parade of Homes that took place each Christmas so they could have a peek inside and, if they were lucky, perhaps a word or two with the Mackeys themselves.
    In the meantime, unless someone was lucky enough to be a close family friend, glimpses would have to suffice. Anyone driving past could slow just enough to get a glimpse of the house and the wreath on the front door, which changed according to the seasons. Sometimes a car would turn onto Shasta Drive and then down the alley that