Free The Bright Forever by Lee Martin Page B

ran behind the Mackeys’ house all for another look at the patio, its pavers cut from blue limestone shipped in from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, at least so word had it at Burget’s Sand and Gravel. Along the edge of the patio a fishpond caught the water trickling down over a wall of that blue limestone. The lawn was always freshly mowed and edged, and Patsy Mackey’s rosebushes were glorious in the summer. No one could raise roses like Patsy, and why shouldn’t that be so? Just take a look at her children. Handsome and full of vigor. Everything about the Mackeys—their children, their roses, their patio, their house, the luminaries that lit their driveway during the Holiday Parade of Homes—announced that they were golden.
    Sometimes people stopped their cars and took snapshots. It was that kind of home. They were that kind of family. Nearly nine years had gone by since President Kennedy had been assassinated, long enough for the shock to fade, but not so long to make people forget what it had been like to have a family like the Kennedys, who captivated a country with their charm, their wealth, their good looks. In Tower Hill, that was the Mackeys.
    In the days after Katie disappeared, Pete Wilson, who took care of film developing at Fite Photography, said he couldn’t begin to count the number of rolls that came in with shots of the Mackeys’ house and yard. “It was like we’d all gone away,” he said. “The whole damned town of us, and all that was left was that house.”
    What no one knew was that in the weeks leading up to Katie’s disappearance, Junior Mackey, at moments when there was nothing to keep him on the sunny side—no canasta parties, or basketball games at the high school, or home-staged talent shows featuring Patsy and Katie—found his heart seized and aching. He was the sort of man who, by nature, brooded over his mistakes; often the smallest, most commonplace things set him to sulking: catching his reflection in a window as he passed, hearing an owl calling in the night, or the creak of bedsprings as Katie or Gilley or Patsy turned over in their beds.
    He crossed over then—left the life he thought was his and found himself, poleaxed and weak-kneed, stumbling about in a place where he saw himself, his true self, and he couldn’t, as much as he wanted to, look away.
    It was then that he thought of the moment—all those years ago—when he and Patsy, both of them only eighteen, stood in the alleyway behind the doctor’s office in Indianapolis on a night when snow was dusting their heads, and she turned to him and said, “Gil,” said it like a plea, and he squeezed her hand and told her, “You can do this. Jeez, Patsy. It’s the best thing.”
    That was the moment he now wished he could change. He wished he had said, “All right. Yes, we’ll go home. Yeah, sure. We’ll go home and we’ll get hitched and we’ll have this baby.” If only he’d said that. If only he hadn’t given a hang about what his father would say. His father, who had told him, “You’re going places, Junior. You don’t want to get tied down with a wife and a kid.”
    Junior knocked on the door, three deliberate knocks as the doctor had requested. When the door opened, a smell of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol and fuel oil from a heating stove washed out into the alley. Junior put his hand on the small of Patsy’s back—he could barely bring himself to touch her there now—and pressed until she stepped from the alley and up the back stairway to the doctor’s office, where he asked Junior for the money.
    “Stupid boy,” his father said when Junior told him that Patsy was in trouble. “You think with your head, not from down here.” He grabbed Junior’s crotch and squeezed. “Stupid boy,” he said again. “I’ll only bail you out of a jam like this once. If it happens again, you’ll have to own up to it.” Money, he told Junior, could buy whatever they needed, but above all else it could