15.
I’d like to share Misty with you, construct a living Misty before your eyes. A tree house of sentences high in the branches, barely visible from the ground. You need to shimmy up the trunk, squint into the leaves. Ahh, there she is. A sturdy structure, but one that isn’t so finished or vivid that it precludes imagination. I want you to help create her. That way you can visit her anytime, in your own mind.
Envision a short woman, five-four, well-proportioned and trim. She walks barefoot through the house, except in winter when wool socks warm her toes. Her feet are compact, gorgeously curved, arches never touching the floor. “Bright colors are me,” she likes to say, and her wardrobe reflects this: lemon skirts to mid-calf, peach scarves, shirts the color of cartoon skies. She even owns a pair of green panty hose, popular with the teenagers in the late 1970s. Murray says to Misty, “You aren’t a ditz, but you dress like one.”
She pretends not to hear, or in fact doesn’t hear his words but rather the music of his voice. Her bliss is her beauty.
Light brown hair, a self-inflicted haircut, bangs draping her brow while the back and sides rest upon her shoulders. Breasts moderate, unremarkable. Hands long-fingered and thick-knuckled. Low-slung face, not pretty in a chiseled way. Jaw broad and defined, tending toward mannish, but her lips—“supple” is a good word—remove all doubt that this is a woman. She has soft, heated hands, one of those people whose skin radiates warmth in spite of her lack of body fat and in spite of always complaining of being cold (so much that McKenna has to run to the hall closet for a blanket every time Misty watches Dallas ).
But other than her great gift of touch—which isn’t to be downplayed and in fact communicates haystacks of words in the smallest of cheek caresses—Misty is not an emotional person. Her children never see her cry.
They also never see her thirty-seventh birthday.
Toby, a technical adult, is proud to stand with five other men (none of whom are their father) in dark, ashen suits. They carry Misty in her closed coffin up the aisle of St. Monica’s church. They set her on a rack at the foot of the steps leading to the altar. After the service, the men bear the coffin outside, slide it into the hearse. Toby watches the door slam shut. He leans over and whispers to McKenna: “You look like a bag of sticks, Kenny.”
It’s a spectacular April day, with the sun staring through a hole in a bank of clouds amassed in the east, a columnar pattern of clouds, which, if studied closely by a person with an artistic eye, resembles a door. The sun is the knob.