Colors Go and Colors Come

Irving Miller, Irv to his friends and Uh oh, here comes Irv to his bowling buddies, didn’t appreciate when people got too close to him. Not emotionally, mind you, but physically. He was a joy to be around, according to his wife, god rest her, but he wasn’t into back slaps or nudges, shoulder rubs or bear hugs. A wink was just fine in his book. At 81, he generally could speak up for himself without anyone giving him too much grief. Age had some benefits, in his humble opinion, although he wasn’t a fan of the creaks in his joints. He wouldn’t have liked how close Nancy Watney was to him at this moment. Not that he’d have disliked her—avid gardener, badminton player, beloved grandmother to six. But she was so close to him he might have smelled her White Shoulders perfume if he’d breathed in.

Mrs. Watney, secretary of her garden club, more than an occasional tippler of a Sloe Gin Fizz, had spent 52 heavenly years with the love of her life, Morton Chaz Watney. Mort had been born in Cleveland, was the captain of the football team. Go Tigers! Graduate of Harvard business school, class of 1966. They’d met at a mixer. He was there with a girlfriend who hadn’t yet known she was a lesbian. People rarely said that word aloud back then. Nancy had been dragged along by a guy who never held the door open for her, who had forgotten her birthday, who already was referring to her as the ol’ ball-and-chain.

She and Mort had hit it off over bright pink spiked punch, ended up in the coat check room under a pile of hand-me-down furs, and never looked back. Although their kids didn’t know that story.

Some things you take to your grave.

The space directly below was currently uninhabited and to the right was the type of scruffy guy neither Irv nor Nancy would generally have had anything to do with, at least socially. He’d come in bearded in a dirty hoodie, nothing but matches and used tissue in his jeans pockets, filthy shoes that didn’t fit him right. Under his nails were remnants of the material you flake off when you’re scratching a lottery ticket but you don’t have any loose change. When you’re scratching a lottery ticket with your ragged nails because you need to win.

He never won.

Miller was due to be picked up shortly. He had family after all. Same for Watney, who was headed in a different direction and a different destination. She might have been kind to the anonymous drifter if he’d asked her for a buck outside the Piggly Wiggly. Her friends would have clutched their purses more tightly and hurried to their Volvos and Jaguars, but Nancy had known poverty as a young person. Her father had gone MIA, step-father had never been able to hold a job for more than a month or two, and the family was constantly moving to avoid creditors. There are some things you don’t talk about at the garden club. Some things you don’t tell your friends as you redo your iced salmon lipstick in the vanity of the steak house. You don’t say that you grew up eating varmints when your neighbor was kind enough to pass you a squirrel. Other than that, there’d been a lot of poke sallet in her diet.

Yes, Nancy was the type who would have handed a folded twenty to the drifter, who did have a name, you know. He’d had a rough go at it, this thing Prince called life. He’d understood cold winters and moving constantly toward Texas or Florida or California in hope for a little warmth. He’d understood how to identify soft touches, and he’d learned the hard way how to sleep both on top of and underneath cardboard.

Maybe Nancy had given him a twenty once, before she’d gotten too sick to drive herself to the grocery store. Before she’d given up her tennis whites for a hospital gown.

The drifter’s name, not that it mattered anymore, had once upon a time been Michael. Before he became invisible to anyone and everyone around him. And once he had known comfort, but that period had been short lived. Irving, occasionally over expensive dinners, would espouse his firm beliefs on the weak-willed nature of junkies and alcoholics, but Irving had been a loved baby and a loved young man and a loved husband.

Michael had known chill and disdain. Although, there had been a woman once. There had been a woman named Veronica, with tattered tights and track marks, who had brought a blanket with her, and they’d spread it out in an empty field, and drunk cheap wine together and made cautious love while the twilight crept in. Two lost and confused souls who found brief solace together. One man’s trash-strewn empty field is another man’s Four Seasons.

He had thought of her occasionally when in the first phase of drunkenness. Or in the late phase. She had left before him. Maybe he’d see her now.

He’d found a book in a dumpster once. A ripped and tattered book of poetry, and for some reason, although he tended to travel light, he’d kept the thin tome to paw through by neon in alleyways. He liked memorizing the words because it gave him something to replace the sounds of hell in his head. The voices.

He liked:

These fresh beauties (we can prove)

Once were virgins sick of love,

Turn’d to flowers. Still in some

Colours go and colours come.

He’d wondered, vaguely, if Robert Herrick had ever done the deed in an empty field.

Nancy had worn white on her wedding day, the purity of it all had been a lie, but nobody caught her at it. Or if there had been any eye rolls, she hadn’t seen them. She’d held peonies. There had been daisies mixed with irises on the tables. Irving had bought his wife a single red rose the first year of their marriage, two for the second, and before she’d died he had added one bloom every year for nearly 60 years.

Michael would have given Roni flowers. But instead they’d blown dandelions to the wind and made wishes that were never answered.

There were only the three of them in the morgue this evening.

The janitor mopped the linoleum one final time, then turned out the lights. But nobody said a word.