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j A Patch of Skin Tenaya Darlington S everal years ago, on the night of the first snow, our neighbor was apprehended for indecent exposure—a young mother, with a baby just a few weeks old. Someone caught her in the park across the road nursing a homeless man with no teeth. The rumor that went around was that someone jogging in the park had come across them on one of the benches. It was dusk, the streetlamps had just come on, and in the glow of the new snow falling , there it was: a patch of skin or maybe her nipple, I’m not sure which. My husband Al, out with the dog, came in and said, “You’re not going to believe this.” He hung his hat in the hall, untethered the dog, the smell of wet wool filling the room. “Dr. Crawford’s wife,” he said, breathlessly, easing his dark feet out of boots, “caught feeding a homeless man by the swing sets.” I was stumped for a second, my hips pressed to the stove where I was making soup stock. It was no secret that a few of us in the neighborhood made occasional food drops in the park—not to temporary vagrants, but to two old women who pushed grocery carts through the park in the summers, one of them in bedroom slippers. They camped on benches for a few days at a time, then disappeared, always together. Docile, child-like, made up like brides, their eyes rarely left the elms where birds built their spring nests. “Breastfeeding,” Al clarified when he saw I didn’t comprehend. He rose up on the balls of his feet, wide-eyed, snowflakes suspended in the fine gray hairs around his ears. He was wiry and excitable. I could almost see the blood pulsing in his temples. “Isn’t her name Sharon?” I asked dryly, tying some parsley together with kitchen twine. “Or is it Shelly?” Al gave a little snort and left the room. I heard him open the drawer where he keeps his pipe, then came the sound of the TV news. In the pot on the stove, I watched the chicken carcass from the night before bob below the surface, its limp bones flapping like a tired swimmer. That same year my father began leaving his house in the middle of the night across town. Calls at 2 a.m. The police found my father in the middle of a field, barefoot, wearing nothing but tattered pajama 172   173 A Patch of Skin bottoms, the bare skin of his chest smudged with dust. Another time, we found him walking down the middle of the highway with his Bible, dressed in a suit, wearing only one shoe. Back in his kitchen, my father let me fix him toast fried in bacon grease. He nibbled the edges, holding onto it with both hands, looking from me to Al and from Al to me, eager as a squirrel. Then for days, he ate nothing. I’d stop by daily with Styrofoam dinner trays full of his favorite things—catfish, slaw, pudding—and find the trays out on his stoop, full of teeth marks from raccoons. Of course I knew her name was Sharon. For a year, I watched her. And even before that, I dreamed her face—her jaw, narrow as a bedroom sandal, and those great big unfocused eyes, like decade-old fruit in a murky jar. She appeared one night, stepping out of Dr. Crawford’s great black car, a blonde ghost carrying armloads of angel-thin belongings. As the lights went on in the upper rooms of Dr. Crawford’s great Colonial house next door, I could see her moving behind the blinds, a shadow that paced long into the night. I knew why she was there. Before her, Dr. Crawford had been married to our good friend Kay. Twenty-one years, two kids in college. Now Kay lived in a duplex with her mother in Rockford, where she called from time to time, a faint voice, to talk about the rain clouds, to ask finally, “What’s she look like? What’s she doing now?” With Kay on the other end of the line, I’d draw back the curtains and watch the girl sunbathe. It was summer. In her bikini, she didn’t look more than seventeen. No one but me could have guessed she was pregnant, except that she slept...

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