If you stare long enough at something, someone, you will notice how the colors bleed through their veins, shine bright purple against sticky skin stretched over collarbones. Sam Olive pointed that out to me once. Once when we used to run wild down dirt roads thick with pine and race each other home. And I think there was something different about him. He said that no matter how different a person was, their veins always shone like that. His were a little bluer than mine. They were always a little bluer.

And growing up my parents were the focus of a messed-up love story, cut short when he lost it all and watched whatever possibility of something he could have had roll down the mountains of North Carolina. He hated the Blue Ridge.
He was her cashier at a drug store in Memphis and she said that looking back on it, the thing that struck her about him was his hair. She thought it was nice how it fell in front of his eyebrows and she liked the way he smiled at her like he knew something she didn’t. And he liked her enough to know that it would someday be love so he smiled until she blushed. And then a week later they found themselves tangled up in Savannah and a month later she had his grandmother’s ring on her finger. They were somewhere in Alabama by then. May, June, July. My mother told me she doesn't remember the exact month. But she can still feel the damp grass between her toes and see her chipped nail polish on the steering wheel.
And every time they’d lose it all, watch the last of the pressed flowers and cracked vases fall to the asphalt, they would leave. And every time one was foreclosed, they would just move. Memphis rolled through like paper cigarettes and folded c***tail parisols and they left just as they found each other. Because then came Savannah, with the big Victorian home he used to say was bigger than a castle. Mama said it was a decent size. She didn’t lie much. But then she was pregnant and Daddy got in another fight with his fifth boss and so they went to Alabama. Mama liked it there.
She said she liked to feel the air, the air that was twisted with peach cobbler and smelled like dew. She liked it because it was different yet exactly the same. Mama said they were happy with living normally in a clapboard house on Gallman Street, it was seven hundred square feet with a red roof. But my father couldn’t find work. And then we ended up here, in Madisonville, with our torn coats cast over our shoulders and the sky shining red on our necks.
Mama and Daddy had this plan, the kind all of us have by the time we’re eighteen. You've just got to see everything. And they wanted to see everything here. All those small towns tucked away in the Deep South first. Then they said they would go elsewhere. I guess they just wanted to try something different, but not too much. And Daddy always said that sometimes the things you never paid much attention to made a big difference to someone else. But they were both from there, so I don’t know who that someone could have been.
And not just mountains and beaches but everything. My mother wanted to watch a white car slick with pollen and streaked with spring drive through a rough neighborhood and not lock its windows. My father wanted to see a place where Mountain Dew bottles and cigarette cartons did not litter the side of the road, a place where the grass grew up to his waist and water was calmed by a finger to his lips.
By the time they got to Louisiana, Mama was pregnant with my older brother and the money they kept in their shoes was spent. So they found a dilapidated clapboard house with shutters that used to be black for sale on 24 Whitfield Lane. Sam used to say the name was a bit too deceiving. It was much more fitting for a nice suburb up north. He said he could just picture a couple of kids running home from school with their books slung over their shoulders in sacks and their laughter floating down the asphalt streets, becoming tangled with the smell of hamburgers on the grill in someone’s backyard. Like in the commercials.
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When I tell people about Sam, they feel only pity. Sam wanted me to sell those toys my father used to make us. Daddy mowed lawns from time to time and when he did, he found washers and fifty-cent coins and mummified lizards and he’d take them home. Because I remember him poring over all those little things, piecing them together with bits of glue and scotch tape. Looking over them with the light that sat above the kitchen counter. And I can remember Mama kicking her feet under the old wooden bar stool, smiling and laughing at the things my father said.
I thought I loved Sam in junior year. We were the kind of friends who had known each other for a while. Because he lived in a house down on Whitfield and we grew up laughing.
Sam Olive came from France they say. And someone told me once that the “i” in his last name was pronounced with an “e” but his family was confused by all those vowels and fruits and trees and oils that they left behind in France. “Oleve.” But it was just gossip. And that someone was just a girl I knew from science class. But I could just picture little Sam running down those tangles of olive trees, olive skin thick with sweat and freckles. There he was, maybe running down the cobblestone streets and whispering like he had something to say, running free through woods thick with pine and feathers from birds and leaves on the ground. But he was from here, Madisonville, Louisiana and all he knew was oak.
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Sam and I used to race each other to see who could make it home first. And we’d pass by Beverly Lane and duck under the honeysuckle that guarded the opening of the woods. And then we’d run until we reached Whitfield. Sam would go so fast all I ever saw was the rustle of his shirt, the checkered one, at the edge of the woods.
One time when we were racing, we ran into a woman; she was thin and tall with wispy hair that circled around her head like bumblebees and brown eyes as dark as the dirt she walked on.
“What have you stolen?” She looked at our hands and in our pockets, at the tomato that was rolling on the ground, bruised and beaten by winter.
And maybe it was the fact that a kind of malignant rush swirled around those black pupils of hers, or that we had seen her before, maybe in a grocery store, on the streets that made Sam run. Sam Oleve was leaving, he was running and dashing under that honeysuckle and all I could see was the rustle of his shirt, the checkered one. He was leaving.
She smiled. Not the kind that your grandmother gives you when you come to visit, no, the kind that makes you wonder what it is that you could have possibly done to someone.
“Did you really think that you could get away with stealing something? You were running very fast and” my eyes lingered on the place in the woods where he ducked. “Girl,” she yanked my shirt. “Look at the way you’re dressed. You were running. Fast. You can’t get away with these things.”
We stopped racing. It’s funny how these things change after something happens. It’s funny too, because Sam never liked change.
Thinking back on it, I should have just ducked under the honeysuckle and walked home. I would have found Sam with his legs draped and crooked over a fence somewhere on Whitfield, cigarette resting on his lips. He would have told me he didn’t know what else to do and I would have smiled and ducked my head under his arm. I wonder though what he would say when I asked him why he left so fast.
I didn’t ask him these things and I surely didn’t think to laugh and duck once more under the honeysuckle. Watching that shirt slip through the brush. I had to get rid of them for good. “Look at the way you’re dressed.” It’s funny how you never notice things until someone says something.
I walked the long way home, watching the way the sun set in the creases of the dirt I traced my fingers in. My father taught me how to build a fire once. He said that you have to gather sticks when there’s nothing else. And he said something too about how the sun can catch the slightest thing on fire. He used to tell us things like that. And he said something too about rocks called flint and leaves and magnifying glasses and I guess all those things did something important. But he started smoking and so there was always a lighter or matches somewhere tucked into the pockets of his jeans or in the kitchen drawer. And so he stopped teaching me where you could find the best leaves on the best trees and the flint rocks that you could find on the ground in the creases of limbs and branches and under dogwood trees.
And we hated Charlie for leaving and for selling those clothes. But he had nice sweaters he had saved up for. I didn’t have a job, no, not yet. And so I saved a sweater that Charlie gave me and some jeans Mama bought for me once and I threw the rest of them, all the clothes out the back door. And threw the match on top.
And then I let it out, I just wanted to burn them a little. Daddy told me once that burning a wound heals it. It closes that hole up, whatever it is there.
I wonder what would have happened if I let it burn. Daddy never said what would happen if the fire spread. And I can see it too. Racing up the porch faster than Sam, finally faster than Sam. Mother would have cried out, and laughed maybe a bit. Madisonville was nothing to them. Because it just happened to be there, in the middle of nowhere, Whitfield Lane that they were dropped off as hitch hikers, that they decided to stick their thumb in the loops of their jeans. Eighteen years ago, and Mama found out she was pregnant and Daddy realized that there was no more money left, no, not enough to see a place where grass grew up to his waist and water that was calmed by a finger to his lips and he watched the last of it fall fast down the hills. And he just knew he should’ve taken the job selling vegetables in the market, it paid 10 cents more than the drug store in Memphis. He would’ve done that thing he did where he slapped his hands on his legs and laughed loud, louder than the echo that rolled through the hills. And they would’ve left. They would’ve been somewhere in Georgia by now. And maybe this time Daddy wouldn’t lose the money he tucked in his shoes.
And Sam. He would laugh too. And maybe he would have run fast down that road and ended up somewhere in France. And he would jump from Paris to Toulouse and then to Dijon. Sam Olive always ran faster than I. He would have run so fast down that dirt road, laughing and pumping his fists in the air. He wouldn’t even look behind him to see the signs, the fifty miles to Paris, the caution of curvy roads. And maybe he wouldn’t even notice how fast he ran past the one that made Sam Olive, Sam Oleve.