Patty came in the middle, but that's okay.

She must've been 40 or so, and it was 1994, so her old-hippie thing must've been firsthand. Although 40 isn't old now, I know. It kind of was then, though.

She had long brown hair, olive skin, and was of Italian descent but has a Waspy vibe in my memory. Maybe it was from the 1950s when she must've been a child. Anyway, she was the new cook at the Sixth Street Deli, in downtown Rapid City (I mean Rapid), after Amber, the teenage goth vegan cook got pregnant and was offered a job cooking for a family with money that had just moved to the state onto a ranch somewhere east of Rapid.

I'd been in the Black Hills about six months. But we'll get there. It's just that that was long enough to start seeing other people besides yourself brought in by only partially visible strings.

Patty chopped a lot, and her answer was usually to pray about it. Though to me she said the same stuff everyone did (he's an alcoholic, he loves the bottle first, you have to love yourself before you can love someone else, etc). That disappointed me, it couldn't lift anything.

She was in a relationship with a guy who grew organic vegetables somewhere south of Hermosa. It turned out I'd seen him before, he sold produce to the cafe, and had noted him as cute in a restless, middle-aged, sideways-glancing-at-you kind of a way.

She felt a lot for him, but there was a problem. I think maybe he was a widower, or his last girlfriend had died.

She told me about a drive they'd taken to some mud flats when she'd had bad period cramps, about walking around naked and unbraiding her hair and "just bleeding into the mud."

I thought, if I tried that, I would never feel the simple power of it she seemed to. It sounded like the kind of thing I'd try after hearing about it in a magazine. But for me there'd be biting fleas. Or the mud would burn. Something would complicate it.

I hate that.

Anyway, Patty was kind and sensible and now says to pray about it, though I lost track of her soon after.