Teague plopped back into a sitting position once the larger twigs took the fire, knowing that the fire would keep for as long as he wanted it to. "Stuff. Lots of stuff. About his life before California, mostly. He well... He told me enough. He and my mother fell in love before they really should have, and things were tough. Money was really tight, so he had to go out of town to work, because there was only the factory and the tiny shops there. He might have even told me that Katherine had a kid before me, but he never really talked about it. I might have just made that up in my mind, you know, to fill in the gaps."
He watched the flames lick up against the actual firewood, and sighed. "I always imagined it to be in black and white, or muted colors, like in the old movies where they only painted over the black and white to make it look colorful, but you could tell it was filmed in black and white. I imagined that they were happy, if young, and made do. I pretended that Kathleen was happy then, that she was rosy cheeked and full of life and vigor that was beyond one could get in a small industrial town. But the more he told me, or didn't tell me, the more black and white it became, the more realistic it was. I'd thought that the kid they had together had gotten sick and died. Because what else would have happened to that kid? I never thought that what had really happened, well..." He rubbed his hand against the wristbands and bangles on his left wrist, sighing. "He never said anything about you. I'd just assumed."