My eyes followed the drifting papers. The sun high in the sky. Dots of white connecting patterns of purple and green.
No. Focus.
The Sentinel couldn’t get caught up in that undercurrent again. I forced myself to pay attention to what was around me, who was around me, not the shapes, the undulations that swirled in enticement, so intriguing I could watch them forever.
Meet their eyes. Tell them you don’t deserve this. No matter what the letter said, what we’d been doing these past five years wasn’t effective. Never mind that the pile of business correspondence under the letter, a haphazard stack of brown, cream, and white, said otherwise. The Raindrop Institute may not have eradicated poverty or stopped collapse, as Dad had wanted, but those pleas awaiting our attention . . . they were evidence of our success.
But I couldn’t ignore what I knew. He’d expected more from me, and I’d let him down and I’d let myself down. And, now that the house was mine, I couldn’t ignore the guilt and disappointment that TRI hadn’t done more.
I had the social clout, and I had the content knowledge to make The Raindrop Institute stand out in the noise of our culture. What I didn’t have was the right vehicle to transport those ideas. Which is why I hadn’t wanted to open the letter, why I didn’t want them to watch me. No matter what the letter said, I didn’t deserve my inheritance.
I also knew I wouldn’t have the courage to reject his gift.
Failure, that feeling I couldn’t put into words, made me tremble for the third time that morning and tears start to my eyes. I put the letter down and rushed from the room.
“Aren’t we going to celebrate?” asked Lynn. “This is great news.”
Mary Beth called after me. “The house is yours. The farm is yours. You’re set for life.”
No, I wasn’t. The keys to the Volvo were at the front door. I grabbed them and opened the front door. I kept moving through the open doorway. They wouldn’t understand.
I’m not sure I did.
“We’re not going to move out, Dart, so Ash can move in,” Classy yelled after me from the open doorway. “You can’t kick us out.”
“And we’re not giving up TRI,” Susan hollered from behind her. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? But we’re not giving up, Dart, and you can’t make us.”
I left them standing in the doorway of the home I’d just inherited and drove away, toward Wilmington and Ash, the man who might explain all of this to me. Maybe Ash would understand the only alternative I had, the one thing I didn’t know how to do, but that my father’s letter had forced me to face.
TWO
ACROSS THE COFFEE TABLE, Ash arched an eyebrow. That gesture translated to an unsaid comment. You messed up.
“My father would have said I hadn’t done enough,” I said.
“Dart, your father’s dead. He’s been dead for five years.”
“I know.” But I didn’t really. I found it easier to look at the beauty of Ash’s landscaped yard, and his neighbor’s impressive landscaped yard and more impressive house—anything to evade the mental image of my father lying in a hospital bed struggling to breathe.
I thought Ash would understand. He wanted me to move in with him, here in Wilmington, where life was civilized with the theater, arts, historic homes . . . and cutting-edge medical services. Spring Haven, one of Wilmington’s more prestigious suburbs, had beautiful homes, I’d give him that, but his view didn’t compare with the one I had at home. The Atlantic stretched beyond my lawn in Southport, and my thoughts could travel everywhere. Here, my ideas flew into trees, tile, brick, and snagged themselves on shingles.
“I haven’t accepted that he’s gone.” I brought my gaze back to Ash. “I know he died five years ago, but I still had to meet his expectations, and that kept him close, all the time, in my mind, my heart. I read that letter and the last link with him vanished. That’s why I ran from the house tonight.” I rubbed my eyes so he wouldn’t see the tears. “My tenants must think I’m crazy, rushing out of the house like that.”
“Not the Raindrops,” Ash said. “What are you going to do now?”
“Grieve, cry, although I did all of that five years ago,” or so I’d thought. “Classy and Susan think I’m an heiress.”
“You are an heiress.”
I shook my head, no. That word didn’t describe me.
My mom’s home place where I lived now gobbled more money than I’d ever have. The Illinois farm ground and the barns, sheds, and fences needed improvements, and the one way I could realize any cash was to sell my portion of the farm, and I couldn’t do that. That farmland didn’t belong to me, even if my name was on the deed. Nor could my brother, who owned the other half of the farm but not the Southport house, afford to buy me out.
I took a sip of the tea Ash thought might calm my nerves. The warm drink, a blend of sencha and matcha, tasted good. “I never thought of kicking the Raindrops out of my house. I owe them everything. How could they believe that I’d leave them without a home?”
And that was the problem. I was going to leave them behind when I revamped TRI, and they wouldn’t be happy. They liked the story they’d crafted of themselves as super heroes fighting against civilization collapse’s impending disaster. Dismantling poverty wasn’t nearly as headline grabbing.
“Dart. . . .” Ash looked exasperated but not angry. “You, not your tenants, gave The Raindrop Institute a national reputation. Now you have the financial means to do anything.” He threw his arms wide. “Anything you want. You don’t need their rent money.”
“I never let them stay for the rent money.” I tossed a pillow on the couch into the opposite arm rest. “They had no other place to go. Every one of them was down on her luck when I took her in. That’s why I let them stay.”
“From their perspective, you needed the money once, now you don’t. You’ve shared that TRI isn’t working. If you don’t need their money and if they aren’t Raindrops, why do you need them?”
His level gaze nailed my indignation down, and I saw over that emotion to the vast horizon of possibilities my father’s bequest had opened for me, and why the Raindrops were afraid. Ash saw freedom. I felt a heavy weight of responsibility.
“Nothing has changed.”
“You’re spending more time with me, and now that you’re an heiress, I’ll never let you go.”
Surely, he was kidding. Wasn’t he?
“We’ll spend more time together, travel to exotic places on Daddy’s cash. I’ll buy you a fur, and you’ll buy me a castle in the Alps because I’ve always wanted one of those.”
“Ash, don’t be dense,” I said.
Then I understood. My eyes must have widened, or maybe my mouth dropped open in the O of surprise people make when they discover the hidden pattern, for he nodded. “They think you’re moving in, or that I’ll move in with you.”
That’s what Classy had shouted at me as I left the house.
Ash grinned. He patted my hand, his fingers warm against my skin. “I’d hoped you would.”
What? Wait.
Ash and I hadn’t been intimate. We were just good friends. I didn’t understand move in with me, but he hadn’t said that, he’d said he hoped I would move in with him. In dismay, I shifted my gaze from Asher’s handsome face to the window, seeking the vast expanse of sky, buying time to think. I pulled my hand from under his.
“That can’t happen.”
His smile disappeared, and he leaned back away from me. “Only because you, Dart, have the belief in your head that I’m still in love with my dead wife.”
“That’s because you are, Asher.”
Jennifer, his wife, had been gone two years now, but she’d been ill for a long time. He was in denial about Jennifer as I had been in denial about my dad. And when he woke up to reality, his pain would be agonizing.
This time I sought the intelligence behind those blue eyes, not the view in the distance. If Jarvis Asher Wright, dean of Stratton College at North Carolina University W
ilmington and my boss, didn’t get confirmation I’d heard him, he’d keep repositioning the idea in our point-counterpoint relationship. We’d discussed this, more than once, including how our path together had come to be. If the faculty hadn’t ganged up on me and appointed me as spokesperson to tell Dean Wright to shape up after his wife died, I wouldn’t be sitting in his house.
We’d had a stormy history. Once upon a time, five short years and eleven months ago, he’d threatened to deny me tenure and promotion. I’d defied him and gone on to achieve both as an associate professor of psychology. Then, he’d done the impossible and supported my promotion to a full professor the following year.
I like to think it was because he knew my worth. More likely, with his wife in the last stages of frontotemporal dementia, he’d caved to the demands of the provost and president, both of whom wanted The Raindrop Institute, which had achieved moderate success by then and showed promise of greatness, to stay at the university.
“You were a mess, my friend.”
“I didn’t like that the faculty thought I needed a sabbatical. I took it out on you.”
“I know.” I sipped more of my now tepid tea just to take a break from the intensity and to consider the opportunity. Ash didn’t talk about that time, those months after Jennifer died when he came to work unshaven, without showering, and stayed later and later until the weekend the janitor caught him sleeping on the office couch at three a.m. and called me.
That he was open to discussing our relationship and that dark time allowed my own frontotemporal lobes to ignite with hope. I juggled data for a living, which was an occupational hazard when I transferred that skill to finding patterns in my personal relationships.
I sighed. What I hadn’t foreseen was that I’d fall in love with my boss. I’d always hoped that love would come my way, despite my wrinkles. I knew the reality because that had a pattern as well. Men saw women like me—older, gray hair among the black waves, wrinkles, an extra pound or twenty, plus an inheritance and a good-paying job—as a purse and a nurse, and if that made me cynical, so be it.
“Have you told your renters about the episodes?”
Episodes, that’s what he called my brain’s sputtering, episodes, and I resented the plural. I’d had two, and that wasn’t twenty or two hundred. Two, just two, in the space of twelve months, and I’d been able to stop the third today when the papers swirled from Classy’s lap. I still saw the abstract art pattern on the floor, and even now my mind found the shifting patterns fascinating, but I’d stopped myself from connecting the dots. I wouldn’t let my brain go there.
That ability, being able to stop the episodes, I reasoned, could make my brain spasms anything, anything at all, like a deficiency in vitamins, minerals—not enough spinach, or broccoli, or turnips. I never have mastered how to eat properly. Even when I was married to Emory and was responsible for all the cooking, we ate out more than we ate in.
Living with the Raindrops wasn’t much better. We’d had hot dogs and chips last night because Classy, who had fixed dinner, knew less about nutrition than I did. Tomorrow night would be better. Mary Beth always prepared a balanced meal. I’d eat double my portion of vegetables.
As for exercise, my fingers got plenty on the keyboard and so did my brain, but not the rest of me. Lately, walking up flights of stairs at work left me winded. That’s why I’d vowed for the rest of this year, I would walk up and down three flights at work at least three times every day.
“There’s nothing wrong with me, Ash.” I wasn’t going to tell him what had happened to me on the ladder this morning. I didn’t want him to fall back into a pattern of caring for someone because that’s what he knew, what made him feel useful and wanted.
“You’re traveling too much, Dart.”
He might have had a point there. I’d presented at two conferences this month, one in San Francisco and the other in Germany. I’d stumbled off a plane yesterday morning. I hadn’t been in any shape to paint the trim. Lack of sleep and jet lag had bungled that opportunity, I could see that now. And in between that trip and the one before, two weeks ago, I’d prepared for my online class; edited my fifth book, which the publishers said would be a best seller; and completed another paper on conscientiousness and how cultivating that personality trait could impact poverty.
I could feel the latent power within that idea. Intriguing. Americans didn’t value conscientiousness. The trait had been lost in get-rich-quick schemes, and the me/my movement. If The Raindrop Institute became the vehicle I knew it could be, if I had the support of the Raindrops, then maybe this odd idea about how to eradicate poverty by changing the culture and making conscientiousness a super meme might have merit. All I had to do was convince my tenants I wasn’t dismissing their contribution to TRI.
I would address their concerns, and we could put all this doubt behind us. Really, I thought they knew me better than to think I’d desert. . . .
“Dart?”
Ash brought my thoughts back to him with another touch to my hand. Touch was the emotional connection that kept me in this relationship. Thankfully, Ash needed touch as much or more than I did.
Funny how all humans craved that sensation, and we were so conscientious about it, hugging others when they needed consoling, or when we wanted to share joy, or when we were overcome with happiness. Touch kept us connected, in tune, aware of ourselves and one another, but that wasn’t the whole truth because touch said you are not alone. Robbie, my nephew, was the only person I knew who didn’t yearn to be touched.
Ash looked at me with concern. “You okay?” he asked, and I filed my observations about Robbie and conscientiousness back into my mental to-do folder. I’d call my nephew and my brother this week to see if they had inherited their portion of the farm, although I couldn’t see why they wouldn’t, and I’d do some more research on how conscientiousness impacted the emotional attributes of poverty, maybe this afternoon while Ash watched football.
“I’m fine, Ash. I shouldn’t have tried to paint the outside trim on the house this weekend. I’m not as young as I used to be. Plus, I’m worried about Ellen.” The cousin I loved like a sister. “She texted me while I was in Germany.” Again, I looked out the window seeking the gray-blue Atlantic that wasn’t there. I couldn’t move here, no matter how many times he asked me. Southport’s ocean view allowed me to breathe and think and create.
“What about your cousin, Ellen?”
“She thinks the cancer has come back. Says Bill will leave her if it has.”
“I didn’t leave Jennifer when she was diagnosed with FTD.”
Now I’d offended him.
Frontotemporal dementia. He never said the name, just the initials, as if that hard, abrupt thunderbolt of consonants explained how the diagnosis had wrecked his life and Jennifer’s. I reached across to hold his hand. “You didn’t nurse Jennifer through twenty years of cancer either. Bill’s out of patience. If this test comes back positive, he’ll call it quits. Ellen says he’s tired of taking care of her.”
Ash started to protest.
I leaned toward him, stopping his words. “Not you. No reflection on you. No one could have cared for Jennifer as well as you did. But Bill’s different. He’s watched Ellen struggle, and he can’t watch her go through this anymore. He’s done.”
“Ellen’s not done.” Ash got up with an abruptness that told me how agitated he had become. “He can’t be done. She needs him. She’s beaten this twice before; she’ll do it again. He’ll regret that decision—if she’s right and that’s what he does. But I don’t think Bill will leave. And if he does, he’ll find himself reminded every day of his life with her. Those memories won’t go away.”
Ash lowered himself back into the chair. “So many little things lie in wait for me. Two years now, that’s how long she’s been gone, and I still come out of the shower expecting to see my suit, shirt, and tie laid out on the bed for me. I didn’t care what I wore, but Jennifer was convinced that if I didn’t look good,
the day wouldn’t go well.”
Moments like these broke my heart. He kept showing me how much he missed his wife.
“Today’s Saturday, and you don’t need to wear a suit to walk the beach.”
He grinned that Asher grin I loved, the one that said he saw me and not Jennifer. “Is that what you have planned for today?”
“I thought we might fit it in around that football game you want to watch.”
“And what are you going to do while I watch football?”
“I’m going to construct a strategy that will convince my Raindrops that they won’t be forgotten when The Raindrop Institute recruits more women.”
“More women? You didn’t tell me about this.”
The man was gone, and my boss had returned.
“I approved the link to TRI’s website on the college’s web page, Dart. You said nothing about changing the structure of The Raindrop Institute when you asked to build TRI’s online presence.”
But I knew how to deal with the boss as well as the man.
“I spent five years driving the wrong distribution vehicle because my father and you pushed me into that decision.” At his wry grimace, I added, “Despite my social credentials and the Raindrops’ content clout, the think tank hasn’t done what I conceptualized it to do. That has to change, or the day will come when I won’t be able to step foot in my own house because of the guilt.”
Dad had left me his achievements, the farm and the house, with one intention, to help me realize my dream, building my think tank to a place of prominence in thought leadership, a touchstone for complex, messy problems. Now, he’d left me without excuses for my failures and a compulsion to make an odd idea reality.
Who tied conscientiousness to the eradication of poverty? No one except for that crazy woman at Stratton College who ran The Raindrop Institute, they’d say, and they would mean me.
Bring the Rain Page 2
