Then there’s a second knock, even louder, and I get up and go creeping out into the kitchen, thinking I’ll take a quick peek out the pantry door and if I don’t like what I see I’ll make a mad dash to the garage and grab the revolver from my saddlebag. I mean I’m ready to do it. I’ve got two little girls asleep in their tent. I’ll do whatever I have to do.
But a glance out the glass in the pantry door is all I need. It’s Janice standing out there, Cindy’s mother. Donnie’s standing behind Janice and smoking a cigarette, looking fairly pleased with himself, like he sold some schmuck a used car for twice its actual value. Janice is smiling too, but with a lot less conviction than Donnie. She’s wearing way too much makeup, but not enough to hide that sort of dazed and rumpled look she always has. Pops would say she looks like she’s been rode hard and put away wet.
I open the door a crack and say to Donnie, “You want to blow that smoke away from the door?”
Janice turns to him and says, “Put it out, Donnie, okay?” He gives me a big grin, sucks in another lungful, drops the butt down to the cement slab and grinds it out with his foot. Then he turns away from me and blows the smoke out his mouth.
Janice says, “We came to check on the girls, honey. How are my babies doing?”
“They’re sleeping right now,” I tell her. “Did Cindy call you?”
“We thought you could maybe use a hand with the girls.”
It didn’t sound at all like Cindy to ask her mother to come help me out. I’d called her after we left the doctor’s office, told her about the tonsillectomy in our future, but it was a short conversation because she was working behind her teller’s window. About an hour after that I got a text from her that said, You need anything? Dani okay? And I texted back, Everything fine. Going camping in the living room.
And then it hit me. Janice is one of those people who goes to the doctor twice a week or so to get whatever kind of prescription she can wangle. I’m fairly certain she patronizes a couple of different doctors and a couple of different pharmacies. Today was probably her day for the Med Express.
I told her, “We’re good, thanks. I’d rather not disturb their nap.”
“Can’t we come in and take a peek at them? It’s been a long time since Donnie’s even seen them.”
“I bet they’ve grown like weeds,” he said.
I didn’t give him any reaction, didn’t even turn my eyes to him. To Janice I say, “Can I talk to you a minute?” And I hold the door open just enough that she can squeeze inside. The second she’s over the threshold I close the door behind her.
“What’s wrong, honey?” she says.
“Look. Cindy doesn’t want him anywhere near this place. She told me that straight out.”
She clicked her tongue. “I wish I knew what in the world she has against him. He’s her father, for God’s sake.”
I said nothing to that, so she looked up at me and asked, “Why is she so mad at him all the time?”
“You’d know that better than me,” I said.
She scowled and shook her head, as if the whole situation was beyond her comprehension. “He used to be overly critical sometimes, I know. But he’s not that way anymore.”
“I think maybe the problem was bigger than that.”
“There’s nothing else to it,” she said. “She makes things up, is all. She always has.”
“I’ve never known her to make anything up.”
“Well she’s going to have to get used to this situation. He’s going to be around now. He’s part of the family.”
“Janice,” I told her. “Let me put it to you this way. You’re always welcome here. But if he so much as ever sets foot inside this house again, I’m going to punch him in the face.”
That was probably the first time all morning her eyes came all the way open. Then she blinked at me a couple times. I sort of felt bad when she started to tear up, because I’m not usually the kind of guy who says things so bluntly. But then she turned away and jerked open the door and stepped out to him, giving him just enough time to look at me with a hurt and puzzled expression on his face before she took him by the arm and yanked him around.
That evening, my camping buddies and me picked up Cindy at the bank. I could tell by the way she came striding across the parking lot that she was seriously ticked off about something. She glared at me when she climbed in, then turned off the look long enough to smile at the girls in the seat behind us and ask, “My baby girls doing okay?” After she talked to the girls a minute or two, she hit me with that glare again.
“So how was your day?” I asked her as I was pulling out into the traffic.
“I need to stop at the store and get some Jell-O,” she said.
“I think there’s a couple boxes in the cupboard,” I told her.
“You think so or you know so?”
I figured she was either pissed at me for threatening to punch her father, or because she found out that the plant was closing. The first option seemed highly unlikely. She was more likely to be pissed because I didn’t punch him. Which left the second option.
For the rest of the ride home I kept my mouth shut and did what I was told.
Back at the house, she got the girls settled in front of the TV with a couple of pudding cups, then she said to me, “I want to talk to you in the garage.”
I wasn’t even down off the garage steps before she spun around and said, “Did you think I would never find out?”
I froze for a second or two, long enough for a feeling of cold dread to wash over me. Then I said, “Who’d you hear it from?”
“Well apparently everybody in town knows about it except me. Apparently I’m the last person to find out. You know what I heard at least a half-dozen times today? You mean Russell didn’t tell you? I can’t believe Russell never told you about it! Do you know how embarrassing that is?”
You know that sick, gut-punched feeling you get when you let down somebody you love? That’s what I was feeling. “Sweetie,” I told her, “I’m sorry. I wanted to find another job before I told you. I didn’t want you to worry about it.”
“Well I am worried. I’m very worried. We’re going to have another baby in March!”
Because she wasn’t showing yet, it was easy at times to forget she was pregnant. Easy for me, I mean. I doubt I’d ever stop thinking about a baby if there was one inside me.
“How much longer before you’re done?” Cindy asked.
It takes me a while to say it, but I know I have to. “It would have been today. But now it’s tomorrow.”
“Dani needs a tonsillectomy! How are we going to pay for that without insurance? Plus there’s the mortgage, the truck payment, the . . . the . . .”
I grabbed her and pulled her close and told her, “Shhhh, shhhh,” while I stroked her hair. “I’ll find a job, I promise. If I have to I’ll get on with Burger King or Mickey D’s. Those places are always looking for managers.”
“You didn’t go to college to manage a bunch of teenagers,” she said.
“I went to college to get a degree so I could take care of my family. And that’s what I’ll do. However I have to.”
“It’s not the long term I’m worried about,” she said. “You’ll find a job, probably even a better one. But even if it only takes you till Thanksgiving, that’s three months we have to get through on my income alone. We can’t make our payments on that!”
“There’s some stuff of Pops’ I can use,” I told her.
“What stuff?”
“Stuff I stored for him. He says it’s mine anytime I want it. Old coins, silver certificates . . . It’s probably worth a few thousand anyway. Enough to keep our heads above water for a while.”
“Are you sure it’s safe out there?” she said.
“Pops and I are the only ones who know it’s there.”
“Is he still going to give us his car? We could probably sell that for a couple thousand.”
“I’m pretty sure he wants to keep it until th
ey take his license from him.”
Then she started crying again. “We don’t even have any college funds started. We need to have three of them.”
“Ah, baby,” I said, and I pulled her close again, although I needed it as much as she did. “I’ll ask Jake if he knows anybody who might take me on. I’ll get us a paycheck somehow. You know I will.”
She nodded and sniffed a little. “Maybe you’d better get those things out of storage and bring them here. We need to figure out what we have to work with.”
“I will,” I said.
She sniffed again, then patted her hand against my chest a couple of times. “I need to get to work on dinner.”
“Why don’t you let me do it.”
“I need to keep busy.”
“I’ll do some hot dogs on the grill, you make a fruit salad.”
“Dani needs something easy to swallow. Tomato soup okay?”
“With grilled cheese? Sure.”
She nodded and pulled away a couple of inches, but she didn’t let go of me yet. “I didn’t mean to sound angry,” she said. “I mean I was but . . . mostly I’m just scared to death.”
“You don’t have to be,” I told her. “Worse comes to worst, I can always go back in the Army.”
“Oh no you don’t,” she said. “This is our home. You’re not leaving it again and neither are we.”
“All right, boss,” I told her. “I’m here to stay.”
You probably think I’m taking a long time getting around to the important stuff, don’t you? Thing is, every time I sit down here in the middle of the night and start typing, I remember more. And it all seems important to me. Sometimes I even get a little bit lost in remembering. But that’s not really a bad thing, is it?
Anyway, to get back to where I left off last time. That night in bed, I felt a strange tension between Cindy and me. I thought at first it was all coming from me, because there were things I still hadn’t told her and couldn’t figure out whether to or not. And I only felt worse about it when she started touching me, letting me know she wanted to make love. It was the kind of touching she does when she is sad or worried, face-touching I call it, as opposed to the kind when she wants sex and goes straight for the lower hemisphere. The face-touching starts out with nuzzling, and with her fingertips tracing all the contours of my face as if she’s blind and can only see me by touch. It took me a couple of years with her to realize what that kind of touching means, but once I did, I always found it a lot more arousing than her more direct approach, and I would get hard in an instant.
The face-touching meant she wanted me to take charge but in a slow, gentle way, taking my time and giving some close attention to her own face, her lips and ears and neck, light touches and kisses part by part until I would gradually slide down with the lower half of my body hanging off the foot of the bed. These were the only times she liked me to do that to her, which also accounts for why I would typically get hard the moment I saw what kind of night it was going to be.
Usually nights like that were a kind of torture for me, but crazy good at the same time. On those nights she required a lot of slow attention to get where she wanted to be, while all the time I’m like a trigger that’s one millimeter from being tripped. Sometimes I would even have to distract myself to keep my body in check, so I would keep reminding myself, no sudden movements, boy. I couldn’t even touch myself for fear of going off like a firecracker, at least not until I’d feel the ripples start on the inside of her thigh.
That moment was always one of the most arousing things for me. Her hands on the top of my head would tell me to keep doing what I was doing, and then she would grab two fistfuls of hair and pull on me and say “Now baby, now baby,” and I would slide up on top of her and inside her and suddenly both of us would be tumbling like meteors down through the sweetest, deepest darkness we’d ever felt.
It makes me a little uncomfortable to talk about this part of our life, but you were always the only one I could talk about it with, Spence. And it never seemed to make you the least bit uncomfortable then, so I’m sure it doesn’t now either. I only bring it up because of how different it was for us that night after she found out I was losing my job.
I did everything that night I usually do, but it wasn’t getting her anywhere. So after a while she kind of sighed and said, “That’s enough, baby.” And immediately everything in me went flat too. Getting her off is as enjoyable for me as getting myself off, and I always felt guilty if I came and she didn’t. She wanted to take care of me, of course, and she slipped her hand between my legs to get started. But then she pulled back and said, “You too?”
“I guess we’re both too tense tonight,” I told her.
“Just hold me then. Sometimes that’s the best thing anyway.”
So I held her and kept trying to come up with a single good reason to tell her about the money. But the only reason I could find was that we were married and had agreed to always be 100 percent honest with each other. Still, that reason didn’t seem to outweigh the consequences of involving her in the stupid decision I’d made.
In the end I tried to make myself feel a little better by bringing up the other bit of news.
“Did you talk to your mother today?” I asked.
“No. Why?”
“You didn’t call her while you were at work?”
“I haven’t talked to her in three or four days.”
“She came by the house today.”
“She did? When was this?”
“Somewhere around two o’clock, I guess.”
“What did she want?”
“She said she came to see how Dani was doing. Apparently she knew about the sore throat, knew that we were home for the day.”
She pulled away from me and half sat up. “How would she know that?”
“All I can figure is that she talked to Dr. Sherry today.”
“Oh. Yeah, probably. Though there’s that one receptionist who works there . . .”
“Toni? The one with red hair. That’s who was there today.”
“Toni, yeah. I think they used to hang out together. Maybe still do.”
“Okay, then. Mystery solved.”
She laid back down beside me then, but only for a few seconds. “The girls didn’t say a word about seeing her today.”
“They were asleep in the tent.”
“The whole time?”
I blew out a breath. “She brought your father along. I wouldn’t let him into the house. So your mother didn’t stay all that long.”
“Oh God,” she said. “Damn her! Damn damn damn damn damn—”
I rolled up close and held her face against my chest, telling her “Shhh, shhh,” until she quieted down and lay still. But her stillness was as hard as stone, so I kept my arms around her and bundled her up against me.
It was maybe ten minutes or so before the anger drained out of her and she started sobbing. I kept doing what I was doing, which was the only thing I knew to do. And when she stopped sobbing there wasn’t anything left in her but a hoarse and miserable sadness that broke my heart in two.
“Everything is falling apart for us,” she said.
I said, “No it’s not, baby. I will never let that happen.”
“You promise?” she said. “Will you promise me that?”
“I swear to God,” I told her. But there are different ways of swearing, aren’t there, Spence? And I didn’t tell her which one I was using.
Next morning I crawled out of bed with a good idea of how it feels to be a zombie. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep all week. It was another nice day outside, but neither the sunshine nor the bike ride to work chased my cobwebs away, so I pulled in at the convenience store a few minutes from the plant. First thing I did was to gas up, then I left my bike at the pump and went inside and filled the biggest cup available with the blackest coffee available. I knew I’d have to drink at least half of it before attempting to ride to work with the cup tucked into my crotch, so
I’m standing there sipping through the lid hole when I noticed a pretty girl coming through the door. And I guess I did what all guys do when they see a pretty girl, I checked her out.
But only for maybe three seconds total. That’s all I needed. Because even with clothes on, she was impossible to not recognize.
She went straight to the doughnut case and started filling up a box. Suddenly I didn’t need the coffee anymore, so I set it down beside the coffee pots and headed outside without paying. I passed within a foot of her on my way to the door, plenty close enough to see the yellowing bruise under her right eye and to notice the way her hand was shaking as she worked the tongs under a doughnut.
You know that state of being hyperalert you used to talk about? That’s where I was all of a sudden, moving in what felt like slow motion toward the door, keeping myself out of her peripheral vision while seeing every detail of her as I passed. You said there’s a knowledge that comes from being in that state when all the details of observation come together, and that it’s important to trust that flash of knowledge because it’s almost always true. Well, I can tell you without a glimmer of doubt, Spence, that I knew somebody had kicked the shit out of that girl. I knew with an absolute and awful certainty that she had been going through hell ever since that rainy day I first saw her, same as I had, except that hers was a physical hell and mine was a mental one.
More importantly, I knew why.
I’ll tell you the truth, brother. If I’d had the money on me at that particular moment, and if I’d known which vehicle was hers, I would have dumped the money in her front seat and hightailed it out of there while she was still picking out her doughnuts. That might have stopped the dominoes in your catastrophe theory from banging into each other.
But I didn’t have the money with me. And the dominoes didn’t stop falling.
After seeing that girl at the doughnut case, I pulled into work so out of breath and confused I didn’t even notice the SUV until I walked right up to it. I parked my bike behind the office same as always, not far from Jake’s pickup truck, but the SUV didn’t really register on me until I started walking toward the office door. And that’s when it hit me. I turned around and looked straight at the shiny black vehicle and I even said out loud what I was thinking. “The fucking Chinese are here.”
Only the Rain Page 9
