Craig Smith - Cold Rain

When our neighbour had wandered off, Molly glared at me. ‘You drinking again?’

‘Might as well.’

A smile snaked across her face as she brushed a long dark golden lock from her forehead. ‘How was jail?’

‘Comparably speaking, pretty friendly.’

‘Who beat you up, David?’

‘It wasn’t Denise Conway. I’ll tell you that much.’

‘The judge got a phone call from Doc this morning.

In case you’re wondering.’

Doc was Bernard McBride, Molly’s father. Before I had gotten to know him real well, Doc told me about a teaching position that was opening up at the university. They hadn’t even advertised for it yet, but it looked like something I might be interested in. Like the typical Ph. D., freshly minted and hungry for work, I was interested in anything that looked like full-time employment. I made the call to the contact person Doc had provided, and I eventually landed the position. Only later did I realize Doc had put in the fix. Recalling my fury at that particular indignity, Molly was no doubt enjoying this latest bit of favouritism. ‘Judge Hollis and Doc used to play bridge together.’

‘Anything your father can’t fix, Molly?’

‘He can’t fix us.’

‘I didn’t have an affair with Denise Conway or anyone else, Molly. This whole thing, these charges against me… it’s a setup.’

‘You know what? I didn’t want to hear it last night, and I don’t want to hear it today either.’

‘Even if it’s the truth?’

‘You said this would never happen, David. You gave me your word.’

‘It didn’t happen.’

‘How is your face? It looks like it hurts.’

‘It’s killing me. What do you expect?’

‘It’s not half of what you deserve.’

‘I’m going to stay with Walt for a few days,’ I said to her as she walked away.

‘Tell it to someone who gives a damn,’ she answered, never looking back.

I drove away thinking about things through Molly’s perspective. I knew her that well. I knew her pain, the absolute sense of betrayal, and even though it was all a lie, I felt guilty as hell.

When she was fifteen, Molly fell in love with Luke Sloan. Luke was seventeen. She was the daughter of a prominent surgeon, the belle of the debutantes. He was a cowboy, his best days already starting to fade.

Even eighteen years later, Molly didn’t like to talk about the romance. I expect she still cherished that part of the relationship, though she pretended otherwise.

I know this much. Luke Sloan was a handsome kid.

I had seen enough action photographs of him on a horse at the Sloan house to know that. From what I could put together, Luke was a lot like his father, a good decent man, the sort Tubs used to call salt of the earth. The difference was Luke had to make some tough choices when he was seventeen. I had never been given the whole story in one sitting, but I was under the impression that Doc and Olga had forbidden Molly to see Luke. These are the kinds of things families talk about in shorthand and never quite explicate for the benefit of the in-laws. Molly told me one time they knew she was seeing him and pretended not to notice.

Olga says otherwise.

According to Olga, Luke Sloan would have been invisible to a girl like Molly only a couple of years later. That meant of course he hadn’t enough money to satisfy the country club set, nor the kind of ambition that would overcome its prejudices. I had seen his type a hundred times over. Lucy raced against them every weekend. I found myself in grudging agreement with Olga McBride: some men are just too attached to the clay. At fifteen those things are romantic. Of course at fifteen we judge people by a different standard. We see cockiness and think it is confidence. We mistake silence for depth.

Whenever I notice the young Romeos and Juliets of modern-day suburbia cluttering the mall or close against the shadows at a high school game, the kids really in love and not just on a date, I wonder if it was like that for Molly and Luke. It’s hard for me to imagine Molly at fifteen. By the time I met her she was twenty-one. The six years between constituted a lifetime of experience, more for Molly than for most.

She was not a moon-eyed romantic at twenty-one, and I have trouble imagining her without her endearing streak of hard-nosed practicality. The pregnancy, according to Molly, was an accident. She was taking precautions but just forgot her pill one morning.

Sometimes forgetting is a decision, too.

Doc and Olga handled it badly, of course. They pre-empted Molly’s right to choose, telling her they knew what was best. I’ve seen Molly play the same game with Lucy, watched the fireworks afterwards. But never with those stakes. Molly saw her duty to her child, just as Olga did. Neither could understand the stubbornness of the other.

The Sloans went along with the McBrides’ decision.

They told Molly years later they understood from the McBrides Molly wanted an abortion. If they had known she wanted to keep the child they would have done anything to help.

Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s only what they believe now. For Molly and to a lesser extent for Luke, I expect, the parents appeared to stand together. Molly would see a doctor. Afterwards, they would go on with their lives as if nothing had happened.

Molly and Luke took off hitchhiking toward Chicago instead. They thought they could get an apartment and Luke could get a job. In the abstract it didn’t seem improbable. Luke was a big strapping kid, capable of giving a day’s work to anyone. They had a couple of hundred dollars and Doc’s. 22 Magnum for protection, the only thing Molly took when she left, other than the clothes on her back.

They lived together for a week in a cheap motel applying for different jobs, then they managed for a couple of nights without a room as they clung desperately to the last few dollars. Then the rain came. Luke stayed with Molly four days more. They huddled together at night under bridges and close to buildings off the beaten track unable to sleep. By day they walked the streets asking for work and panhandling bits of money. One afternoon Molly looked around to say something and Luke wasn’t there.

Molly knew where he had gone. He’d been trying to talk her back from the moment it was clear the money wasn’t going to last. It wasn’t the end of the world, he said. All they had to do was just go along with her folks. They could keep on seeing each other just like before. It didn’t matter what her parents said, they could be together and it wouldn’t be like this.

This, Luke said, wasn’t going to work.

And their baby? Molly asked. There would be other babies, he said.

Molly called her parents a few weeks after Lucy was born to tell them they had a granddaughter. When they asked if she was coming home Molly told them she was never coming home. Did she want them to tell Luke? She said she didn’t care.

The McBrides told the Sloans they were grandparents, if only to share their grief with someone. Luke’s parents told Molly later Luke was happy about it and only sorry he couldn’t find her and help out. He wanted that more than anything. That was what they said.

The truth was probably something else. A year after Lucy was born Luke drove into a tree. He was drunk.

He had been drunk since he had come back home. It went down as an accident, but everyone except the Sloans knew it wasn’t that. It was the shame of his betrayal finally catching up.

After Molly and I were married I persuaded her to contact Doc and Olga and the Sloans. For Lucy’s sake, I said. Molly already owned three houses and had a good deal of cash in the bank. We had been up to DeKalb a couple of times. If I could put up with Tubs, she could spend the occasional weekend visiting Doc and Olga. She knew from a friend she had called one time that Luke had died. She also knew the Sloans and her own parents had no one else. She wasn’t going to have to face Luke or even an I-told-you-so. She could go home knowing she had done the right thing.