Craig Smith - Cold Rain

‘Do you have any idea,’ I asked, ‘what your mother went through those first couple of years after you were born, Lucy?’

Jezebel skittered because she felt Lucy’s body stiffen.

We were walking suddenly on forbidden ground.

‘I can imagine,’ she said carefully.

‘You’re way ahead of me then.’

‘She never told you?’

‘She never told me, and I never asked.’

Lucy considered this for a long time without offering a comment.

‘I don’t know who was more afraid of the truth, Lucy, your mother or me. I guess I was always afraid if I heard about how she got through it, I wouldn’t be able to love her in quite the same way. I think she understood that or started believing it herself. We walked around your mother’s finest moment, the choice to give you life, and ended up turning it into something she thought she should be ashamed of.’

Lucy blinked.

‘What your mother did, coming off the streets and making a life for the two of you, not one girl in a thousand could have accomplished, and I made her think she had to keep it to herself.’

‘I don’t understand why she wants a divorce!’

‘You remember when I told you that silence is the biggest lie of all?’ Lucy nodded. ‘Well, our lies caught up with us, kid.’

I met Robert The Realtor, who wasn’t an entirely offensive character. He and Molly were intimate. I could tell by the way he shook hands with me.

I had imagined something else for Molly and me when I got down to see her, but it wasn’t going to happen. A week into it and I knew the only thing Molly wanted was for me to take off. There were no words to erase our history together, and for a time it seemed there weren’t even words to talk about it. The night before I left we had dinner together in Naples.

Afterwards we walked along the beach. I think in the dark with the wind around us to carry our words off to sea we could finally speak about things that mattered.

She said she was sorry she had put Lucy into the middle of things. She should never have done that. She was the one who had left the farm for a drive with Buddy the night Johnna Masterson disappeared.

‘It was my fault,’ I answered. ‘I should have said something. Instead, I just pretended to believe you both.’

‘When did you know?’

I laughed and looked out at the dark mass of ocean.

‘I knew from the start, Molly. I knew it from the moment Lucy told me she met Buddy at a frat party.

The kid is a terrible liar. It’s one of the things I love about her.’

Molly considered this for a moment. ‘Would it have made any difference if you had said something?’

‘You would have known upfront that whatever happened between you and Buddy doesn’t change how I feel about you.’

Molly walked for a while without speaking, and I thought she might be ready to give me another chance.

When she finally spoke, I knew all my chances were behind me. ‘When I look at you, David, I see that night all over again.’

I wondered if she meant the deaths of Buddy and Roger and Denise or if she was talking about the humiliation of watching herself on Buddy’s homemade video.

‘We beat them, Molly.’

‘We didn’t beat anyone. We survived.’

‘We survived together,’ I said.

‘I need to start over. I don’t want to carry that night with me for the rest of my life.’

At the airport the next morning, Molly and Lucy were there to send me back into the winter. I got a hug from both of them, a daughter’s kiss from Lucy.

Ipicked up work at the Ford dealership in DeKalb a few days later. I told Milt, ‘For a while.’

Then I gave him a wink. ‘And don’t ask me to lie. I won’t do it even if it costs me!’

Milt grinned with his big horse teeth. ‘You‘re giving me shivers!’

‘He was a good man, wasn’t he?’

‘Tubs? Tubs was golden, David. Look at the boys he raised if you don’t believe it.’

‘I never knew that until he saved my life,’ I said.

Milt smiled but he didn’t know what I was talking about. ‘When was that?’

‘The night I got shot.’

Milt tried to put it together, but he couldn’t understand how a man already in the grave could save his son’s life.

Back in the wastelands again, I got my wish and managed to put my name on the wall every month as the number one salesperson, but even stone-cold sober I wasn’t any Tubs Albo.

I kept in touch with Molly by e-mail. It was all business, selling off property a piece at a time, moving the date of dissolution back a couple of different times so we could settle things financially and have the divorce as the last event of our relationship. Lucy kept me informed about the more intimate matters of their life.

Oklahoma had offered her a full scholarship, and she accepted it. Molly sold the house they were living in and was shopping for another catastrophe she could resurrect. Robert bounced out of Molly’s life, and now there was a man named Ted, who was a cabinetmaker.

Fifty-something. Flat ass. Boring.

One day, in early June, I was working a couple in the closing booth when Milt called me out. ‘Got a customer wants a pickup. Won’t deal with anyone but you.’

I pointed at the desk where I had been working.

‘I’ve got buyers here, Milt.’

‘I’ll take the T.O. myself, David, no split. You go take care of the pickup.’

I knew better than to hope for what I was hoping, but I couldn’t help myself. Milt was conning me, and Milt didn’t play games when it came to making money.

There was no way he’d pull me off a close to go talk to some tire kicker about a pickup. So there was only one person it could be.

Two salesmen were keeping Molly company when I walked up. I doubt they were talking trucks.

‘You looking for a pickup?’ I asked.

Molly smiled at me the way she had the day I met her. ‘Might be.’

The salesmen left us, and I walked over to be close, though not daring to touch her. ‘What brings you north, Molly?’

‘I got an offer on the farm a couple of days ago.’

‘A good one?’

She smiled. ‘Good enough.’

I waited.

‘I thought before I took it I’d talk to you about it.’

‘The farm is yours, Molly. You don’t need to talk to me.’

‘That’s the thing. The minute I got the offer I knew we needed to talk. When I sell the farm that’s it. It’s all gone.’

‘I thought that was the point.’

‘So did I.’

‘Well, if you’re asking me my opinion, I’d say the only way to know is for the two of us to drive to the farm and take a look at it.’

She laughed. ‘That’s a long drive just for a look!’

I gave her a sly smile. ‘They’ve got motels between here and there if we get sleepy.’

She grinned prettily at the idea. ‘You can leave? Just like that?’

‘I can do any damn thing I feel like, Molly. I’m fear-less these days.’

‘I knew a guy like that once.’

‘Why’d you let him go?’

‘He got careful. That was part of it. Mostly he knew too much about me.’

‘Hard to forgive a man that, I expect.’

‘We need to talk,’ she said after a moment. ‘About a lot of things.’

I took her hand and held it for a moment to be sure she wanted me as much as I wanted her, and then I said, ‘What do you say we do that on the way home?’