Only the Rain(17)

In that same box was his favorite Craftsman wrench set, six heavy wrenches, still gleaming and without a scratch. A small, heavy purse of Gee’s I used to play with all the time, because I liked the feel of it so much. It was made out of tiny metal overlapping plates that shimmered like fish scales. Gee said it had belonged to her own mother, and came from the Roaring Twenties.

Three framed 5 × 7s, one of Pops, one of Gee, and one of my mother, each of them holding me as a baby, all taken on the same day, I guess, seeing as how I was wrapped up in the same blue blanket and had the same goofy smile on my face each time.

Another 5 × 7 that, even as a kid, used to break my heart when I looked at it, and it was impossible not to look at it every day, seeing as how it always sat on top of the television set. It was a picture of Gee when she was only nineteen years old, and on her lap was a chubby little baby boy who looked a lot like a cherub out of a religious painting. This was a photo Gee had taken while Pops was in Asia. It would have been the first look he had of his son. And not long after that it became the only look he’d ever have of him, because the little boy, David Jr., died of pneumonia a few months after the photo was taken.

Back before Mom had me, she asked a friend of hers to use an old photo of Pops in his dress blues, and somehow combine it with the photo of Gee and little Davy. I don’t know if there was such a thing as Photoshop back then or not, but I do know that Gee cherished that photo of the three of them, even though if you got close up the photo of Pops looked like a kind of cutout superimposed behind Gee’s right shoulder. Still, when Pops and Gee took Mom and me in, it was almost like we were a family of five instead of four. Hardly a night passed that Mom didn’t say “Goodnight, Davy,” on her way up the stairs. Later, when she wasn’t able to climb the stairs anymore and slept on a roll-up bed in the dining room, I’d sometimes hear her talking in the middle of the night, and the only thing that kept me from being scared was telling myself she was talking to her brother, Davy.

And there was other stuff in that box too, every piece wrapped in its own sheet of Bubble Wrap, all those worthless, priceless pieces of the past the four of us had shared. I was weak and shaky and teary-eyed from looking at them, even the ones I didn’t remember ever seeing before, and at the same time I felt all dirty and despicable because of those bundles of cash at my feet.

Then my phone beeped in my pocket and nearly shocked me out of my skin. It was a text from the daycare center, reminding me that they closed at six and would I be coming soon? I texted back B there in 10. Then I repacked the box and covered the cut tape with strips of fresh duct tape, one strip over each cut because I knew I would be back to look inside that box again.

Then it was a matter of finding somewhere else to put the money. I started looking at the furniture pushed up against the wall. The secretary and dresser had lots of empty drawers, but how bright would it be to dump the money in there?

I finally settled on the rolltop desk, especially after I found a key in the little drawer underneath the rolltop part. The key was for locking the rolltop down, which was exactly what I did after I’d stuffed each of the six pigeonholes with bundles of cash, then stacked the rest of the bundles in front of the pigeonholes. Afterward I pocketed the key to guarantee that if maybe Pops ever got the idea of locking something of his own in there, he wouldn’t be able to get the top up.

Before leaving I checked and double-checked and triple-checked everything I’d touched, and felt for that key in my pocket at least a half-dozen times, making sure it hadn’t evaporated, I guess. Then I locked up the unit, shook the padlock as hard as I could to make sure it was secure, and climbed back into the truck with nothing in my hands but a smashed-down shoebox.

I backtracked a couple of miles, using those few minutes to calm myself down as much as I could before I picked up the girls. I pulled over a block from the daycare to stuff the shoebox into a trash can, then drove forward and parked again and apologized to Anita, a college girl who had stayed late and was keeping the girls entertained with a game of Chutes and Ladders.

I was still out of breath and nauseated when I pulled into the garage at home and unbuckled Emma from her car seat. Then Dani climbed out and sniffed the air and squealed, “I smell pasgetti!,” and I couldn’t keep it down any longer. I hustled outside around the corner of the garage and hoped the neighbors weren’t watching while I puked into the grass.



Sunday mornings I usually stay in bed with Cindy, snuggling and talking about whatever, until we hear the girls making noise. But that next Sunday wasn’t typical, and I was awake before dawn, even though I’d spent most of the night jerking awake at the slightest sound, some of them probably not even real. I slipped out of bed and dressed and put on a pot of coffee, and while the coffee was dripping into the pot I walked out our street to the intersection, where there’s one of those glass boxes with newspapers in it.

I bought a copy and checked out the entire front page before I got back home. Nothing. Then I laid it out on the counter and drank my coffee and went through the paper from front to back. By the time I got to the last page, the coffee tasted sour going down and even worse in my stomach.

Around here, it’s big news if the police shut down a meth lab. The whole county is basically a bunch of small towns and villages, a lot of two-or three-man police forces whose biggest excitement is breaking up a bar fight or a domestic disturbance. Early last spring a van with fourteen illegals in it was stopped along the interstate that runs through the northern part of the county, and before long that part of the highway looked like a state trooper convention. I swear that if it had happened at night instead of in the afternoon, the glow from all those flashing red and blue lights would have painted the sky like the aurora borealis. It was all anybody could talk about for at least a week.