Only the Rain(28)

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 they 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.