Only the Rain(3)

Anyway, the last box we carted off to the storage unit was filled with what he always referred to as “your mother’s stuff,” meaning the scrapbooks and photos she collected over the years, her few pieces of inexpensive jewelry and a shoebox full of the valentines and drawings and poems I made for her up until I was maybe eleven or twelve and started to believe only sissies do that kind of stuff, plus a couple of quilts she’d made and three afghans she knitted after her back injury left her more or less unable to walk on her own. Pops said I could take those quilts and afghans if I wanted them, put them to good use, he said, the way I did with his and Gee’s bedroom suite. He kept two afghans for himself, put the one Gee made on his bed at Brookside and the one from my mom on his recliner, and I think he was a little offended when I didn’t take the rest of them.

So as not to hurt his feelings I told him I’d get that box of blankets someday, maybe in the fall when the weather turned cold. Truth is, Cindy didn’t want them; she prefers the thick, fluffy comforters and fleece blankets from the department store, said those old quilts and afghans make her think of the Amish, or like something you’d find in an old folks’ home or a flea market. It was hard enough to get her to take the bedroom suite, but we were going to need Emma’s twin bed for the new baby in a year or so, and we were watching every penny.

I know this makes Cindy sound like a not very nice person, but in fact the opposite is true. We’d got our own place a few months earlier, a three-bedroom ranch in a little development a couple miles out of town, which we were able to buy thanks to the money Pops gave us for the down payment, and Cindy wanted it to be exactly that, our place, not like the HUD double-wide she grew up in, stuffed with hand-me-downs and pillows and knickknacks her mother bought at the Goodwill store.

“Nothing was ever my own,” is how Cindy described it. “Clothes, shoes, toys, whatever. They were always somebody else’s first. The only reason I ended up with anything was because the other person didn’t want it anymore.”

That was something Cindy and me shared, I guess, the feeling that we were sort of like somebody else’s castoffs. I never had a father other than Pops, and though Cindy had a father she often wished she didn’t. Her mother always came over for Christmas and Thanksgiving, even when all we had was that cramped little one-bedroom and only a card table in the kitchen. And Cindy always took her out to get her hair done on her mother’s birthday, but as far as I know Cindy never once invited her father anywhere or even asked how he was doing. Up till the trouble started I’d only ever seen him twice myself, and that was enough for me too, I guess. I wish it had stayed that way.

Anyway, none of this really has anything to do with the rest of the story. Or maybe it has everything to do with it, depending on which theory of life you subscribe to. Personally, I’ve come to believe that theories are of small value when it comes to actually living your life, to making all the hard decisions you have to make and then dealing with the consequences of those decisions.

And there are always consequences, that’s the one truth I know for sure. That’s something you kept telling us, Spence, remember? And reminding us that sometimes the good consequences are as hard to swallow as the bad.

“You just do it,” is how Pops would put it. “You do it and then you live with it.”

Okay, that’s enough for tonight. I got to work in the morning, same as always. Better catch a little shut-eye if I can. Talk to you again soon. I promise to get to the point next time.



The thing I remember about that day all the trouble started was looking out the kitchen window and wondering if I was going to get wet riding my motorcycle to work that morning. Cindy was always good at knowing what I was thinking, and she said, “You want me to get the girls up?”

It wasn’t quite 6:30 yet, which meant dragging the girls out of bed a good hour earlier than usual so she could give me a ride to work. Then she’d have to rush back home, get Dani and Emma fed and dressed for daycare and get herself ready for her teller job at the bank. We’d done it before but I always felt bad asking her to do it. Back when I finally got my job at the rock-crushing plant and we were able to get this house, our plan had been to pick up a secondhand compact for Cindy as soon as we could put a few dollars aside. But then Pops got another ticket for driving too slow, and he said we could probably have his Lumina next June because that was when his license came up for renewal and the odds were ten to one against it being renewed. So that was when Cindy decided that instead of buying a car she wanted us to try for a boy one more time, and after that I would get a vasectomy. It was important to both of us that all our kids were planned and in every way intentional. We both agreed there are already too many people on the planet, and though we understand the math behind zero population growth, it also seemed that since we were both only children, with three grandparents and one mother already gone, and two fathers more or less missing in action, then we maybe deserved a little wiggle room for a third child.

So Cindy read a book about the various tricks we could try in order to increase the chances of having a boy, things like using lemon juice to change the pH of Cindy’s body and so forth. The thing that made the most sense to us was when she read that the boy sperms are faster swimmers than the girl sperms, but the boys die off sooner. The girls are slower swimmers but they have more stamina. So the thing to do was to get the boys as close to their target as possible before they all tired out and died.