Only the Rain(43)

“Good,” I told her. “Real good. He said I’d hear from him sometime next week.”

The thing is, I’d already heard from the guy who interviewed me. He took a long look at my résumé and said, “You know, Russell, I like to hire our vets whenever I can. Male and female. The thing about you is, with this college degree, you’re always going to be looking for something better. And you should have something better. So if I do what I want and hire you now, a month or so down the road, I’m going to have to fill the same position again.”

Which leaves me where, Spence? Getting screwed by the elephant, that’s where.



That first day back from the hospital, Cindy wanted me to spend the entire day on the couch, nursing my wounds like some kind of invalid. But I couldn’t sit still, no matter how much my body was hurting, not even with a couple of sweet little girls crawling into my lap every ten minutes. The more love they poured over me, the more I ached to set things right. But every possible correction I could think of felt less like a correction and more like trying to cancel out a negative with another negative.

That’s supposed to work in math, but I never could understand the logic behind it. Mostly all I had to know at the crushing plant was simple arithmetic. A hundred and twenty tons of this material and four hundred tons of that. Add them together and that’s how much inventory we had in the yard. Subtract it from the number of tons on the purchase order, and we either had enough inventory or needed to order more. But there was no way sixty negative tons times a hundred negative tons was ever going to produce six thousand tons of anything. It doesn’t work that way in real life. It can’t. All you’re going to end up with is a lot more of a bad thing.

All I knew for certain was that sitting around watching cartoons with my girls made me feel like a horde of ants was crawling through my veins. So when Cindy wasn’t looking, I slipped out into the garage.

My bike, which was still in the bed of the pickup, was banged up pretty good. The crankcase was dripping oil onto the truck bed, the handlebars were twisted out of alignment, and the front fender was bent up against the tire. The whole left side was caked with dirt and covered with scratches.

I put up the garage door and was pulling out the ramp when I felt Cindy standing there watching me. “And what do you think you’re doing?” she said.

“Trying not to go crazy from sitting still all the time.”

“Well you’re not ever going to ride that thing again.”

“You going to drive me to Lowe’s every day? Pick me up every night?”

It was the closest thing we’d ever had to a fight, Spence. I hated myself for the way I sounded.

Finally she said, “Well you can’t unload it by yourself.”

“I’ve done it dozens of times before.”

“Not with bruised ribs you haven’t. Where do you want me, top or bottom?”

How do you deal with a woman like that, brother? How do you do anything but love a woman like that? I honestly had tears in my eyes just looking at her.

“Stand down there and steady it for me.” I said. “The tricky part is when I have to jump down without letting go of it.”

I felt like my ribs were being pulled out of my side, but we finally eased the bike down and got it parked in the driveway. It hurt like hell holding in all my moans and groans the whole time.

“Thanks, babe,” I told her.

She came up to me then and threw her arms around me and pressed herself up against me. “You’re a damn fool,” she said. “I hope you realize that.”

“Time and time again,” I told her.

It took some doing, but an hour or so later I had the crankcase sealed up tight again, the handlebars straightened, and the fender pulled away from the tire. Cindy and the girls came out into the garage when I fired up the engine so I could listen to the idle.

Cindy had to raise her voice to be heard over the growling pipes. “You’re not planning to ride that today, I hope.”

“You know what they say about falling off a horse.”

“And you’re a horse’s ass,” she said.

Dani gasped and said, “Mommy, you swore!” and Emma held to Cindy’s leg and giggled.

I told her, “That’s already been established.”

Then I swung a leg over the seat and eased myself down. “I need a little shakedown cruise, babe. That’s all. I need to take it through the gears a couple of times. Make sure I didn’t knock something out of place.”

She reached out then and put both hands on Dani’s shoulders. “You see this?” she asked me.

I said, “I do.”

Then she did the same with Emma. “You see this?”

“I do.”

And she put a hand on her own belly. “You see this?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then put your helmet on and make sure you’re back here in time for supper.”

And I was too. In fact I was a few minutes early. I didn’t waste any time out at Pops’ storage unit. I came back with five thousand dollars in cash, which I would use on Monday to pay off my hospital bill. I also came back with a couple of boxes of .22 longs for Pops’ old revolver. My plans for them weren’t yet specific.



Come Monday morning, Cindy headed off with Dani. She left ten minutes early so she could have “a few choice words” with the vice principal, she said. Cindy is usually a very low-key girl, always the quiet one in a crowd, but I didn’t envy anybody who got in between her and her little ones. That vice principal, and anybody else within spitting range, was in for a good tongue-lashing.