Send Down the Rain(46)

Bobby must have hung up. The sheriff closed the phone. “That’s a new one.” He lifted Allie gently from the back seat of his patrol car and unlocked the handcuffs, freeing her wrists. “How do you know him?”

Allie rubbed her wrists and opened her mouth, but I answered for her. “That’s a longer story than this one.”

He turned his attention to Allie and held the phone aloft. “Can I reach you at this number?”

Allie smiled. “Yes, sir.”

He handed me the phone but spoke while looking at Jake. “If you’ve been married to him ten years, and he did what you’re saying he did . . . I ’magine he deserved a lot more than just a steak knife through the hand.” He walked off shaking his head and talking to himself. “You can’t technically assault someone who’s legally dead.”

Before Allie climbed into my truck, she took a long look around. Taking in the enormity and prosperity of what had been Jake’s life. If she had words, she didn’t speak them. We drove slowly to the cabin. Jake’s sand castle was about to come crumbling down and those kids were about to lose their mom and dad. Allie had already lost a husband. And for what? Just money. Stuff. It was pathetic, and so was Jake Gibson. Prison would teach him that soon enough.

Allie fell asleep in the truck. When we parked at the cabin, she said, “Think I’ll get some sleep.” I got her settled, but when I spread a second blanket across her legs and toes, she said, “All the times he was gone from me, he was here with this family . . . two kids who had no idea. And there I was back home, hurting, thinking what a lousy wife I am. I was never anything to him other than a payday. What kind of man does that? And why me?”

The next morning I woke her with a breakfast of eggs, toast, jelly, hot coffee. She didn’t eat much, but she appreciated the gesture. Hovering over her coffee, she stared into the coals and said, “You think he’ll go to jail?”

“Just as soon as they sew up the hole in his hand.”

She looked out across the mountains. “I thought about driving it through his heart, but then I remembered he didn’t have one.” She leaned against the sofa and wiped her face with both hands. “I didn’t see this coming. And I have no idea what to do now.” She was quiet several minutes. “Does this mean I’m not married?”

“I think it means you never were. At least . . . not to Jake.”

I poured her a hot cup of coffee and sat opposite her. Just being present without feeling the need to talk or try to fix everything. After breakfast she closed her eyes. “You mind if I rest awhile?”


ALLIE SLEPT THE BETTER part of three days. She’d wake, eat, drink something, sit by the fire, then climb back into bed. At night she slept deeply, fourteen hours at a stretch, her eyes rolling behind her eyelids. I recognized, maybe for the first time, how tired she was. Not just sleepy, but bone-and soul-tired. She’d been holding both ends together so long, trying to recover from betrayals and rejections. Treading water while tied to a cement block.

Rosco and I never ventured far from the cabin. When we did, we left the door open so she’d know we were close. On the third day she woke, rubbed her eyes, and found me looking at her. She said, “How long have I been sleeping?”

“Better part of three days.”

“I could sleep a week.”

“I have a request.”

“Okay.”

“Will you let me show you something? It’s a bit of a drive.”

“What is it?”

“It’s better if I show you.”





26

I packed knowing I wouldn’t be back for a while, and the three of us drove out of the mountains. When we reached Atlanta I turned west on I-20, then took Highway 431 north out of Dothan, Alabama toward Abbeville, where we turned west on Highway 10 and south at the flashing light in Clopton. Rosco had sprawled across the center console, slobbering on Allie’s thigh and expressing his incessant need to be literally in the middle of everything all the time. The cup holder next to me held three of Gabby’s crayons. I remembered watching her gently peel the paper back and sharpen each. Below my tachometer I’d taped a small picture she’d drawn of a stick-figure man next to a stick-figure dog. The picture tugged at me.

When the hard road turned to dirt, we drove a mile to a pecan grove and stopped at a red gate. Somebody had stolen the sign. I unlocked the gate, and we pulled through the pines down a dirt road and up onto a small rise to an open field. Standing in the center of the field was a large metal-roofed building with no walls and a fifty-foot ceiling at its apex. Maybe a square block in size. Buildings like this were originally constructed to house outdoor rodeo venues.

Allie’s eyes had grown large as Oreo cookies. The roof protected most every kind of carnival ride known to man: merry-go-round, bumper cars, go-karts. Those rides too tall to fit inside the building surrounded it. She pointed at my carnival ghost town. “This is yours?”

“Kind of a neat place when it’s all lit up at night. Provided you don’t mind bright flashing lights.”

“How long has it been here?”

“Twenty years or more.”

“How long’s it been like this?”

“What, you mean dilapidated?”

She laughed. “Yes.”