Wrapped in Rain(38)

I kept my eyes on my work and smiled. "I can understand that."

"What?"

"Yeah, last time I saw you with your shirt off, you were flat as me. Bird-chested too."

She slapped me on the arm. "Tucker!" The bantering felt good. So did the laughter.

"I'm kidding." I held out my hand and backed up. "Uncle. I yield." We let the dust settle, and my curiosity got the better of me. "How'd you know?"

"Trevor's a camera buff himself. He's no good, but he likes to think he is. Our mailbox is full of his photography subscriptions. It would've been hard for me to miss Tucker Rain's career." She looked at me out the side of her eyes. "I like the name."

I nodded without looking up from my work. "It's a good name."

"I also like your work." She paused, looking for the words. "Especially when it comes to faces. Somehow, you can capture emotion and the moment all in the space of someone's face."

I nodded, thinking back through seven years of furiously chasing one picture after another. "Sometimes. But most times, I'm just wasting film."

"I doubt it." She stepped closer, eyeing the camera again in my hands and obviously growing more comfortable with me. "Anyway, after two years, too many working dinners and late nights he wouldn't explain, he began losing his clients' money and his waistline and turned into someone I didn't like or want to live with. There were three other womenthat I know of." She shrugged her shoulders. "For Jase's sake, I bit my lip, hung around, and hoped." She turned and walked to the barn door. "I was wrong. He became more open with his affairs, and when I inquired, physically abusive. I lived with it, covered it up, hoped he would change, and then ..."



"Then?"

"Then he hit Jase. Once. I walked out, filed, and when Trevor came to the hearing wasted and unable to speak in complete sentences, the judge threw him in jail for drunk and disorderly conduct and awarded me sole custody. Trevor sobered up and discovered he couldn't have exactly what he wanted. That did not, and does not, sit well with him.

"For the last two years, we've attended counseling. It was my idea. I thought if we could learn to be friends, maybe we'd be better parents. My thought was Jase. He needed ... needs ... a dad. And Trevor may not be much, but he's all Jase has got."

"Things got better?"

"Trevor improved, even quit drinking for a time, but I'm pretty sure he never quit"-she shrugged her shoulders-"the other stuff. Anyway, our counselor suggested a family vacation, so five weeks ago, we flew to Vail. Trevor boarded the plane and called it a `much-needed vacation.' I thought maybe the change would do us all good. Maybe a snowball fight would cool him off a little. And"she started digging in the dirt again with her toe-"I guess I was hoping that maybe I'd find a reason to start over. To try again. We had been there a week when he got a call from the office saying he had lost his biggest account. That night, I came back from the grocery store and found him with a ski instructor." She shrugged again. "She wasn't teaching him how to ski. I confronted him, and he hit me." She pointed to her eye. "Then he went in search of Jase, who was hiding outside. I found him first and we started running, but not before I introduced Trevor's head to a fire poker."



That sounded like the Katie I knew. The Katie I knew would have taken a fire poker to his head back in New York, but adults are harder to wake up than kids.

Her eyes scanned the drive again, searching for whatever wasn't there. lase and I returned to New York, packed, and I filed a restraining order-which wasn't difficult given our history, the fact that Trevor was laid up in a Colorado hospital, and that the ski instructor took my side once she discovered who I was. We've been running ever since."

She walked around the barn and breathed deeply, letting the aroma of Glue, leather, manure, horse feed, and cobwebs fill her lungs and fingertips. "Trevor is no dummy, and chances are real good that, sooner or later, he'll find us. He doesn't like being told he can't do ... or have something." She shrugged her shoulders and looked straight at me. "I couldn't stay in New York and I couldn't go to Atlanta because he'd find me there. With no place left, I drove this way because I knew I could think here. That I'd find space and, maybe, peace."

She looked around the barn, waving her hand in an arc across the back of Waverly and the pasture. Both she and they were dripping with soft morning sunshine. The dew rising off the pasture looked like golden honey that had seeped through the cracks on the front porch of heaven. "When we were kids," she said, "I was happy here. Really happy. I remember never wanting the days to end and always wanting to play your father's piano while Miss Ella smiled and soaked in every note."

She nodded, almost to herself. "Nobody's eyes ever lit up for me like Miss Ella's. Sometimes, late at night, when the crowds dwindled, I'd close my eyes and think of her sitting next to me on the bench, letting me play your father's grand, whispering in my ear and telling me to imagine myself in front of a sold-out show at the Sydney Opera House." Katie shook her head. "She was my cheerleader. The best. Every time I play, I think she's sitting beside me. Nodding, smiling, closing her eyes, and waving with the melody. Sometimes, I can almost hear her voice and smell the Cornhuskers."