Wrapped in Rain(68)

"Tucker," she whispered, "it's me." She pressed her palm flat against the back of mine. "In here lives the little girl who kissed you in the quarry. The one who held your hand when nobody was looking. Who passed notes between classes and who waved good-bye, blowing you a kiss from the backseat of her daddy's car." She wrapped the towel tightly around her, and I opened my eyes as she breathed another easy, steady breath. She stepped closer, and with both hands she placed my hand over her heart and pressed it in close. "I've just got a few more scars than I had then." She paused. "We all do."

I don't know how long I stood there. A minute. Maybe two. Looking at her but not looking at her. Lost somewhere in a place I'd run from and a time I had forgotten. I swallowed again, slowly picked Mutt's towel from the bathroom floor, and half-turned. I wanted to take her by the hand, race her to the quarry, talk beneath the stars, undress the years, and pick up where we left off.



To be the boy who loved and knew love-the first time.

Like a child, Katie stood honest, upright, hiding little, and ashamed of nothing. I looked back at her, searching for answers to questions I hadn't asked in a long time, and when I began to find answers I wasn't sure I knew how to take, I turned toward the door.

I walked out into the barn, handed the towel to Mutt, pulled Jase off Glue, climbed the ladder of the water tower, and dove into the tank, now spilling over with icecold water from the quarry. I submerged, kicked to the bottom, let the cold engulf me, and remembered the quarry, the joy of watching that boat fly off the cliff, sink to the bottom, what it felt like to hold the oarlocks, and how I missed that day.

When my head broke the surface almost two minutes later, I exhaled every ounce of air in me and squeezed hard with my stomach, expelling bits and residue of a painful past and sucking in everything that was new.

I climbed down a few minutes later to an incredulous Jase, who looked like he wanted to ask me a question but never opened his mouth. Mutt climbed down from the loft, dressed in a red-striped, three-button polyester suit, a vest, and white buck shoes. I have no idea where he got any of it.

"I'm ready to go to church," he announced.

I grabbed the towel hanging through the rungs of the ladder, wiped my face, and looked toward Miss Ella's cottage. "Yeah, me too. Me too."





Chapter 28


MUTT WAS SHOWING THE EARLY SIGNS. I ALMOST CALLED Gibby but thought better of it. Wait and see. Whether that was hope or complacency, I wasn't sure. Mutt had become more introspective, his face often tilted and skewed like he was wrestling with his muscles and losing. His personal hygiene-fingernails, hair, beard, teethwas out the window, except for the bath, so I spent the afternoon alone and bought some deodorant, nail clippers, a razor, and a toothbrush. Alone in the drug store, I realized I hadn't had much time to myself lately. Something that I'd had a lot in the last seven or eight years. Something I'd always needed and valued. It's not that I don't enjoy people; I do. It's just that I needed to think, and with all the activity at Waverly, I could have used a weeklong assignment to someplace remote.

I returned to Waverly, set the toiletries next to his bedroll, and returned to my office, which was a mess, cluttered with months of receipts and unopened mail. I desperately needed to get on the phone with Doc, but he was not going to like what I had to say, so I put it off as long as I could.

A mirrored footprint of the first floor, the basement was a large room, filled mostly by rows and racks of more than two hundred old, dusty wine bottles and unused furniture covered in dusty sheets. The only other items of furniture in the room were my bed-a single pushed up against the wall and draped with a few wool blankets, a night table where I set Miss Ella's Bible and her picture, and a few feet away, my desk. The desk was one of my own creations where function definitely preceded form. A flat door, eight feet long, spread longways across the tops of two filing cabinets. Upstairs, scattered about the house were three or four nice leather-topped desks Rex had bought to fill every nook and cranny in Waverly, but I had no desire to sit at them, because for a little more than a decade, living beneath Waverly had become easier than living in it.



I planted myself in my chair, organized a month's worth of mail, paid bills, pitched the junk mail, and tried not to remember how the shower steam had risen off her skin and fogged the bathroom mirror. Finally, I picked up the phone. I had hoped to just leave a voice mail, but I knew better. Doc defined workaholic. He answered midway through the first ring. "Hey, Doc."

"Tucker!" I heard the cigarette switch sides and a thick exhale follow. "How the devil are you? The Whitey photos are superb. I told you it'd be vacation. Now, catch the first plane to Los Angeles and-"

"Doc."

Silence followed. He knew me pretty well by now, and the tone in my voice told him I wasn't going to Los Angeles. I heard his Zippo lighter crack open, the turn of the wheel and strike of the flint, a small inhale, and then the pop of the lighter as he closed it on his thigh and slid it back into his polyester pocket. A delicious sound. Chances were good that he was dropping the first ash of this cigarette into a cold cup of black coffee and looking out the window over lower Manhattan. Reclining in his chair, he let the smoke slowly filter through his nose and up around his eyes. Doc loved to smoke more than the Marlboro man.

"Tell me about it," he said.