Cold Rain

Chapter 16

‘I said I want to think about it,’ Molly told me the following afternoon.

I paced nervously, my cell phone pressed to my ear.

‘You said you never wanted to sell the farm.’

‘We both said a lot of things, David. Look, I want to go down to Florida for a few weeks. Take a look at the situation. Doc says the housing market is getting stronger. I can flip a place in three-four months if I buy the right property.’

‘You’re quoting Doc on real estate, Molly. Listen to yourself.’

She laughed. ‘That’s why I need to go down there and take a look. You move back to the farm.’

‘And Lucy moves in with the Sloans until you decide what you want to do. I know. I just don’t know why you’re doing this.’

‘You’re the one who wanted to move back to the farm. So move back. Make Walt happy.’

‘I’ll break Walt’s heart. I didn’t tell you but we’ve zipped our sleeping bags together.’

‘That’s sweet.’

‘When are you going to take off?’

‘Tomorrow.’

I hated the sound of that word. It meant she had already arranged everything. ‘Am I going to see you again?’

Silence answered. When I didn’t break it, she told me, ‘Why don’t you come out tomorrow around four-thirty? Lucy will be here. The two of you can see me off.’

Molly had the cap on the back of her truck, a few tools packed away in a trunk we had used over the years to keep the horse gear, and a couple of suit-cases. She was travelling light, but not so light she couldn’t stay for the winter if she decided to.

The weather was cold, the sky overcast. A brutal wind swept in from the north.

‘People are crazy to live in this weather,’ Molly announced happily. ‘I called Olga this morning. It’s eighty degrees today, blue skies, and just a light breeze.’

‘I’ll join you, if you want,’ I said. ‘Nothing holding me here.’

‘You hear something from school?’

I shook my head, sorry I had broached the subject.

‘It’s not going to be good when I do.’

‘I don’t get it. Randy Winston’s been screwing around with students since he got here, and everybody knows it.’

‘And Walt can’t open his mouth without offending someone. What don’t you get?’

‘Why you?’

‘I refused to take my lawyer’s advice.’

Molly looked out at the pasture. She shook her head and smiled, recalling our earlier conversation. ‘Every time I start thinking that maybe you’re telling the truth, I remember: this guy made a living by lying.’

‘I never lied on the car lot. I told you that. That was the deal with Tubs.’

‘It makes a good story, David. But I don’t believe it for a minute. You can’t help yourself. You open your mouth and a lie pops out. I think you’re lying about Tubs, like everything else!’

‘How many times have I lied to you, Molly? I mean about something important.’

‘That’s the point! I don’t know. Last summer, you went into town for a couple of hours, you came back with whatever you went for and had a little smile on your face! Did you sleep with Denise? I don’t know!

How many times did you lie about her? I have no way of knowing. You won’t even admit it!’

We heard Lucy’s Toyota come off the pavement and climb the hill. A moment later she pulled her vehicle into the circle behind Molly’s truck.

‘You taking off?’ she called.

‘Not without a hug.’

They hugged. They talked about Lucy flying down for the week of Thanksgiving. Lucy had cleared it at school, pulling the divorce trump card to get them to give her the extra three days.

Molly said there was some good in it after all. Lucy glanced at me to see how I was handling the joke. I just smiled. I was thinking about an axe in Buddy Elder’s skull, though I was more inclined to give him something along the lines of what he had fed Hawthorne amp; Co. I had heard that Liquid Plumber was an especially slow and unpleasant way to go, but naturally for an occasion like Buddy’s imminent demise I would want to do my research. That’s what Ph. D. s do.

‘You’re going to be all right?’ Molly asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The minute you drive away from here half of my reason for living just disappears.’

‘Don’t do this to me.’

‘You asked.’

She walked away, hugged Lucy one last time, and then to my surprise came back to me and threw her arms over my shoulders. ‘You broke my heart, you bastard,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll never forgive you for that.’

A moment later her truck started up and she drove away.

With Lucy’s help I moved back into the house. The whole process took about ten minutes. I offered to fix her dinner, but Lucy said she’d told the Sloans she would have dinner with them.

‘I’m going to have a talk with Mom when I go down for Thanksgiving, Dave. About the grass, I mean.’

‘Sounds like you’ve got your mother figured out.’

With entirely innocent eyes she asked, ‘What do you mean?

‘Molly isn’t going to want to let Olga know the two of you are having problems. Absolute best place to confess is with Olga in the next room. Your mother will just smile and say that’s wonderful, Lucy! I hope you’re only smoking good dope. Bad grass can be so irritating to your little throat.’

Lucy laughed. ‘You think?’

As she was getting in her Toyota I said to her back,

‘You going to tell her about the boyfriend?’

Lucy froze. It was a just a second, and then she turned. ‘Nothing to tell. Not yet anyway.’

‘The weekend’s coming up. You never know.’

‘That’s right, Dave. You never know.’

‘Be smart, Lucy. You want to get serious, fine, it’s your choice, but don’t assume a guy has been as careful about things as you would be. Some of these guys drink first and think later. Even they don’t know where they’ve put it.’

I sounded like Tubs and I hated myself. At least I hadn’t mentioned genitalia turning into vegetable matter.

‘Talking from experience, are we?’

‘Say hi to your grandparents for me, kid.’

After I fed the horses and fixed my dinner, I settled into the guest bedroom across from the room Molly and I had shared. Then I went up to look at the work Molly had done on Lucy’s apartment. The bathroom and kitchen appliances were in. She had the tile for the floor still in the boxes. I wasn’t doing anything else, so I started tiling the kitchen floor.

Around midnight I had a good start and went downstairs. As long as I was working, everything was fine.

Once I stopped the place felt enormous and empty.

Not really frightening. Fear comes from the unknown.

I knew who had killed the dogs, and a part of me yearned for him to show up and take his best shot.

No, it wasn’t frightening. Just empty and lonely and far too grand for a man on his own.

I spent a couple hours the next morning in my office.

The latest short story I had been working on was in trouble. At least it had gone stale on me. I could not find the excitement I had felt at the beginning. On the first page a woman had gone off to meditate in silence at a Buddhist monastery for six weeks. Coming home refreshed and revitalized, she discovered her husband was living with another woman. The thing had seemed so rich at the beginning, so full of possibilities, but I had lost the momentum. I no longer had the distance and confidence I needed to write about love and relationships. My sense of humour had died.

I had eight weeks of paid leave, I told myself. I knew writers who could crank out a novel in that time, and I knew others who could produce a chapter and a full outline. For me a short story would be about right.

The trouble was I could think of nothing but Buddy Elder, plot nothing but his murder. Pleasant as the fantasy was in the abstract, I did not dare think in practical terms about it. My greatest fear was that I would come up with something that might work.

So I went upstairs and threw myself into laying tile.

In January my life at the university would resume or it would end and I would begin something else. If it came to starting over, I would probably get another teaching position. Jinx would get me something. I wasn’t ready to learn another profession. The very idea of it at this late stage made me want to kill myself. I looked around my office and saw my shotguns in the gun case, a twelve-gauge and a four-ten. Definitely the twelve-gauge. Because if you’re going to do a job, do it right.

Like murder, fantasies of suicide were a narcotic. I knew better than to indulge in them. New job, I thought, as if it were an accomplished fact. New city. Get busy and keep busy. When the time was right, think about meeting someone. That’s what people did when they got divorced. They didn’t kill the people responsible and go to prison or swallow a shotgun while they tried to slip their toes into the trigger guard. They smiled at a pretty face. They kissed strange lips and tried to forget how much they still loved the world they had lost.

At midnight, as I lay in bed, I began to think about murder again in a purely hypothetical way. A short story. I really couldn’t help myself. It was the only thing that got me past the notion of suicide. Strange to say, but of all the sleepless nights I had spent since I learned of the complaints against me, this was the only one that afforded me some pleasure.