Late Rain (4 page)

Stanley’s obvious discomfort and bewilderment over the new and ever-changing furnishings was the closest Corrine could come to outright revenge.

At least for now.

The next door neighbor’s dog started barking, a signal that the mail had arrived.

There was a reassuring weight to seeing her name on the mail she took from the box next to the front door. She rifled through the envelopes, watching her name appear over and over. She was
Mrs. Corrine Tedros
. The name erased everything else. She was clean and clear of Phoenix and the names she’d lived in there.

Corrine left the front steps and walked into the middle of the front lawn, then stopped. She kicked off her shoes. She looked up and down the street. At this time of the afternoon, everything was empty and quiet. The houses up and down the block shadowed each other, all of them in White Pine Manor having three basic layouts. Corrine had memorized each, just as she knew each of the houses tipped the scales at 3100 square feet and the lots clocked in at one-third acre.

She turned and faced her house. A two-and-a-half-story Mock Tudor, with the emphasis on the
Mock,
it had been a wedding present from Stanley Tedros, his way of literally and figuratively putting Corrine in her place. She and Buddy had talked about building their own home, Corrine conjuring up the layout to its rooms, savoring each detail, Buddy and she even scouting out lots, but as their wedding approached, Stanley had gone to work on Buddy’s resolve and Corrine’s character, Stanley constantly pointing out to Buddy all the eligible Greek women in the area and praising their virtues, evoking family, tradition, and the importance of the blood flowing through each, until Corrine, worried about how things were beginning to play out, had convinced Buddy to elope. Stanley had the last word though, giving them the house in White Pine Manor as a belated wedding present and making sure Corrine understood its point: White Pine was peopled by those who had yet to fully arrive, the development occupying a nebulous position just north of the mid-point on the slope of the area’s social register.

Still holding the mail, Corrine stood in the middle of her front yard and lifted her arms and closed her eyes and felt the warmth of a spring sun on her face and imagined the whole of White Pine Manor on fire, every home ablaze, every shrub and flower and lawn burning beneath a sky empty of clouds, any rain coming too late.

THE OFFICER DRIVING the blue and white reminded Jack Carson of a minor league saint, some obscure foreign holy man whose gaunt Byzantine profile belonged in a dusty corner panel of stained glass or stamped on a small coppery-green religious medal.

“Did I hurt him?” Jack asked. He waited. The name eventually bumped into view. “Don Meade.”

The cop glanced over at Jack, then went back to his driving. Outside, the afternoon light was pale and thin.

Jack Carson thought it was probably April. Maybe March.

The officer hesitated, then said, “Meade’s ok.”

It might have been afternoon, but the inside of the cruiser smelled like a late Saturday night, the point where promise collided with disappointment but had yet to curdle into regret or resignation.

“I’ve got references.” Jack cupped the back of his neck with his left hand. “I do good work.”

He shook his head and then looked out the window. “Don Meade doesn’t. He doesn’t have to.”

Jack closed and opened his fists. The skin around the knuckles was tight. The cuts he expected to see weren’t there.

“The bids, they were supposed to be sealed,” he said.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” the officer said.

“You know the apartment complex over on Warley? Barely five years old and you see what shape it’s in. That’s Meade’s work.”

The officer reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror.

“You have kids?” Jack asked.

The officer waited a long moment before answering, “No.”

“If you did,” Jack said, “you’d understand why I needed the bid on renovating the recreation center.”

Just as he would have understood what tore loose in Jack Carson when Don Meade walked into the High Tide and started buying everyone drinks, a little early celebration, Don Meade everybody’s pal, brother-in-law to the president of the city council and star of his own television and radio commercials,
Meade Construction, let us build your dreams
, and Jack Carson for his part wondering if he could make this month’s payroll, his own construction company once again losing out to the bigger outfits, Jack angry and afraid in equal measures because his word and his work had always been good, and then Don Meade stepping up and setting a beer in front of him and dropping his hand on Jack’s shoulder.

Jack was not sure how many times he’d hit Meade.

He looked out the passenger window. A street sign, white on green, popped up and disappeared in a blur of consonants. Two vowels,
a
and
e
, followed like a comet tail.

“Almost there, Jack,” the officer said.

Jack leaned forward and tried to read the left pocket on the cop’s chest.
D-E-C
-O-something. The light kept getting in the way of the rest.

Jack hoped it wasn’t something about the bus. They hadn’t pressed charges yet, but there’d been some ugly undercurrents.

The officer hit the signal and turned down a street lined with magnolias. The leaves were a dark waxy green and shaped like a hand with its fingers extended and tightly pressed together.

Jack kept bracing himself for a smudge of yellow among the green and then the appearance of the bus, squat as a loaf of bread.

Over the next block, he counted his breaths.

Something was not right, he told himself.

Like a magician who didn’t know anymore what his hand would pull from the hat.

That’s what it felt like sometimes.

The bus thing, it had just gotten away from him. He hadn’t meant anything. He needed the paycheck.

The officer took another left. Jack craned his head and barely managed to catch the street sign:
DeHaviland
.

The movie star or the airplane. That’s what he was thinking. They sounded the same, but he was pretty sure one of them had two
l
’s.

The officer turned his head in Jack’s direction. “You know where we are, Jack?”

Jack didn’t remember saying the name out loud.

The radio crackled and buzzed. It sounded like some movie extraterrestrial clearing its throat.

The obvious tapped Jack on the shoulder. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it earlier.

He was sitting up front in the cruiser.

That meant no crime or charges. It was something else then.

A slow panic began filling his chest. Jack glanced over at the cop.

“Is it Carol?” he asked finally. He thought of murky ultra-sounds, Henderson the OB/GYN man clearing his throat, Carol soldiering it for seven and a half months, the baby, their first, riding low and ticking in her womb.

“No,” the officer said and smiled. “Carol’s ok.”

The smile didn’t match the eyes though. They saw more than they were giving back.

Jack’s panic slowed but didn’t subside. He needed to ask the cop something about Carol, or maybe it was that he needed to tell the cop something about her, but everything inside was running away from him.

The officer cleared his throat. “Hey Jack, you still with me here?”

Jack nodded and looked toward the street. The long slant of afternoon light. The parallel lines of magnolias. Older middle-class homes, most of them white and vinyl-sided, their lawns shedding winter and working their way to green.

He tried to insert a life into the scene.

The cop followed DeHaviland to Farrow and took a right. He drove three blocks north. Along this stretch, the houses had a frayed respectability, their former middle-class seams showing.

The cop slowed and then glanced over at Jack. He hit the turn signal and pulled into a T-square driveway full of crushed oyster shells. The afternoon light threw itself against the windshield.

The house was a weathered one-story with a wrap-around porch and sat on a wide lot dotted with white pines, live oaks, and crepe myrtles. It was a good twelve feet off the ground, supported by six telephone-sized poles. The space beneath the house to the left of the front stairs was used in lieu of a garage. This afternoon it was empty.

“Shit.” The cop peered over the steering wheel and rubbed his jaw. “Any idea where she is, Jack? Aren’t Tuesdays her day off?” Jack frowned. “You told me Carol was all right.”

“I’m talking about Anne, not Carol,” the cop said. “Anne, your daughter. It’s Tuesday.”

Jack pointed through the space between the rearview mirror and the passenger-side visor. “Isn’t that her?”

A girl, somewhere between eleven and thirteen, stepped onto the landing and peered over the railing. She was wearing jeans and a pink knit top. An expression that Jack couldn’t read scuttled across her features.

The cop was already opening his door. “No,” he said. “That’s not Anne. Sit tight, Jack, until I find out where she is.”

The radio crackled and buzzed, the voices a call and response that was buried in static. Jack watched a gull break over the roofline of the house and disappear into the afternoon. He closed his eyes for a moment and repeated the name of his wife to himself, a makeshift chant, keeping its syllables alive on his lips.

“WE’LL TRY THE RESTAURANT,” Ben Decovic said, backing the car around.

The Salt Box was a little over a half-mile away, one of the dozens of family-owned restaurants clustering the northern shoreline of Magnolia Beach. Ben had gotten into the habit of eating there on a regular basis.

He called in his location. Once out of the car, he tied Jack’s shoe and then led him inside. The greeter was in her early twenties, left eyebrow pierced, a T-shirt designed to mimic a painter’s palette, and dark red shorts. She tapped a clipboard against an overly thickening thigh. “Forty minutes, minimum, for a table. We’re really swamped today.”

Ben looked over her head into the crowded interior. “I can see that. But we’re not here to eat. I need to talk to the assistant manager.”

The greeter sighed. “Ok. You can wait over there.”

Ben led Jack to a small alcove. There were seats built into the walls and a large hibiscus with salmon-colored blooms sitting beneath the front window.

A few minutes later, a short, dark-haired woman appeared. She wore a green Salt Box apron tied around the waist of a new pair of jeans, a white oxford shirt, and white athletic shoes. She was pretty in a way that surprised you, possessing a quiet understated beauty that only came into focus after a second or third look. Her eyes were a very light brown, large and startlingly clear, but today the flesh beneath them was smudged with exhaustion.

“Oh no,” she said. “Not again. That’s the second time in less than three weeks.”

“I found him on Crescent.”

“Oh Dad, what am I going to do with you?” She stepped toward him, then stopped.

“Ms. Carson —,” Ben began.

“Anne.” She held up her hand. “Remember? I told you to call me Anne?”

Ben remembered too late and inwardly winced. He liked the woman and had been stopping by the restaurant on breaks and the end of shifts for a while now. The beer was always cold, the hush-puppies homemade, and the seafood gumbo top-notch. The Carson woman had a nice smile and a way of making you feel at home.

“I need to get to work,” Jack said, abruptly standing up.

Anne Carson lifted her arms, putting her hands on her father’s shoulders, and slowly pushed him back down to the seat. Then she sat next to him and began gently to rub his arm.

“He kept mentioning something about a bus,” Ben said.

Anne Carson sighed. “After dad lost the construction company in Myrtle Beach, we moved here. He hung in as an independent contractor but still picked up odd jobs.” She reached up and touched her father’s cheek. “One of them was driving an elementary school bus.”

Ben waited.

“When he started to get confused ...,” she said and paused, looking over Ben’s head toward the door.

“I’m sorry, but we’re talking a little bit more than confusion here.”

It was her turn to wait before speaking.

“All of us who know him missed the signs at first,” she said. “Ok? Or we didn’t want to see them.”

Ben saw where she was headed. “Then your father lost a busload of kids.”

Anne Carson nodded. “Nobody was hurt.” She went back to slowly rubbing her father’s arm. “But that was the beginning of where we are now.”

She looked up at Ben. “Look, I’m really sorry. I had to come in because another manager took a half-day. Mrs. Wood was supposed to be watching him this afternoon, but she had to leave early. Then my daughter Paige missed her ride home from school.” She paused and raised her hands. “I get off in an hour. I thought he’d be all right til then.”

“You mentioned something about new medication last time,” Ben said. “It’s not working?”

“The doctors were optimistic. They’d seen some encouraging signs in some of their other patients.” She paused and squeezed the bridge of her nose. “It doesn’t seem to be making much of a difference with my father though. At least none that I can see.”

Ben glanced down at his watch. “What are you going to do with him until you’re done?”

She bit the lower corner of her lip. “The banquet room’s not being used. I’ll put him in there.”

“Ok, but I have to point out—,” Ben started.

Anne held up her hand. “I know where you’re headed. I’ve talked to Social Services. And I’ve checked out nursing homes. I can’t afford to put him in a good one.” She paused and looked away. “And I’m not sure I would even if I could. My daughter and I are all he has left.”

She turned and took her father by his arm, and he got unsteadily to his feet.

She nodded and smiled at Ben, and once again, he was struck by her eyes, how pretty they were, and he wondered too as she led her father away, how long it had been since they’d seen a full night’s sleep.

It was a familiar question. One that he’d asked himself on more than a few occasions.