But the idea made sense. I’d created the think tank to help women, and a few intrepid men, think past symptoms to the problems underneath. The problem was the idea I had for TRI’s metamorphosis was too difficult, too odd, too big for me to contemplate, or at least it had been before I’d had this conversation with Ash.
And I was scared to death of the thing because, despite my best intentions to shoo it away, like I’d done as a child with the chickens in my father’s barnyard, the idea that TRI had to be more wouldn’t leave me alone. Which is probably what my father had planned from the very beginning, because if anyone knew how to play me, my father did.
He’d left me that farm and the house, not because I deserved either one, but to spur me on to greater accomplishments through TRI. I would see this idea through plus find a way to make TRI more accessible to a larger community.
As I drove home from Ash’s house, I started laughing as I drove by the grocery store, because an old commercial started playing in my head. The Sentinel had a sense of humor, but I was going to need more than a bowl of Wheaties to make this transformation happen.
When I got home later that evening, none of my tenants looked up from their Mahjong game. I pulled out a chair at the dining room table, sat down, and decided how to begin.
“Sorry, I ran out on you—”
Classy frowned and held up a warning finger. She laid down a tile and said, “One dot.”
Fine. If that’s how they were going to play it, I would ignore their request as well. “You see, as long as I could fulfill the requirements of the will, I never had to say goodbye to my dad because we were always connected, because I still felt as if I were working with him, for him. Then the letter came, and. . . .”
Susan looked up from the game. “Five years go by and you didn’t know your dad was dead?”
“Of course, I knew he died.” They knew as well as Ash did, but how to explain? “I hadn’t accepted that he was dead.”
No one said anything.
“I’m sorry I ran out on the celebration.”
They turned back to their game. They were still mad.
“Ash is not moving in.” Maybe that reassurance would get me back into their good graces.
“Sssshhhh.” Classy held up her hand as if to stop me talking and picked up a tile, considered, then racked it again.
“And I’m not moving out,” I added.
No one looked up. I wasn’t deterred.
“I should have shared my doubts with you from the moment I started thinking about changing TRI.”
“Now she tells us,” Classy murmured as she rearranged her tiles on the rack.
“You’re not kicking us out?” Mary Beth asked.
“Of course not. We’ve got a Raindrop Institute to run and a meeting to convene. Lynn, would you please get the folders?” Then I held my breath, hoping she would comply.
She did. I breathed out. Maybe this would be okay now. At least they were listening to me.
“Ash won’t be happy living with a bunch of old women.” Classy pushed away her rack with a sigh, as did the others, and tiles clacked, clattered, and clicked against each other as they filled the trays with tiles from the table. Susan put the game away. Lynn brought the folders to the table and distributed them.
“Didn’t you hear me, Classy? He’s not coming to Southport.”
Classy got up and brought back a bottle of wine that she put on the table. Susan picked up the wine and filled the glasses.
“To Dart,” Classy said as she raised her wine glass. The crystal gleamed in the ambient light of the overhead chandelier.
“And to her father, Will Sommers,” Lynn said.
“May her house always be ours,” Susan said.
Reluctant crusaders. That’s what they were. What I was. In the dear faces around the table tonight, I saw what I had known but refused to admit for some time. They hadn’t realized that TRI had been drowning. We had gathered around this scarred, worn dining room table once a month for the past four years to discuss pleas for help, but no matter what we did, the pile of letters kept growing every month.
When I mentioned that, Mary Beth put down her wine and said, “Why do we have to do more? Why can’t we have one evening where we feel good about what we’ve accomplished?”
Classy was trying to organize the unwieldy pile in her folder because when she’d dropped it earlier that day, she had stuffed every piece of paper every which way. “You’ve got the house now.” Classy adjusted a few more letters before sighing in defeat. “Mary Beth’s right, we can sit back, relax, and take our time.”
No, we can’t, because humanity is a hot mess that is getting hotter, and catastrophe will be here soon, maybe in as little as fifteen years. Scientists are already saying we’re in a sixth mass extinction, and humans are to blame. I reined in the thoughts and arguments I’d constructed around civilization collapse and instead said, “I thought TRI was my best effort, but then I realized it wasn’t. I can’t accept what I haven’t earned.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Classy said as she turned on me. “The farm and this house are yours. You’re the one who made the requirement more than that, Dart.”
“I’m not going to give it up.” “Praise be,” Classy said, and the others echoed her comment. Smart aleck. “I’m not an idiot, but I am going to change how The Raindrop Institute works.” Once I figured out how to make that odd idea happen.
“I’ve always thought civilization collapse and poverty were too big for us,” Lynn said, “and that we should focus on one or the other.”
Both problems needed solving. They weren’t going to go away, but Lynn had seen what my father’s death made me realize. “I agree. TRI’s efforts are too fragmented.” My dad had wanted me to eradicate poverty. If I could focus the Institute on poverty instead of splitting our energies between both initiatives and anything else we thought we might impact, the Institute could start to make some real progress.
“We need an intellect as big as the ocean to deal with the heartbreak out there,” Susan said as she considered the logic I’d presented. “This was fun, Dart, when we first started.” She flipped through the papers, her dreadlocks swaying, the tips of them just brushing her shoulders. “I suppose the faces weren’t real then.”
In other words, Susan understood, but she didn’t want things to change. I knew that feeling.
“Here’s a letter from a mayor in Arkansas,” Lynn said. “He wants to rename his town Daylily because the economy blooms for one day when folks cash their monthly relief checks.”
Mary Beth picked up a letter. “Here’s one from a citizen in Oklahoma. She’s concerned about the farmers who are losing generational farms because of low grain prices.”
“Some of these pleas for help are dated from several months back.” Susan looked across the table at me. “Why haven’t you shared them with us?”
Her edgy tone made me wonder. Had she heard the rumors about the bad blood between me and Kathleen Hendrix? Kathleen was her friend. They had lunch quite often. Is that why she seemed so antagonistic tonight? Stratton College, where the three of us worked, was in a small town, and gossip spread like the flu. Susan worked as a research associate in North Carolina University’s provost’s office. Cushy job for someone with a brain like hers that liked numbers, facts, and stats, and the provost’s office heard all the gossip.
“We don’t have the funds or the manpower to go that far from home,” I said.
“Then why aren’t we dreaming up solutions to that little problem?” she asked.
“I can always use more money,” Classy added.
“Money isn’t the problem.”
Classy indicated the inheritance letter that was still on top of my folder. “Not if you have farm income and a house on the Atlantic Ocean worth a cool million.”
She’d never understand that I felt like the caretaker of these properties, not the owner, even though my name was now on the deeds.
“This mode
l isn’t scalable. Five women sitting around a dining room table discussing and solving one problem a month won’t stop anything. At best, for every beached plea we’ve thrown back into the sea, we’ve left thousands that contribute to the growing unrest. We need more minds at work on the problems that face humanity. We’ve had some great successes, local and statewide. And gratitude for our efforts has made us a name in North Carolina. When we got the Oprah interview. . . .”
“We didn’t get that interview,” Classy said. “You did. Your research. Your books. Your ideas. We just helped.”
“You did more than help. You launched TRI.” I took a sip of wine, caught my courage, and dared to verbalize the idea that refused to leave. “Why don’t we find a way to train more women— not local women, but the ones who are living in these cities and towns and dealing with poverty every day?”
“How would we do that?” Susan asked.
“You mean create more Raindrops? Everywhere?” asked Lynn.
Mary Beth looked dazed with the possibility.
“We’re the Raindrops.” Susan rejected the idea out of hand and started leafing through the papers, searching for information she already knew. “We should charge for our services.”
“They don’t have the money to pay our travel,” I said, “which means they don’t have the money to pay us. We can’t travel that much because we’re gainfully employed. Perhaps we could train older women in those towns to think outside the memes without putting our own jobs in jeopardy or our bank accounts.”
“I don’t have a bank account,” Classy said, twirling a curl with her index finger, “and I don’t know what you mean when you say memes.”
If I tried to curl the waves in my salt-and-pepper hair, my friends would say, stop embarrassing us. With Classy, we all watched those blond curls twist up and bounce free. I envied Classy those curls.
“Memes are infectious ideas that spread from person to person within a culture,” I said as I leafed through the letters in my folder. “And the lack of a bank account is a problem a lot of these folks have as well,” I said, indicating the letters I had been leafing through. “You are not alone.”
“We took two years to get up to speed, Dart,” Susan said as Classy frowned.
“Memes are like the flu?” She cocked her head to one side considering that.
“Kinda,” I said, “but it’s a cultural phenomenon, not a bacterial one.”
“Can we please get back to the subject,” said Susan. Classy looked miffed, and I almost smiled. “How would we train women we don’t know, can’t see, and can’t talk to about a problem that has plagued humanity forever?”
“Books, websites, blogs, videos.”
The Raindrops weren’t enthused about the idea. They wouldn’t meet my eyes. That frustrated me. I knew firsthand that technology held the answer to creating communities that made a difference because this semester I was scheduled to repeat a massive open online course, a MOOC, that I had taught for the first time the previous semester.
Lynn stated, “All these backwater towns have in common is poverty.”
“Don’t call them that.” I’d grown up in a town like these, and so had Lynn. I didn’t understand her remark unless she was putting the town down to validate her reason for leaving. “People live in these towns, like I did in Hawthorne, like you did in your home-town, Lynn.” She had the grace to look ashamed. “Like we live in Southport,” I said. Their glances suggested I’d gone crazy.
“This is a small town when the tourists are gone.”
They relaxed once again. “Okay.” Lynn said. “The question remains, how can we help these people?”
“They have to help themselves,” Classy said.
“Most of them have no desire to improve their lot in life,” Susan said.
“That’s not true.” I gestured to the fat folders in front of us. “That’s evidence to the contrary, but you’re rejecting these letters because the evidence doesn’t confirm your bias.”
“People aren’t motivated to get out of poverty. Everyone knows how well they live,” Classy said.
Like Classy, I used to believe the same stereotype, but no more, not after the last five years. “They know that their lifestyle isn’t optimal, but finding the money, the energy to get out is difficult.”
“You can’t believe that,” Classy said.
“One woman worked two jobs until one night she parked her truck in a no parking zone because she was late to work. The truck was impounded. She didn’t have the cash to pay the fees, couldn’t borrow the money, didn’t have bus fare, and as a result, lost both jobs because she no longer had transportation.”
“That old rock keeps rockin’ back in every time you think you’re out from under,” Lynn said. She had lived at the edge of poverty for most of her adult life. She knew better than anyone at the table how banal poverty could be.
“Has to be intelligence then,” Mary Beth said, “that differentiates the superrich.”
“Intelligence isn’t a determining factor,” Susan argued. “Read Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. He makes a pretty good case for opportunity or lack of it as the culprit.”
“Dart and Susan have those fancy degrees that open doors for them,” Classy said. “That’s why. . . .”
“Men do the same thing,” Mary Beth said. “They open doors for their wives—”
“—until the bastard doesn’t.” Susan’s face twisted. She’d had a tough marriage and a tougher divorce. Most days she wasn’t bitter, but tonight the pain was real again.
“I think we should take from the rich and give to the poor,” Classy said. At the collective groans, she pointed to the stack of emails I’d printed. “A lot of them agree.”
“You’re thinking about this wrong,” I said.
“No, I’m not,” Classy said. “If everyone had money, poverty wouldn’t exist.”
Classy’s heuristic wouldn’t go away unless I could erase that shortcut thinking. “Wealth is a sexy word, but producing objects of value isn’t sexy. But that’s why people are wealthy. They produce items that others are willing to pay for. You can give the poor all your money and the next day the imbalance will be back because the wealthy, not the impoverished, produce things of value.”
“If the poor had money, they could create items of use.” Classy wasn’t going to give up.
“Money is a technology,” I said. “A vehicle we use to buy things of value. If you want to solve poverty, we have to focus on giving those who are impoverished opportunity to create things of worth. That’s different from giving them money.”
“Lots of beliefs standing in the way of that one, Dart,” said Susan.
“You’re saying poverty isn’t a result of unequal distribution of money, but rather a symptom of the underlying problem?” Mary Beth’s fingers tapped the table as she considered what that meant.
“Eradicating symptoms does nothing to solve the problem.” I was getting tired of repeating myself, but unless I kept putting the data points up for consideration that I wanted them to incorporate into their decision-making about the poor, they would ignore everything I said. “And the problem has many, many parts. Only one of which is the unequal distribution of the capability to produce things of value.”
“We have to bring the rain then,” Mary Beth said.
My dad always liked rain, but that’s not what Mary Beth meant. “That’s right, we have to approach the problem from every angle we can and patch all the holes in the roof, not just the one, like wealth distribution.”
“That’s because you earn money.” Classy twirled her blond curl. “Thinking differently about nothing still leaves you with nothing.”
The unconscious at work again. With that heuristic, that simple little go-to formula that solved, although it didn’t, a complex mess, Classy could ignore the problem. She’d shrugged her shoulders and decided there was nothing she could do. Problem solved. We might as well sacrifice a virgin or two as the Mayans had, and hope that sac
rifice would work if we were going to ignore hundreds of thousands of conflicting data points as irrelevant.
“Not for the first time, we’ve spun ourselves in a circle,” I said.
Susan grinned.
“We’re ignoring what Dart has been trying to get us to do.” Something in Mary Beth’s voice caused Classy to stop twirling her hair.
“For a psychology professor, she’s clueless.”
Classy’s indignant words stung.
“She’s dating the dean. She’s got money and a roof over her head.” Classy ticked the points off on her fingertips. “She doesn’t need us anymore, and she sure doesn’t need to solve problems like poverty because that doesn’t affect her, not anymore.”
Funny, if I were rich, I’d hire someone to paint the trim. But I wasn’t, and that meant I’d be back up on that ladder tomorrow. However, I did have the resources to buy a long extension handle for the brush that would reach the spot I’d missed without my getting back on the ladder.
“We’ve been successful,” Susan said. “We could charge for our suggestions, and I think with our track record people would pay our way.”
Translation: nothing I’d said had assured them.
But I had made a decision. Like my paintbrush, TRI needed a longer reach. I’d hoped that all these years of working together would smother their fears and their persistent unconscious voices, but I would have to go on without them. The data were too strong to ignore. I might not have the evidence to back up my odd idea that conscientiousness could combat poverty, but I knew in my soul that conscientiousness was key.
THREE
“DR. SOMMERS.”
Lea Wilson, the postdoc whom I’d hired to run the MOOC, the university’s only and ongoing collaboration with Stanford, came up behind me on the east wing stairs at Stratton College. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. I was out of breath and wondering why I’d thought climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator was a wise decision. The most I could manage was to return her smile and wish I were anyplace else while taking deep breaths that didn’t begin to ease my need.
Bring the Rain Page 3