Chance of Rain

by Lin, Amber

  Joe seemed tired, eyes shadowed and clothes spattered with mud, though any sympathy Sawyer might have felt evaporated when he gave Natalie a thorough once-over. Not sexual—for that, Sawyer might have had to set him straight. More like checking for any damage, as if Sawyer wasn’t trustworthy. Well, shit.

  “There a problem?” he asked, faintly mocking.

  Joe kept his eyes on Natalie. “Not that I can see.”

  Sawyer snorted. “The great defender of the weak and helpless.”

  Joe’s eyes met his. “You’ve never been weak.”

  He kept his expression steady, though inside he felt a blow that belied the words. “Yeah? That’s not how I remember it.”

  “Sometimes strength means standing back up. You figured that out a lot sooner than me.”

  Clearly they weren’t talking about the time since Sawyer had rolled back into town, nor shared childhood antics. This was about the fight, when Sawyer had lost more than the straight bridge on his nose. He’d lost self-respect that day and spent the next decade clawing his way back. Had he reached it? Yeah. A little late, because he’d lost something else then, something he still hadn’t gotten back.

  He turned to her. “Natalie?”

  It was put up or shut up time. Go with Joe or stick with Sawyer. Dissolve back into the town or stand apart, with him. He knew where she belonged and it sure as hell wasn’t in this empty shell of a house, with an empty shell of a man, but damned if he could stop wanting.

  Stay, he thought. Give me one more day and I’ll make it last forever.

  But even that was a lie, because he’d never get enough of her.

  Her eyes haunted him, flashing pools of amber, endless wells of pity. “Goodbye, Sawyer.”

  Even Joe’s eyes clouded with embarrassment before he turned to hook up her car to the tow. So it was a damn good thing Sawyer had a lifetime of disappointment to prepare him for this. Damned convenient he’d been alone for so long that Natalie climbing into the cab of the truck didn’t bring him to his knees. He was really fucking lucky that way.

  He went inside the barn, a refuge from a chill he had known his whole life, an emptiness that the wind and hollow structure could never compete with. Their time together had been amazing, unforgettable, and like a punch in the gut from the past. In high school they had kissed, and then he’d fucked up. Now they’d had amazing sex, and then he’d fucked up. As he always did. Like Old Faithful, he could practically set his clock on it when he was in Dearling.

  So what did he do about it? Leave? That’s what he’d done before. Except it hadn’t solved anything, only created new problems like getting shot at or blown up. Did he really want to go back to that? Not really.

  So maybe he would make a stand. He didn’t set much store in his ability to do that here, but maybe this time it would work. He’d fallen down, and as Joe had pointed out, the strength was in getting back up. He’d known that at one time. When had he forgotten?

  * * *

  Two days later found him at the Dearling County Library. Staring at the squat grayscale building, he swallowed past a lump in his throat. Somehow this felt more intimate than his previous interactions in town, at the grocery store or hardware store, as if he were a true member of the community instead of passing through.

  This had been his old haunt years ago. His dad never cared much for education, but one year he’d kept Sawyer back from school to help with the late harvest. A woman came around threatening to take him away if Dad didn’t send him to school and keep him passing. After that, Sawyer had been able get out of time on the farm by claiming to study at the library. Guilt was heavy in his gut. He had studied at the library, but that didn’t make it less of an excuse.

  As he strolled through the thick-windowed doors, something inside him relaxed at the familiarity. The same metal return box adorned the entrance, the same Quiet Zone sign hung from the tiled ceiling. He paused at the brightly bordered bulletin board covered with notices. There was a babysitter for hire and an upcoming event called a Reading Bee. Looked like a Dearling pig had gotten lucky—five piglets were for sale to a loving home.

  Not much had changed.

  Like a magnet, his gaze honed in on a grainy black-and-white photograph of Natalie. She smiled broadly for the camera, accepting a certificate that the printout claimed was appreciation for running the book drive. Her hair was shorter, just above her shoulders instead of down her back. She looked good, happy.

  Distracted, his mind still on the smile in her picture, he walked straight into one of the meeting rooms. Women and children all turned their eyes to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, figuring he’d interrupted reading time or something, but the words caught in his throat when he realized that every woman in the room had her shirt lifted, breast out, and not all them were in babies’ mouths. Shit. He tried to avert his eyes, cover them, but like some sort of heat-seeking missiles they couldn’t look away.

  “Don’t mind us,” one of the women said, smiling. “This is completely natural.”

  Then she winked.

  He excused himself a few dozen times and then made his way back out, leaning against the wall beside the still wide-open doors. That was new.

  He needed to focus. He’d come here to figure out how to appeal the water rights decision—and how the hell to farm this late in the season.

  How embarrassing. His father surely rolled over in his grave at the thought of his son learning farming from a book. Sawyer remembered some from his summers on the farm. He knew the feel of the land, the moisture and texture of the soil, the smell of the weather. What he didn’t know was what to plant and when, which chemicals to use and exactly how much would be enough to pass the damn appeal.

  Wandering through Nonfiction, he found that the Agriculture section had mostly information on recreational gardening and small vegetables gardens. On a whim, he picked up Domestic Bounty: How to Grow Your Own Groceries. If he was really going to play farmer, he might as well fix up the small plot behind the house.

  On the magazine rack, he found several recent issues of professional agricultural magazines. They had recent rainfall and weather patterns, some articles on herbicide contamination and the rising price of grain. Good, but he needed more.

  With a small rumble of trepidation, he realized he’d have to ask the librarian for assistance. Then she’d know he was a dumbass, but it had to happen.

  He stopped in front of the broad desk, remembering a time when he could barely see over it. Now he dwarfed it. The woman behind the computer was a mop of dirty blonde curls and a flurry of typing fingers.

  He cleared his throat. “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  She looked up. Like a sunrise, her smile spread over her face. “Sawyer Nolan, as I live and breathe.”

  “Hi, Mrs. Cooper.”

  She beamed. “Are you here to see the little babies?”

  He blinked, thinking of the babies in the community room. “Pardon?”

  “The ducklings. They’re in the lake behind the library.”

  “Oh. Maybe later. Actually I came looking for some information, but I’m not sure exactly what books I need.”

  “Then you’ve come to the right place. Tell me what you do know and we’ll go from there.”

  He let out a breath and quoted the paper. “I guess, hypothetically...if the situation were to arise...how would a person go about demonstrating a substantive yield of crops, agricultural stability and a positive fiscal projection for a farm?”

  If possible, her smile grew. “Right this way.”

  She led him to a section titled Professional Science that narrowed down to Horticulture. Almost too quickly for him to read, she pulled books from along the aisle, piling them on him. He caught a few titles Financial Management and Planning in Agriculture, The Biology of Farmsteading, and texts spe
cific to the region. By the end, the pile was heavy, even for him.

  “That ought to get you started,” she said.

  “Ah, thanks.”

  At the checkout desk, he took out his driver’s license. It still had his old—and current—address. He had never gotten around to changing it.

  She waved him off and began scanning the books. “I’ve still got you in the system. I always knew you’d be back.”

  Well, she knew more than he did, but something eased, low in his gut.

  At home, he spread the books out on the kitchen table. He knew the feel of the land, but he learned its history. He had been a bystander to its beauty, now he studied its ecosystem.

  He picked up The Texas Book of Bugs, and a paper slipped out. It looked like one of the flyers from the bulletin board. Apparently the McClellan farm was for sale. He snorted. Maybe he should put them in contact with his real estate agent.

  He set it aside and kept reading.

  * * *

  Natalie shivered in the chilly waiting room. The fabric of the stiff chair itched even through her clothes. Motivational posters hung on the wall, pictures of smiling old people. They were fake pictures, but many of the home’s residents did smile. She had passed the ice cream social in the lounge on her way to the doctor’s office. The staff was always genuinely cheerful and kind. Natalie wouldn’t have kept her grandmother here if that weren’t true. But Gram never smiled.

  Finally, the door opened and a young couple came out. As they walked quickly past, she caught tear tracks down the woman’s cheeks. Natalie had cried when Gram had been diagnosed in Dr. Parker’s office back in Dearling. She’d cried over the year as her grandmother’s condition had rapidly deteriorated, when it escalated to full-scale dementia and then violence.

  Natalie never cried here. This was a waiting place, the beige walls inducing a kind of stasis in her.

  The doctor appeared at the door. “Natalie? I’m ready for you now.”

  Inside, she found another uncomfortable chair. “Is she okay?”

  Dr. Carmichael’s smiles were always soothing, in contrast to her news. “She’s feeling much better. I asked to speak with you before you visited with her because I want you to be prepared. She had another episode. Our monitors subdued her quickly, but she did manage to get a couple of scratches on her face, all shallow and healing fine. We have her under sedation for the rest of the day, and then she’ll return to her usual schedule.”

  “Are you sure that’s necessary? Maybe she would be calmer at home. I would hide the knives this time, and...” She trailed off, knowing there was nothing left to do. Denying the violence only allowed it to escalate.

  Gram needed around-the-clock medical care.

  Natalie looked down.

  “I realize this is difficult to handle,” Dr. Carmichael said, “but she’s content here. She’s not suffering.”

  Was that the best she could hope for, not suffering? Natalie shut her eyes.

  “How you’re feeling right now is a normal part of the grieving process. Maybe you should start coming in again for sessions. It’s okay to worry for her, but you also need to focus on you, moving forward in your life.”

  Forward? How could she move forward when Gram was dying? It was a form of suffering, this prolonged purgatory.

  “Can I see her? I need to talk to her.”

  Gram’s room looked the same, mauve-colored walls and soft lighting. Natalie had slept on the fold-out booth in the corner for five days when Gram had first moved in, until Dr. Carmichael had gently insisted Natalie go home. Then Gram had watched her from bewildered eyes that turned, mercurial, into rage and back again. Now her eyes were closed, her leathery skin a pale gray. The scratches Dr. Carmichael had told her about were short, thin lines around her mouth.

  Natalie sat beside her and felt sick. “Hi, Gram.”

  Gram didn’t stir. Machines monitoring her vitals were tucked discreetly behind wooden cabinets, muting their steady beeps. The tubes that connected them could have been a million miles long for how far away her grandmother seemed, floating in limbo, the space between them muting any sounds or understanding, but Natalie had to talk anyway.

  “I’ve missed you.” I miss you now.

  Outside the room, she heard people walking by.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t come last week. There was this crazy storm. It kind of reminded me of that time when I was in sixth grade. Remember the power was out for two whole weeks? When a few people had run out of food, you opened up the diner anyway. We made barbeque in the street.”

  No answer.

  Unable to sit still, she got up and stood at the window, looking out at the busy streets. Were they happy, rushing around, or were they just not suffering too?

  “Do you remember Sawyer Nolan? I’m sure you do, considering I talked about him nonstop in high school. Before that, even. Well, he’s back in town. I know when he left you said I would find somebody else, and you’re usually right, but I didn’t.”

  She didn’t want to be content anymore, stagnant. She didn’t want to keep the diner the same, simply because that’s how Gram had done it. Maybe on some level Natalie had imagined her grandmother coming back to visit the diner, remembering the diner—remembering her. But Gram would never come back. Even if she was awake on her next visit, she would never again look at Natalie with wise, lucid eyes.

  Natalie had lived in her own purgatory, shielding herself from the grief by pretending that nothing had changed, taking comfort in the place Gram had loved like a security blanket.

  It wasn’t fair to use Gram as an excuse. She would have been pissed about that. Natalie allowed herself a small, sad smile, wishing she could mourn, finally feel the pain, but the tears wouldn’t come.

  * * *

  Over the next couple of weeks, Sawyer’s slim hope shrank to nothing at all. His muscles were as sore and torn up as they’d ever been during Hell Week. His days were a blur of physical labor, his nights an ache of pain and unfulfilled desire.

  He had found two men through the local labor agency. One had the look of a country boy, but he’d turned out to be a drunk who cost him more work than he contributed. The other had a smooth face and smooth hands, but he’d been a huge help.

  He went by a single name, Ian. From the little he’d told Sawyer, Ian had been a desk jockey at a bank until he got laid off a year ago. Since then he’d been working odd jobs around the central Texas Hill Country. He was a transient, but a hardworking one. Sawyer wished he could offer him a permanent job, but the more he worked, the more it became clear they’d never make it.

  He had purchased a brand-new tractor that didn’t stall out every mile, but the farm had been too long neglected, the land uneven and cracked. He had managed to eradicate most of the pests, but the land still needed to be tilled, fertilized and planted. There just wasn’t enough time.

  After washing up at the pump, he met Ian at the back door. Although Sawyer had told him again and again to just go in, he refused to step foot inside unless Sawyer was there. In the kitchen, they both sucked down a couple glasses of water.

  Sawyer picked up a pencil and shaded in a two-centimeter radius in the northwest corner. He’d gotten the idea to use the map from the spare McClellan land survey he’d found in the library book. A little digging in his father’s paperwork had turned one up for his own farm. After a few days, it became clear that even a backbreaking pace would never cover the entire farm in time. He and Ian were both hooded and stumbling from lack of sleep, and the map was still overwhelmingly blank.

  He passed the pencil to Ian, who slanted Sawyer a look of regret before erasing most of the work on the eastern border. “The levee overflowed again.”

  Sawyer closed his eyes. It didn’t matter. They would never make it. Even his old mantra failed him. Did you even try? Yeah, he did.
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  It wasn’t enough.

  He lounged on the front porch, his forearms resting on the newly installed and painted railing. All for nothing, because he hadn’t been able to bring the farm back from the brink, to run it as he was meant to do. Didn’t that beat all? His dad had been right about him.

  An oversized truck rumbled over the horizon. Slack, Sawyer watched it approach.

  A portly man in jeans and a stain-covered T-shirt hopped out. “Lonestar Junk,” he grunted. “Sorry about the delay. Storm put us out of commission there for a bit, but we’re back on track now.”

  Just like that, he could be finished here. He could finally be rid of this town.

  Chapter Ten

  Natalie washed another coffee mug and dried it with a dish towel. The mugs she ordered had come in, and despite being brand new, they looked remarkably like her old vintage ones, except they didn’t chip or break all the time.

  Wash, dry. Wash, dry. There was a kind of Zen to doing the dishes, though she wouldn’t ever say so out loud. She knew better than to tell people how much she looked forward to cleaning up the diner at the end of the day. They’d think she was lying—or just plain crazy.

  Wash, dry.

  She liked things about the daytime too. She felt satisfaction knowing the food was nourishing this town. She had friends here, good friends. Just yesterday, Mae Watson swore she saw a squirrel with a bow tied around its neck. So that was something. Wash, dry.

  Ever since she’d gotten the new mugs, it seemed like there were more of them, as if they were multiplying. Of course, it only felt like there was more to wash and to dry. The diner was still serving the same number of coffees. An audit had confirmed this last night.

  The cowbell on the door jangled and she called, “We’re closed.”

  As usual it was Lucy and as usual, Lucy didn’t let a little thing like a business’ operating hours stop her. She poked at the fridge before pulling out a tub of chicken salad and a slice of pie.

  Well, if her friend needed to eat, it would be rude not to sit with her. So Natalie did, tossing her drenched apron onto a counter in a sodden heap.