Raising Rain

by Debbie Fuller Thomas

  Briefly, and with the guarded words of one alert, he told them he was doing okay and couldn’t wait for graduation. He had made some buddies and said he appreciated receiving letters. They chatted for only a minute or two and they heard a voice speak in the background.

  “I have to go. I love you guys and I miss you.”

  They said their good-byes and he hung up. Neil came out from the bedroom and they looked at each other in wonder that they had at last spoken to Scotty and he sounded fine. They were grateful that they had both been home and that Bebe had answered the phone. Bebe said she would put another letter in the mail the next day.

  She called Dylan to tell him that Scotty had called. He said classes were going well for him, but the job at the bookstore didn’t turn out and his car’s brakes were getting mushy. He said he would be home a week from Friday for Labor Day.

  Before she went to bed, Bebe called Rain and arranged to meet for coffee the next morning. She thought she detected a certain lilt to her voice when she agreed.

  Rain picked up her coffee and snagged two cushy chairs, placing her purse in one to save for Bebe. Rain and Hayden used to frequent this Starbucks together, and she always scanned the faces of the other patrons when she came in. Of course, he might not even live in the area now—it could be completely out of his way. She thought again how odd it was that he’d left all their furniture and taken only his clothes.

  Lately, she’d begun to wonder if he had commitment issues. All she had wanted to do was to move them to the next level, and certainly a baby would add a deeper dimension to a couple’s relationship.

  Bebe came in wearing scrubs with patterns of playful kittens on them. Bebe’s cheerful smile always managed to lift Rain’s spirits, no matter what was going on in her life. The smile made Bebe’s eyes sparkle and called attention to her freckles, which were still plentiful, even at her age. You couldn’t really call Bebe beautiful by today’s standards. She wore hardly any makeup now and did little with her hair other than occasionally putting it in a French braid, but she still looked youthful and vibrant—more than Rain was feeling at the moment. Bebe paid for her coffee and grabbed the chair that Rain had saved for her.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” she asked Rain. “What’s up?”

  “Well, I have a date. At least, something like a date. I’m not really sure. A ‘not-date.’”

  Bebe forced a smile. “Oh, a ‘not-date.’ Who with?”

  “Craig, one of the attorneys in the office. We’re going to see Journey in concert tomorrow night.”

  Bebe made another effort to brighten her face, but the effect fell short. “That sounds like fun. How do you feel about it? I imagine the first date with someone new might be a little strange.”

  Rain shrugged. “It’s flattering to be asked, but I don’t really know him very well. It’s only a concert. It’s just that . . .”

  Bebe waited. “Just what?”

  “It’s just that Hayden and I met singing ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ at a karaoke night and our first date was a Journey concert. So I’m not crazy about the possibility of running into him there.” She shook her head. “Thousands of people will be at the concert. What are the odds that I would even run into him?”

  “Oh, I see.” Bebe carefully popped the lid from her coffee and sipped lightly. “How did it go when he came by for his things?”

  “It was fine. He came alone. He looked like he was on his way somewhere, though. He’s officially moved out now.”

  Rain kept her eyes lowered and tried to look casual, but she felt Bebe’s eyes on her.

  “How’s your mom?”

  “She’s still working half-days when she’s not recovering from her treatments. I don’t know how much longer she’ll be able to keep it up. It will be hard for her to let it go when the time comes. She thinks the firm needs her. She says she brings ‘balance to the force.’”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  Rain studied her. “She must have been a real pain when she was young. I don’t know how the three of you put up with her for so long.”

  Bebe chuckled. “All the dorms were full that first year, and the lease was in her name. After that, we just kind of settled into a routine.” She grew thoughtful. “The truth is that we were clay in her hands. She had so much more experience with life than we did. I was a farm girl just off the vineyard. Mare was fresh out of Catholic school, and Toni still spoke Polish to her grandmother. Although Toni definitely gave Jude a run for her money. Jude was so charismatic and together.” She gave a rueful smile. “We were primed, what can I say?”

  “She must have been more fun back then.”

  “Did you know she was in Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love? She met the bass player with Jefferson Airplane—at least, that’s who he told her he was. She was young. But she’s told you this stuff already, hasn’t she?”

  “She told me more than any adolescent girl should know about her mother.” A question formed, and she asked it even though she wasn’t sure she was prepared to hear the answer. “Do you know who my dad was?”

  Bebe took a long sip of her coffee and frowned like she was thinking. Then, she shook her head. “No. There were a couple of guys Jude hung out with, but nobody special. Hasn’t she ever talked to you about it?”

  “Mom never talks about it. She said she didn’t need a man.”

  Rain remembered her own words to Bebe that she didn’t need Hayden to have a baby. Would her own child resent her years from now?

  “You have to realize that times were different then. A lot of people embraced the idea of ‘free love.’ There were no curfews or dorm mothers monitoring coeds by then, and we were off campus in our own little world. So much changed so fast, that no one knew where the boundaries were. It was heady stuff.”

  Rain sat back and crossed her arms. “Are you saying that my mother was typical?”

  “No, Jude worked very hard not to be. Back then, women were just beginning to realize that they had choices. Jude arrived fully loaded with the opinion that women should have control of their own bodies and take charge of their own sexuality. And guys were only too eager to agree.” Bebe pinched the rim of her coffee cup. “Some of us found that that type of freedom wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.”

  Bebe’s cell phone buzzed, and she pulled it out of her pocket and turned off the alarm. “I’m scheduled for surgery this morning. Oh, here.” She dug deeper in her pocket and produced a slip of paper. “It’s Scott’s address. Sorry I didn’t get it to you sooner. He called us last Sunday.” She gathered her purse and they headed for the door as she filled Rain in on the phone call. “He sounded good, but of course, moms never stop worrying.”

  Outside, Rain gave Bebe a hug before she left. “You’re a good mom.”

  Bebe hugged her back. “I try to be. Love you.”

  “Love you, too,” Rain answered.

  As she drove to work, Rain felt warmed by Bebe’s motherly affection. She wondered what it was that kept Jude from being the mother Rain had always wanted and needed her to be, and which one she would naturally emulate—Bebe or Jude—if given the chance to mother a child.

  Bebe talked to Neil that night about connecting with Hayden to encourage him not to give up on the relationship. She had hoped Hayden would change his mind himself, but when she heard that he had officially moved out, she became disheartened. Neil wasn’t sure it would make any difference, or that Hayden would even agree to meet with him, but he promised to try.

  Bebe checked the mailbox on Thursday, hoping to find their weekly letter from Scott. Inside, among the bills and junk mail, was a white envelope with the eagle, globe, and anchor in the corner and Scott’s handwriting. He had established a schedule of writing on Sundays, which was his only day off, and mailing his letters in time to arrive on Thursdays. It gave her a thrill to hold this paper that Scott had held and written his thoughts on, and she grinned like silly, smitten woman.

  She opened the envelope, slid out
the single lined sheet, and began reading on her way back to the house. “Dear Mom and Dad,” it began. What followed was a brief rundown of his normal day-to-day activities and comments that he’d lost weight and wasn’t getting enough sleep. He sounded distracted and perfunctory, and she thought he was just tired until she got to the end. He said that Uncle Bobby had sent him a letter and given him some things to think about.

  Rain laid two complete outfits on her bed and stood back with her arms crossed. Which one should she wear on a first date? She considered the blousy babydoll-peasant top, but decided that it might not be a good choice if Craig had gotten a good look at the donor site on her computer. Her indigo jeans would work if the temperature dropped when the sun went down, but by then, she could have a very embarrassing heat rash going on. She knew it was an open-air concert and that the weather could stay sultry, or drop from blazing hot to a chilly 60 degrees in the space of a few hours.

  She had to admit that she was also worried about what to wear in case she ran into Hayden. What would she have worn if it were Hayden instead of Craig who was picking her up? A screen-printed T-shirt and capris with sandals and a lightweight zippered sweatshirt for the evening. Rain and Hayden no longer felt the need to impress each other. It wasn’t a bad thing—it was just familiar. Comfortable.

  She decided to go for comfort and dressed up her simple T-shirt and capris with dangly earrings and a necklace. As it turned out, Craig dressed for comfort too, and she pocketed the earrings when she saw him come up the driveway.

  At the amphitheater, she scanned the crowd to the point of distraction and finally quit after Craig asked her who she was looking for. She never saw Hayden. They had a nice time, but Rain established a comfortable distance between them from the start and he didn’t even try to hold her hand. He must have known about Hayden and was smart enough to figure out that she wasn’t ready for a new relationship yet. She wouldn’t even let him walk her to her door, but insisted that she could just hop out. She gave a wave as she went in and closed the door behind her.

  She dropped her purse on the counter, kicked off her shoes, and set out some catfood for Noah. He preened as she put a dollop of mashed salmon into his bowl. She reached down and stroked him as he dove into it. “Well, that’s over,” she said.

  Would it get easier to be with other guys that she really didn’t have a “thing” for, or should she wait until she found someone who made her feel the way she did with Hayden? Did lightning ever strike twice?

  If she wanted a baby, she decided, she may have to settle for making lightning of her own.

  Rain breathed a sigh of relief to find that this time the waiting room at Dr. Lazenby’s office was devoid of women in their third trimesters. She explained to the doctor about her desire for a child, her recent change to single status, and lack of candidates for fatherhood. Since it was determined that she would need a sperm donor and artificial insemination, the doctor recommended a fertility clinic that she knew had good results. Dr. Lazenby gave her a physical exam to rule out obvious reasons why she wouldn’t be able to conceive and carry a child to full term. She told her to begin charting her ovulating cycles by taking her basal temperature each morning before she got out of bed. In conjunction with that, she suggested that Rain buy ovulation predictor kits (OVPs) that tested the levels of luteinizing hormone in her urine and were more accurate than taking her temperature alone. She gave Rain a lab slip for a complete blood workup and said she would forward the results to whatever clinic Rain decided to use.

  Gathering this information in advance would help her to expedite things. Dr. Lazenby gave her some literature to read and told her to go ahead and call for an appointment with a fertility clinic, since there could be a waiting list.

  Rain left the doctor’s office feeling a mixture of excitement and frustration. At last she was making progress on having a baby, but if it took months just to get an appointment at the fertility clinic, taking her body temperature would be like slogging through wet cement, and she felt that time was not on her side.

  She stopped at a drugstore on her way to work where she didn’t normally shop to purchase a basal thermometer and an ovulation kit. She placed the kit on the floor of her backseat and covered the bag with a blanket she pulled from the trunk. Later, on her lunch hour, she checked out the clinic Dr. Lazenby had suggested and was encouraged by their success rates, although their prices were a shock. She set up an appointment for mid-October, which fortunately, was a cancellation that had occurred just that morning. Rain wondered whether the cancellation had been the result of a successful pregnancy, or of a woman accepting defeat.

  Rain found herself making mental notes about the guys she saw at work. It was always possible that she could save some money by getting one of them to agree to be a donor instead of paying lots of money to the cryobank. She tried to stay open-minded about which ones had the potential to be a good donor. There was Luke from Accounting, who was attractive and smart and moving to the top of her list, until she cruised by his cubicle to find him playing Warcraft online during his lunch hour. David was a junior attorney and his stock was rising within the firm, from what she’d overheard, but then she saw him with a Spice-girl-type stick in three-inch heels and decided he probably wasn’t the right type. Kyle, the FedEx delivery guy, was a hunk and obviously spent a lot of time at the gym, but he had the imprint of an absent wedding band on his left hand and a roving eye. He was either freshly caught-and-released, or was a shark cruising shallow waters.

  There was also Craig. He was sweet, and she’d had a nice time at the concert. He wasn’t on the “no” list, and she couldn’t really find any objections to him except for the fact that he was boring. On a color scale, he was a gray winter’s day. He told her about his Saturday fly tying class and his favorites, the woolly bugger and the Montana nymph. They worked best for trout, pike, and walleyes. At Starbucks, he preferred frou-frou macchiato drinks to a good cup of Kona or a strong Caffe Verona, and he bought his clothes online because he couldn’t stand to shop at the Galleria. Ever. The worst part was that she sensed that he was interested in her. He would interpret being approached as a donor to be an overture for a relationship. If he agreed, he would want contact with the baby, she was sure. She wasn’t in it for the relationship—she was in it for the baby. Plain and simple.

  She stopped by the mall on her way home from work and looked at the new fall fashions at Macy’s. Soon the weather would be turning cool again, and she saw some things she liked, but reasoned that she shouldn’t spend the money in light of her tenuous financial situation.

  She wandered down to the baby department to see what was new. She found an adorable pink sweater in a delicate knit with rosebuds, and a matching hat. She ran her hand over the soft weave and breathed in its scent. She could imagine baby powder and saltines. Maybe Cheerios. She took it to the counter and charged it to her Visa card. The clerk exclaimed that it was the prettiest sweater they had, and she carefully wrapped it in tissue before bagging it up. She asked Rain if it was for her, and she answered that it was for a friend.

  When she got home, she went into the spare bedroom and opened the dresser. In the top drawer, neatly folded, lay pale yellow baby blankets, onesies with ducks and bunnies, and dresses with tiny collars. Soft terrycloth toys, designer baby shoes in supple pink leather, and a Hello Kitty pacifier were tucked in between the stacks. She pulled the new sweater from the Macy’s bag and pulled away the tissue paper. She refolded it gently so that the tiny buttons would show in the front and carefully placed it in the stack. Reverently, she closed the drawer.

  It had only been a little over three weeks since Dylan left for college, but Bebe felt a surge of joy at the prospect of having one of her boys at home again. The Friday afternoon before Labor Day was slow, so she left work early. Next Tuesday morning, the fun would begin. Someone’s pet always ended up with allergy issues, foxtails, or injuries after a long weekend of fun.

  When Dylan’s car pulled into the dr
iveway, Bebe was taking a pan of brownies out of the oven. They were his favorites, and made the house smell wonderful.

  She went out to help him carry in his stuff, and hugged him hard, planting a kiss on his cheek. He hugged back one-armed and popped open his trunk. Inside were two baskets full of dirty laundry. He deposited them in the laundry room before following the scent of chocolate into the kitchen where the brownies sat cooling on the counter.

  He poured a glass of milk, positioned himself at the counter in front of the plate of brownies, and complained about the traffic he’d encountered. “I think I’ll wait until 8:00 to leave Monday night after the traffic has cleared out.”

  “That reminds me,” Bebe said. “Grandma’s planning a barbeque for Monday.”

  He winced. “I told Tyler that I’d go with him to Nicole’s on Monday. Her parents are having a cookout and a pool party, and Zach and some other guys are home from school. I kind of promised to go.”

  “Oh, okay.” Bebe was not so much disappointed that he wouldn’t be going to her mom’s, as the fact that she wouldn’t be seeing much of him all Monday. “Don’t worry about it. But you should call your grandma sometime this weekend to say hello.”

  He agreed, and after he had downed four brownies and the milk, he put in a load of laundry and kicked off his shoes in front of the television.

  It turned out that he had plans for that night also, but they insisted that he at least have dinner with them first. He quickly agreed, especially since they were paying.

  He came in late after seeing the movie with Tyler, said good night, and headed for his room. It seemed odd to Bebe how fast she and Neil had gotten used to being alone after Dylan left for school. Now his belongings were strewn between the family room, the kitchen, and his bedroom, as if he were reestablishing his territory.