After the Rain Read Online Free PDF

for Friday-night poker games. Then they’d rented it out again. When they ran out of renters it was converted back to a storeroom. Ace rubbed his eyes. Since he and Darlene split up he’d been storing himself here.
    He stood up and tested his balance. He had talked Darlene into no lawyers—a friendly separation and division of resources, she getting the lion’s share, of course, plus alimony and child support. Like in the old joke about fires, floods, and twisters. Hurricane Darlene got the house in the end. She promptly sold the house and moved back to Bismarck, where they had malls and designer coffee.
    Downstairs, he heard Gordy working at the hyper rate of a meth-addicted beaver—stacking crates of booze for pickup on the loading dock in the back of the storeroom.
    Gordy Riker was the dark side of the relentless prairie work ethic. He labored to consolidate a corner of the smuggling in the county. Ace’s dad’s network was his present coup. Ace didn’t care to continue the family franchise, so Gordy worked hard, selling off the equipment, cleaning out the last of the inventory. Through hard work and attention to detail, he was inheriting the network of Canadian drivers who ran the booze and cigarettes north, and folding them into his plan to bring drugs south. Ace just signed off, took his cut, and sent the rest to Dad in Florida. The plan was to sell everything. After four generations, the Shusters were leaving North Dakota.
    The feeling came back, a warm honey spiral in his chest, a sensation of sparkly gold dust— snap —just like that, in his fingertips.
    Lucky.
    But reluctantly now, reality came creeping in and he admitted to himself that he started every day like this, wanting to believe that something different would happen. Something just for him.
    He got up and went into the shower and sloughed off the top layer of hangover in strong jets of hot water. Eyes shut, he shampooed and shaved by feel. Then he toweled off in front of the wash basin. The mirror was a murky cloud of steam, like his memory of last night. He rubbed a tiny circle in the fogged glass. Just enough to see one bloodshot blue eye staring back at him, like coming from way off there in some deep shit. Which pretty much summed it up.
    But thirty minutes into the day, the good feeling accompanied him into the small living room. His space was sparse and tidy; short on furniture and long on books. As a young man he became a dedicated reader; during a twelve-month stay at the James River Correctional Center at Jamestown, the state farm east of Bismarck. Wrapped in a towel, he sat down at his desk, opened the middle drawer, and took out two items; just like he’d done every morning for the last month. It was his little comic ceremony, which, nevertheless, contained a dark grain of truth.
    First: he placed the well-worn Vintage paperback on the desk. Albert Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus.
    Second: next to the book he placed the old .38-caliber pistol Dad used to keep under the bar. The pistol was not real clean but it was real loaded.
    He open the thumbed pages to the first chapter and read the first couple sentences: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. ”
    The lucky feeling was still cooking in his chest as he closed the book, so he put it and the pistol back in the drawer and stood up.

    Ace dressed in faded jeans, a faded red T-shirt with the neck and sleeves scissored out, and a pair of old running shoes. He came down the stairs into the main room of the bar, which was a dogleg that wrapped around the old kitchen, now an office space. The booths had been removed and sold to a new malt shop on Main Street. The place had been stripped bare, just an empty mirror and three bar stools. One table and some chairs remained in the main room where Ace usually had his coffee and read his morning paper. And