Cold Rain Read Online Free PDF

dismounted and walked through.
    Beyond the pasture, we followed the grassy lane that circled a field of corn. We were still a long way from any road, farther still from other houses. We had a small wood giving us some late afternoon shade. There was just enough breeze to keep us cool. It seemed like the perfect time to talk about marijuana, so I gave a whoop in the direction of the blue sky. Jezebel skittered like a race was about to start. Ahab lugged it along like an old hand. Touch his sides, he could still go. Otherwise, he just let folks make noise if that’s what they wanted.
    ‘It’s good to be sober!’ I shouted.
    The hard clay at our feet seemed suddenly very interesting to Lucy. ‘Is it hard? Quitting?’ She met my gaze at the end of her question, curious, nothing more.
    I had been sober two years, just before I started writing Jinx . I had quit for no other reason than I really liked to drink and I wanted to prove to myself I still had control of my choices, and because Jinx, a stand-in for my old man, didn’t drink. Once I was off the stuff a week, I felt ten years younger. So I stayed off. I called it my one-step program, and counted myself lucky I didn’t carry demons on my back like most of the heavy drinkers I knew.
    ‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘The payback comes when I can look at you and your mother and I don’t have to feel I’ve let you down. Then it’s not hard at all.’
    ‘You’ve never let me down, Dave.’
    I could think of a few times when I had sent her out to feed the dogs and horses because I was still in town wrapped up in some important barroom talk, but instead of recounting my own failings, I started in on Walt Beery, our family’s poster child for the evils of drink. ‘Three days,’ I said, ‘and to save his life he couldn’t make it four.’ That was it. That was my talk on addictions great and small. Tubs would have mentioned his friend, poor soul, now locked up in an asylum because of that one joint laced with PCP, but I wasn’t the slimiest parent to have walked the earth, so I kept it simple and let Lucy work out the implications on her own. All things considered, I was fairly satisfied with myself, but Molly said later it was lame.
    I expect it was, but I doubt anyone could have turned Lucy from the course she had chosen for herself that fall. She was growing up. She was suddenly something more than cute. She was, without quite comprehending it, a force of nature. Words can do nothing against that.
     
    TWO DAYS LATER MY sabbatical came to its inevitable and tragic end, and I was sitting in a faculty meeting, the first I had attended in over fifteen months.
    There were new faces and new procedures in place, but it felt like the same-old-same-old to me. A couple of days after that I met a new generation of students ready for the agony I was paid to deliver. The trouble was I wasn’t ready.
    I had always liked going back to school in the fall, both as a student and as a prof. This time I had trouble adjusting. It had been too long: two summers and one academic year felt like a lifetime. I had developed new routines. I had gotten used to solitude. I liked staying in the country far away from people, especially academics. I had grown accustomed to silence and working the day through without a single crisis. If I wanted to scream profanities the horses never blushed.
    The dogs wouldn’t dream of turning me in for a pat on the butt or a careless remark. Suddenly, all that was gone. Students were there with their expectations.
    Colleagues needed a shoulder to cry on. People crowded into my life waiting for me to say something glib or intelligent or politically astute, and I discovered to my dismay I didn’t want it anymore.
    My teaching, like my office desk, had a patina of dust covering it, as well. It would eventually get cleaned up and straightened out, the teaching and my desk, but not without effort and time. By the end of the first week, things were still not right,