Father of the Rain Read Online Free PDF

grandfather talks to Mavis, never seeming to notice the hot flush of her flabby, downy cheeks. And then he reaches into his pocket for the key and steps over to box No. 5 and I stare down at the wooden planks of the floor until I hear the box click shut, my heart leaping in my body until I see that there’s nothing from Neal, and then it slows slowly down.
    At the end of July, my brother comes to Lake Chigham with his new girlfriend, Heidi.
    “Hermey!” he says, and picks me up in a big squeeze. He’s a little smelly and unshaven. “Hermey’s gotten so tall and even more fluffy-haired.” He calls me Hermey because I remind him of the little toymaker who wants to be a dentist on
Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer
.
    “It’s the humidity,” I say, trying to mush down my frizz.
    He introduces Heidi. She has long smooth hair and clear green eyes. He met her at the end of June at a party in Somerville, where he’s living for the summer.
    “What day in June?” I ask him later, after dinner.
    “I don’t know. It was a Monday night.”
    “The twenty-fourth.” She hits my brother softly.
    “Ow,” he says, not meaning it.
    “The night before we left Myrtle Street,” I say. Everything for me is divided there, the before and the after.
    “I’m going to marry her, Daley,” he says on the couch after dinner, when she goes to the bathroom. He puts his hands on his head and presses down. “Fuck. I’m going to marry her.”
    When she comes back he clutches her tight, paws her hair, whispers something, and laughs into her neck. I’ve never seen him with a girl. He always only came home with other boys. They’d stay in his room all weekend, playing their guitars and rolling what looked like dirt into little squares of tissue paper. They listened to records I’d never heard of, cleaned every scrap of food out of the fridge and pantry, and then disappeared in a car until next time. But with Heidi, Garvey is very different. He’s soft and mild and always asking her what she thinks or what she wants.
    “He’s really fallen in love,” my mother says.
    We lie in our twin beds and listen to them murmuring in Heidi’s room. My mother tells me about her first love. She met him here one summer. He was visiting her cousin Jeremy. I know Jeremy. He looks like an old man already with tough leathery skin. He always wants a few kids to go out sailing with him, but he barks at you if you pull the wrong line on his boat. Jeremy’s friend was named Spaulding. He spied my mother from Jeremy’s porch.
    “‘You’re a pretty thang,’ he said to me, just like that,
thang
because he was from Georgia and that made me curious. I was fourteen. I climbed right up onto the porch. The first night we went out I told him I felt like I was in a novel. That’s the way he made me feel. It’s the way I always feel when I fall in love.”
    Garvey and Heidi have stopped talking and are making other noises. I know what they’re doing but it sounds like they’re both jumping on the bed, which I’m never allowed to do.
    “We’re all lucky my father is losing his hearing,” my mother says.
    The next day we go to one of the islands in the middle of the lake with a bucket of fried chicken. On the picnic blanket my brother licks the grease off Heidi’s fingers until my grandmother reminds them of their napkins. Then they go for a walk around the island. My grandparents walk in the other direction, shoes on, arms linked, leaning into each other as they speak. My mother, in her yellow bikini and enormous sunglasses, reads the newspaper, talking to it like she always does. “A five-minute-and-eighteen-second gap in the latest tape. How shocking.”
    For a split second I think it’s my father on the front of the paper —the stoop, the heavy eyebrows, the small eyes—but it’s Nixon, waving from the metal stairs of his airplane.
    Late that night, Garvey, Heidi, and I go for a walk all the way to the main road where the sky opens up and there are