Hard Rain Read Online Free PDF Page A

added, “What are you up to these days? Want to come for a sail sometime? My boat’s called Schlepper .” In the background, the woman shouted, “It cost two hundred g’s.”
    â€œDid you try calling him?” Jessie said.
    â€œPat? He wasn’t home. But hey. Stop worrying. He’s not a child.”
    That was the point in question, all right, but Jessie just said, “Kate is.”
    Pause. She wasn’t being fun. “They need me up top,” Norman said. “Problem with a stuck cork.”
    The woman laughed uncontrollably. “Good-bye, Norman,” Jessie said.
    â€œI meant it about that sail.”
    Jessie put down the phone and went upstairs. She opened the front door and stood in the doorway. Street lamps made greenish pools in the night. She crossed her arms. 9:21. Flash, flash.
    After a while, Jessie heard a squeaking sound. The gum-cracking mother went by again, pushing her little Buddy Hackett in his stroller. This time they brought tears to Jessie’s eyes. “Shit,” she said, angry at herself. The gum-cracking mother jerked around, startled. Jessie went inside and slammed the door.
    She dialed Pat again. “Hi—”
    From the cupboard over the refrigerator, Jessie took a bottle of brandy and poured herself a glass. She sipped it, leaning against the counter. It didn’t calm her down. She drank some more.
    Her gaze fell on a piece of notepaper, stuck on the refrigerator door:
    My Mom
    My mom is like a turtle shell ,
    so beautiful and strong ,
    My mom has eyes like oceans ,
    that know what’s right and wrong .
    â€œGood use of simile,” Miss Fotheringham had written at the bottom in red pencil, “but not developed enough. B–.” Jessie wondered what Cameo’s poem was like.
    She put down her drink. It was making her light-headed already. Perhaps she should eat. She made an omelette, set the table for one, sat down, didn’t eat. Instead she thought about her marriage and what had happened to it. “That’s simple,” Barbara Appleman, her friend and attorney, had said. “His conscience is in his schlong. He refuses to grow up.”
    But that wasn’t fair. Who was Barbara, or who was she, to say what growing up was? And, like drowning to a deep-sea diver, casual sex was an occupational hazard of Pat’s career. But in the end, Jessie hadn’t been able to accept it. He’d debased his sexual currency. She’d frozen to his touch. Their lovemaking had stopped.
    Now she had Kate. She had her work. It wasn’t enough.
    Much later, Jessie realized she’d been staring at the omelette, staring until it looked like imitation food in the window of a Japanese restaurant. 3:00 A . M . Still flashing.
    Her index finger jabbed out the digits of Pat’s number. Cuteness waited at the end of the line. “Hi. No one’s here right now, but just leave a message and we’ll buzz you back. Promise.”
    â€œThis is my message,” Jessie said, her voice rising into realms that cuteness never knew. “You were expected here at three this afternoon. Where is Kate? Where the hell are—” She checked herself, swallowed the rest of what she had to say. It was a physical effort. “Just call me,” she said, in as toneless a voice as she could manage, and hung up.
    Jessie went upstairs, undressed, climbed into bed. She heard a small animal run across the roof. She heard a dog bark. She heard a plane fly overhead. But she didn’t hear the phone.

5
    Jessie slept: a short, tiring, anxious sleep. A dream flashed by. In it her womb turned to a block of ice, and Philip said, “No one coughs in the movies without dying in the last reel.”
    Jessie sat up, wide-eyed, shivering. 8:27. She got out of bed and went down the hall to Kate’s room. The sunlight that slanted through the window every morning pooled as it always did on the quilted bed; but today it