I Will Send Rain Read Online Free PDF

and looked out at the old farmers who were leaning against the post office, taking cover from the heat under the gutter’s thin stripe of shade. The rain gutter. A cruel irony these days. He used to see Jonas Woodrow out there biting his fingernails, rubbing the scar where his pinkie had been.
    The light in Jack’s office held the dust like a snow globe, like the one he’d given Charlotte a lifetime ago—Chicago seemed impossibly distant now—a sleigh covered in buttercream snow, made in Germany, bought in that little shop on Michigan Avenue. The chime of her laugh when she shook it in her slender hands. That clarion sound, beautiful, mirthless. Her upturned nose and perfect marcelled waves.
    So unlike Annie. She had one lock of hair that fell onto her forehead no matter how many times she pushed it back. Her laugh, always surprisingly gruff, as if she was letting you in on a secret. She called him Mayor—true, he was the mayor, but—with a shimmer in her eye that he couldn’t quite read. Ever since he’d found himself momentarily alone with her at the church bazaar a year before, Annie had become something to him. He had only ever seen her with her family, an attractive woman, someone else’s wife. But there, sitting alone behind a sun-sprayed table, neatening her stacks of preserves, he was at once struck by the angles of her face, her bewitching half-smile, as if he were seeing her for the first time. Would you look at her, he thought.
    â€œLet me guess,” she said. She closed her eyes and touched her temples. “Strawberry.”
    He stood there dumbly smiling.
    â€œI’m right, aren’t I?” she asked.
    Was she flirting with him? He used to have an easy time of it back in Chicago. Before he had set his sights on Charlotte, there had been other city girls trying out their newfound independence. Flamboyant Helen with her trousers and dark curls who had, for a short time, set his heart ablaze. But out here was different. Early on he’d courted a sweet substitute schoolteacher named Laura for a few months, but his feelings had fallen flat. It had been so long since he had felt that uptick of his pulse, the charge of a small interaction, the warmth of a body close to his.
    â€œIndeed you are, Mrs. Bell,” he said.
    â€œLucky for you there’s a two-for-one mayoral special,” she’d said.
    He’d bought six and lined them up along his windowsill.
    â€œA giant ball of string,” Styron said, slapping the desk and startling Jack. Styron, wiry and ruddy-cheeked, took to his duties with the energy and fervor of a missionary. They were trying to figure out a way to shore up the badly listing local economy, lure people to Mulehead, a place where apparently they couldn’t even get people to stay. “Make it as big as a house.”
    â€œWho gives a mole’s whisker about string?” Jack said.
    â€œWe make it a tourist destination. Tell people it’s something to see. You know, like those faces they’re carving in that mountain in South Dakota. Now that’s inspired. I wish I had thought of that.”
    Styron was only a pretend frontiersman, his family trust a not-so-secret secret. At twenty-two, he’d come out here after Dartmouth College, on a whim, to start a newspaper although he didn’t even know how to set type. After meeting Jack, who had been a real newspaperman back in Chicago, Styron saw that out here, he could think bigger. He could be mayor. He could be the one to single-handedly transform Mulehead into a thriving town. All before the age of thirty.
    â€œThe land of blowing dust,” Jack said. “How about that?”
    Styron ignored him.
    â€œGet a sign up on the highway. Get someone to declare it official. The World’s Largest Ball of String. I’d stop the car for that. Just to say I’d seen it, you know?”
    â€œGood Lord.” Jack laughed despite his weariness. It