Prayers for Rain (Kenzie & Gennaro 5)

You can sit on one of the prettiest streets in the country, and if you’ve been sitting long enough, it begins to look ugly. Angie and I had been sitting on Beacon Street, halfway between Exeter and Fairfield, for two hours, the mailboxes fifty yards up on our right, and in that time I’d had plenty of opportunity to appreciate the dusky charcoal town houses and black wrought-iron trellises hanging beneath bright white dormer windows. I’d enjoyed the sharp summer smell of abundant flora in the air and the way the fat raindrops dripped through the trees and clattered on the pavement like coins. I could tell you how many of the buildings had roof gardens or just flower boxes jutting from windowsills, which were occupied by businessmen and -women, tennis players, joggers, pet owners, and artists running out with paint-splattered shirts only to return ten minutes later with Charrette bags filled with sable brushes.

Unfortunately, after about twenty minutes, I didn’t really care.

A mailman passed us, bulging bag bouncing off his outer thigh, shrouded in rain gear, and Angie said, “Hell with it. Let’s just get out and ask him.”

“Sure,” I said. “Not like he’d mention to Wesley that people were asking about him.”

The mailman climbed some slick stairs with careful steps, reached the landing, and swung his bag around to the front of his thighs and dug into it.

“His name’s not Wesley,” Angie reminded me.

“It’s the only name I got right now,” I said. “You know how much I hate change.”

Angie drummed her fingers on the dashboard, then said, “Shit, and I hate waiting,” and tipped her head out the window, let the rain fall on her face.

The serpentine twist of her legs and waist coupled with the arch of her back as she did so made me recall images of her from our days as lovers that made the car seem about four times as small, and I turned my head and stared back through the windshield at the street.

When she pulled herself back in, she said, “When’s the last time we had a sunny day?”

“July,” I said.

“El Niño, you think?”

“Global warming.”

“Signs of a second shift in the polar ice caps,” she offered.

“Beginnings of a biblical flood. Break out the ark.”

“If you were Noah and God gave you the head’s up, what would you bring?”

“On said ark?”

“ Sí.”

“A VCR and all my Marx Brothers movies. Couldn’t survive long without my Stones or Nirvana CDs, I suppose.”

“It’s an ark ,” she said. “Where you going to get electricity at the end of the world?”

“Portable generators aren’t an option?”

She shook her head.

“Shit,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d want to live then.”

“People,” she said wearily. “Who would you take?”

“Oh, people ,” I said. “You should have made that clear. Without the Marx Brothers tapes and the tunes? They’d have to be people who knew how to party.”

“Goes without saying.”

“Let’s see,” I said. “Chris Rock to keep me laughing. Shirley Manson to sing…”

“Not Jagger?”

I shook my head hard. “No way. He’s too good-looking. He’d hurt my chances with the chicks.”

“Oh, there’ll be chicks?”

“Gotta be chicks,” I said.

“And you the only guy?”

“I’m going to share?” I frowned.

“Men.” She shook her head.

“What? It’s my ark. I built the damn thing.”

“I’ve seen your carpentry skills. It won’t get out of the harbor.” She chuckled, turned on the seat. “So what about me? What about Bubba and Devin and Oscar and Richie and Sherilynn? You’re just going to leave us to drown while you play Robinson Crusoe with the bimbos?”

I turned, caught the malicious gaiety in her eyes. Here we were stuck on a grindingly boring stakeout, having one of our more inane conversations, and suddenly the job was fun again.

“I didn’t realize you wanted to come along for the ride,” I said.

“I’m going to drown?”

“So,” I said, and shifted on the seat, brought one leg up off the floor, and our knees touched. “You’re saying if I was one of the last guys on the planet…”

She laughed. “You still wouldn’t have a chance with me.”

But she didn’t pull away when she said it. She moved her head in another inch.

I could suddenly feel it in my chest, a cool funnel of air that loosened as it twirled-loosened everything that had been clenched and sore since Angie walked out of my apartment with the last of her suitcases in hand.

The gaiety left her eyes and was replaced by something warmer, but unsettled, still questioning.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“What?”

“About what happened in the woods last year. About that child.”

She held my eyes. “I’m not sure any longer that I was right.”

“Why’s that?”

“Maybe nobody has the right to play God. Look at the Dawes.”

I smiled.

“What’s funny?”

“Just…” I took the fingers of her right hand in mine, and she blinked, but didn’t pull them away. “Just that over the last nine months I’ve been seeing it more your way. Maybe it was a relative situation. Maybe we should have left her there. Five years old, and she was happy.”

She shrugged, squeezed my hand. “We’ll never know, will we?”

“About Amanda McCready?”

“About anything. I think sometimes when we’re old and gray, will we finally be settled about the things we’ve done, all the choices we made, or will we look back and think about all the things we could’ve done?”

I kept my head very still, my eyes on hers, waiting for the searching to settle, for her to see whatever answers she was looking for in my face.

She tilted her head slightly, and her lips parted a tenth of an inch.

And a white post office truck sluiced through the rain on my left, glided in front of us, clicked on its hazards, and double-parked in front of the mailboxes fifty yards ahead.

Angie pulled away and I turned forward in my seat.

A man in a clear, hooded slicker over his blue and white postal uniform jumped from the right side of the truck. He held a white plastic carton in his hands, its contents protected from the rain by a plastic trash bag taped loosely on top. The man came around to the front of the mailboxes, placed the crate by his feet, and used a key to open the green mailbox.