Rain (Hudson 1)

It was my grandmother's last will and testament.

I shoved it back as neatly as I could and put it aside. Then I opened my door enough to hear anyone walking by and waited until I heard Victoria leave. As soon as she left, I grabbed the folder and returned to Grandmother Hudson's bedroom.

She looked up expectantly and I held out the document. "Did Victoria see you get this?"

"No."

"Good," she said. "Give me the phone."

"Shouldn't you be resting now, Grandmother?"

"What this whole thing has told me is I will be resting soon enough," she said firmly. "And I'm not the sort who would relish leaving something undone. Give me the phone."

I did as she asked. She waved me off as she made her call.

Rich people are too complicated, I thought, and for a while I actually longed to be back in the Projects, sitting in my room, worrying about nothing more than what I would make us all for dinner.

I didn't see Corbette the next day until the rehearsal. Despite our rendezvous on Saturday, he didn't behave any differently toward me. No one would guess we had kissed and been intimate. Whatever he had hoped would be between us, he wanted to keep secret. He did have an impish grin on his face when we performed, however, and that annoyed me. Mr. Bufurd stopped us continually to tell me I should try to be softer, more wide-eyed about life. The other girls had big grins on their faces and laughed together. I could almost hear them whisper, "Can she be softer? How can a girl like this ever be innocent and sweet?"

"You've had no trouble getting this before, Rain. Concentrate, relax, take a deep breath and try again," Mr. Bufurd urged.

I looked away, swallowed back my tears, sucked in my breath and turned again to face Corbette and say my lines. I tried to look past him, to really not think of him as Corbette Adams, but as the character in the play, as George Gibbs, who was just as sweet and innocent as I was supposed to be. Finally, it worked well enough to please Mr. Bufurd.

"That's it. That's more like it," he declared.

I was grateful when rehearsal ended; it had been the most exhausting yet.

"I told you we should practice more," Corbette whispered in my ear. "I'll call you later." He started after his buddies from Sweet William. I watched him go up the aisle and then I called to him.

"What's up?" he asked.

"Can I see you a minute, please?" I asked. He grinned at his friends, said something that made them all laugh, and then came sauntering down the aisle toward me.

Audrey looked my way and then quickly turned and hurried out. Corbette and I were the only ones left in the theater.

"You want to meet tonight?" he asked quickly.

"No. I want to know why you told me that terrible lie," I said.

"What terrible lie?"

"About your younger brother," I said.

He stared at me, his eyes blinking rapidly for a moment.

"It wasn't a lie," he insisted. He did it with such sincerity, I wondered if Audrey had been wrong after all.

"You said he had died when he was four from a blood disease. Isn't he still alive?"

"You went and asked people about it?" he asked, grimacing with pain.

"No, but someone told me he was in an institution and he was still alive and he had Down Syndrome. Isn't your mother on the charity board raising money for treatment and research?"

He looked back up the aisle and then he looked at me and sat with his head down, his hands clutched between his knees. He spoke slowly and toward the floor.

"When my little brother was four, they decided to institutionalize him. They treated it as if he had died. We had a big argument about it. Yes," he said looking up at me with angry red eyes, "my mother is an executive in that charity, but she's an executive in a number of charities, I told you. She does it to ease her own conscience and cover the fact that she couldn't stand people seeing him in our home, people knowing she had a child with Down Syndrome, and it does come from blood. It has to do with chromosomes and they're in the blood, so whoever opened their big mouth, doesn't know anything."

He looked down again.