Authors: Brandon Shire
The Value Of Rain
| The Value Of Rain |
| Shire, Brandon |
| TPG Books (2011) |
The Value of Rain
b
y
Brandon Shire
Copyright ©
2011 Brandon Shire
Cover Photo:
Wojciech W
olak
The Practical Group
, LLC
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, people, places, schools, media, incidents, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN
-13
: 978-1-
467990240
ISBN-10: 1467990248
In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.
Pat Conroy
“The Prince of Tides”
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
Oscar Wilde
Contents
Chapter Seventeen
-
February 1991
Chapter Eighteen
-
February 1991
Chapter Nineteen
-
February 1991
One
February 1991
There are dead people in my head. They keep squirming around and pulling at me just when I expect that things will get better; just when I hope that life will improve somehow. But it never happens like that, not in my world. Not in anyone’s really. I think that we all just kind of hope that somewhere amidst the flotsam in this shitty river we call life there will be a savior that comes along and lifts us from the stream of our relatives, our sanctity and our moroseness. It’s not religion or god I’m talking about; it’s that one soul that leaves its mark so deeply imprinted on you that your very breath seems short when it’s gone.
What makes that impression?
What soul has that much aura?
More importantly, how can you replace it?
I don’t think I have that answer any more, and I wonder if I ever
did; if
anybody ever did.
*****
I stood at the foot of my mother’s bed as she lay dying. I had no re
morse; it was all I could do
to
not
hurry her death with my own bare hands. I had come through every obstacle she’d erected, every barrier she’d put up before me, every indignity she’d laid upon me. And I was still here.
I looked at her worn walnut features, her tarred over eyes and wondered… could it have been any different; could we have ever been
that
family?
“No,” I said as I sighed out loud and looked around for the first time.
The room hadn’t changed in my twenty year absence. It still had the same red felt wallpaper, the same early French relics, and the same floral carpet. Charlotte’s divan was still littered with laced pillows, and her vanity was still covered with the same ancient crystal decanters she’d worried me over as a child. With the exception of the indignifying stainless steel of he
r new hospital bed, it seemed
she had finally accomplished the old New Orleans beau monde
she’d always
envisioned herself belonging to.
“You’re here. Good. Don’t let them put their hands on me,” she said suddenly, as if we didn’t have all those iron-hammered years of antipathy between us. The hands she referred to belong to my relatives, whom I silently passed in the kitchen when I came into the house.
“Who am I?” I asked. It seemed a reasonable question since she hadn’t opened her eyes yet.
But she never answered. The flat mirror of her eyes said enough when
it
found me hidden in the shadows by the window.
I breathed in deep, and loudly, and floated my nose in her direction. “Hmm. Death. Fear. Do you smell them, Charlotte?” I asked her slowly.
“From your direction, yes. You’ve returned for your inheritance?” she asked me.
I almost chuckled. “Exactly right, Charlotte. I came to get all this French shit you whored yourself out for. I think I’ll burn it in my cardboard mansion behind the VFW with your effigy.”
Her fingertips came up slightly from the bed sheets to stop me as if she was wearied by the conversation. “Well, it’s yours anyway. Do what you want with it.”
I grunted in disinterest. She had nothing I wanted but her final sense of peace. If the Buddhists were right, I wanted her next life to be as painful and mired as mine had been. Then maybe we could continue this charade through the next few lifetimes and really put a hurt on each other.
“Don’t you think it’s time we mend our bridges?” she asked me.
“No.”
I turned to the window, opened its vertical slit and sucked in some fresh air before she could suffocate me with this ludicrous bid at a long lost peace. I hadn’t come here to attempt the familial harmony we’d never had in the past, nor to forgive her for what she’d done. She knew this.
“Then why’d you come back?” she demanded.
“Because you wanted me to.”
“I never said...” she began.
I made a sudden move to leave, betting that she believed that it wasn’t necessary for me to be here; that she would think that I’d concluded that we could end this debacle if I could just sit outside in the snowy fog, pack my good-lie smile away, and simply wait for her to die.