Chapter 9: Rain in the Barn

The storm came in on the sixteenth night, and it found the hole in the barn roof.

I woke to the sound of it and ran out in Martha's slicker with a flashlight.

Water was coming through over the apple crates in a thick, steady stream.

Orson was already up on the loft ladder with a tarp and a hammer, soaked to the skin.

"Hold the light!" he shouted.

I held the light.

He nailed the tarp over the beam in six hard strokes, and the stream slowed to a drip.

Then he came down the ladder one rung at a time, and I saw that his shirt was plastered to him.

He peeled it off and wrung it out on the floor.

The light shook in my hand, and I did not know why.

His back was broad and wet and marked with a long white scar I had never seen.

He turned around.

"Thank you," he said. "You can lower that."

I lowered it.

We stood in the dark barn with the rain loud on the tin.

I was breathing hard from the run.

He was breathing hard too, and his eyes were on my mouth.

I saw it, and I reported it, because that was our arrangement.

"You're looking at my mouth."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because it's raining and you're here and I'm tired of pretending I'm not looking."

He said it plainly.

The pulse in his throat was going fast.

I tried to be fair about what I knew.

I could not feel wanting.

I could only remember it.

I knew what my body had done at eighteen, standing outside a library.

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