Chapter 5: Gutters

Alister came at eight on Tuesday morning with an aluminum ladder on his shoulder.

I watched him from the porch with my coffee.

He set the feet on the grass beside the downspout, tested it with his boot, and looked up at the gutter.

"I do these every October," he said. "Your mother wouldn't let me take a dime. She said I'd earned the coffee."

"You did her gutters."

"For about nine years. She made a good cup."

He climbed.

I stood below him with one hand on the ladder, because someone should.

Handfuls of wet leaves came down past my face and landed on the lawn.

It began to rain at nine.

It was a soft, gray, steady rain, and it ran off his jacket, and he went on working.

I thought about my mother on this porch, handing a boy a coffee she had made too strong, and not telling me.

I thought about a man who had nothing he could say to the daughter, so he cleaned the gutters.

When he came down his hair was flat, his sleeves were black, and there was a leaf stuck on his cheek.

He stopped on the last rung, which put his face even with mine.

"That's the last of it," he said.

I took the leaf off his cheek with my thumb.

His eyes did not leave my face.

"It's ten o'clock in the morning," I said.

"It is," he said.

"There's no one I'm angry at. Not on this street, not in this rain."

"Odalys," he said.

"You said to ask you on a night when I'm not angry at somebody else."

The rain was running into my collar.

"It's a morning. I'm asking."

He came down the last step.

He did not touch me yet. He stood with his hands at his sides and water running off his jaw.

"I've never broken the rule," he said.

"I know. I laughed at you," I said.

"I'm going to break it now."

"Good," I said.

He put one hand on the side of my face. His palm was cold, and then it was not.

When he kissed me it was slow and certain.

It tasted of rain and old coffee.

I went up on my toes and took hold of his jacket.

I kissed him back until the porch rail was against my spine.

"Inside," I said against his mouth.

"Say it again."

"Inside, Alister."

We went in leaving wet prints across my mother's hall.

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