Come Rain or Come Shine (8 page)

She had been known to channel leftover energy into all manner of unexpected things, once laying waste with a hammer to the plaster of their kitchen walls, then finishing them after the manner of ‘ancient Italian villas.'

‘So what do you want to do?' he said. Maybe more readings at bookstores—she liked that sort of thing.

‘I want to . . .' She was pensive, choosing her words. ‘. . .
live
. Just that. Helping the kids get ready for the wedding, sitting here on the glider, making bow ties for the dogs—I'm finding all that enough.

‘Then there's sleeping with my husband and listening to rain on a tin roof. Greatly enough!'

‘Anything else mulling around in there? Some deep, ungratified desire?'

‘The RV trip, remember? I'd love to do that. See the Oregon Trail, the national parks, I don't know. Wear a ball cap and jeans, sit in the passenger seat and knit . . .'

‘You don't know how to knit.'

She laughed; he took her hand and kissed it.

Their moderately old marriage burned with a steady flame, and that too was greatly enough.

Having sent a link to Olivia and Beth, she took her iPad around to everyone she could locate.

‘What do you think?' she said, showing them a
full-screen image. As for her own thinking, this dress was only sort-of-maybe-kind-of, but she could be wrong. She was getting the desperate feeling that a lot of her bride friends had experienced in their search for the perfect dress. Of course they had started earlier and hadn't refused the help of their mothers, who were deeply invested in getting it right.

Father Tim moved his glasses down his nose and peered at the subject of interest. She figured he had seen a few brides in his time, he had good taste, he would know.

‘More than a hundred, I wager.'

‘Less!'

Cynthia was grating cheddar for her famous pimiento cheese.

‘What do you think?'

‘I'll be darned. Smocking! We never see smocking anymore.'

‘Vintage,' she said, defending it somehow.

Lily weighed in. ‘Looks big through th' waist. If it don't fit, my sister Violet can fix it. And if she can't, Arbutus can. Arbutus is married to Junior Bentley.'

‘I know.'

‘And lives in a brick house,' bragged Lily for the hundredth time, ‘with two screen porches.'

Beth's review was totally brief.

No!

Olivia's e-mail was diplomatic.
You will look beautiful no matter what you wear.

Nobody liked this dress, herself included.

Bummer.

Willie had bushhogged the north strip today and would mow it with a lawn tractor on the fourteenth. As for himself, he and Harley had finished getting the floor timbers in, shop-vacc'd the loft and old grain room, and weed-whacked around the barn—a job to be done again prior to the fourteenth. Then he and Lace had cleaned bird and guinea poop off a vast target site beneath the rafters.

‘Look,' she said, beaming, ‘I have calluses.'

‘Do you like having calluses?'

‘I do! I'm going to be a farmwife, you know.'

The Harley/Amber issue seemed to be fading from the collective household mind. Willie reported seeing the Toyota parked at the mailbox yesterday. Harley had gone out and stuck his head in at the passenger side but not for long, end of report.

‘So what's going on with Harley and the Toyota?' he asked Lace.

‘He's not talking.'

‘Has he asked you about Las Vegas?'

‘He said they'd talked about it, but she decided she couldn't leave her cats.'

‘Is his money in a shoe box or in the bank?' He was a meddlesome son of a gun, a prime requirement for clergy.

‘In the bank, in a CD, with something in savings.'

‘What's this about her being a hoofer?'

Lace laughed. ‘I meant to tell you. He said she danced in a show on Broadway years ago.'

Broadway
? If that didn't take the cake . . .

The burial of the bottle had roused a good bit of merriment in what had been a hectic day. He and Cynthia were in bed by eight. Indeed, the entire ménage was quiet, though he heard the house phone ring a few minutes ago.

Graduation tomorrow. He would make breakfast and they'd head out with Lace around noon. Yesterday Lily had lined up the men, including Hal and Blake, and given them all a haircut on the porch. Though he felt positively skinned, he was ready to see Dr. Kavanagh
walk
.

They turned out the lights, silent for a time.

‘Are you dead yet?' asked his wife.

‘Not yet,' he said.

She placed the phone on the charger. Her whole body was thrumming with a kind of low-grade tremor.

She had just sold five paintings to a three-time Academy Award nominee on the other side of the continent.

S
he would miss her lookout tower.

And sometimes she missed the children she had worked with at the nonprofit. She looked around the attic studio, at the walls hung with more of their art than her own. Luke's wild, painted horses. Emmy's huge raccoon faces. Eugene's skyscrapers and whirling Van Gogh planets. Latisha's row of strangely beautiful dolls . . .

When she and Dooley moved into the second-floor bedroom after the wedding, the view would be lovely but different. From this big attic window, she could look into the front yard and over to the clinic, and there was the green post in its bed of zinnias, waiting for the sign to be hung.

She went quickly to the other window, which was open to the breeze. The trailer was backing up to the cattle gate right now.

There was Jake from their hole-in-the-wall diner in Farmer. And their postmistress, Judy, who had been kind to
them over their years of visiting Meadowgate. And there was Willie and Harley and Hal and Blake and Father Tim and Cynthia and all the farm dogs and a squad of neighbors lined up along the fence. How amazing! Their new bull was a complete celebrity.

She'd been working on Dooley's wedding present and forgotten the time, and if she didn't hurry, she would miss the whole show.

She tossed her hair into a ponytail and opened her jewelry box and took out the strand of turquoise beads. She loved these beads. He had given them to her when they finally knew the friendship ring was an engagement ring. She wore them only on special occasions, the most recent being his graduation yesterday.

And there was her cell phone ringing. That would be Dooley saying
Where are you?

She slipped the strand of beads around her neck, fastened the clasp, and raced downstairs.

Yes!

She heard hooves thundering against the metal of the trailer bed, then clattering down the ramp.

Surely he would bolt into the pasture from the restraint of the trailer, but he stopped just beyond the ramp, silent as stone, looking ahead.

She drew in her breath, astonished by the authority of his massive shoulders and his immense poise.

He flicked an ear.

‘Holy cow,' whispered Honey Hershell. ‘That's some big guy you got there.'

Standing with his rump to the crowd in what Dooley called the ‘chill pen,' Choo-Choo turned his head and gazed to the right, then turned his head and gazed to the left.

‘Go, Choo-Choo!' yelled eleven-year-old Danny Hershell. But Choo-Choo stood motionless.

‘Man!' said Jake. ‘Last time I saw that bull, he was chasin' Emmet Holder through 'is turnip field. Emmet vaulted th' fence and hit th' road runnin'. I braked my truck an' he jumped in, said,
Floor it, Jake, that bull's out to get me.
'

‘Judy's wearin' red,' said Honey. ‘She better step back from th' fence, don't you think?'

‘It's okay,' said Lace. ‘I looked it up. Bulls can't distinguish red or green. It's the matador's cape that drives them crazy.'

‘Here's y'r sign,' said Harley. ‘It come on th' trailer with Choo-Choo.'

BULL
IN
FIELD

KEEP
OUT

‘I'll jis' lean it right here an' me an' Willie'll git it on th' cattle gate when th' truck clears out.'

‘Don't you worry,' Jake told her, ‘it's th' gentle bull, not the bad guy, who most often kills or maims 'is keeper.'

Honey was incredulous. ‘
Kills
?
Maims
? Are you kidding?'

‘Wikipedia,' said Jake.

Choo-Choo faced the crowd now, with an unwavering stare.

‘Whoa!' yelled Danny. ‘He's lookin' at us, he's gon' charge.'

Choo-Choo tossed his head, ambled away, and began to crop grass.

The co-op manager removed his cap and scratched his bald pate. ‘This ain't th' same bull as Choo-Choo.'

‘Yeah,' said Danny. ‘I could ride this ol' bull.'

Several onlookers had moved from the fence, were saying their goodbyes, congratulating Dooley and paying respects to his future bride. They had come to see a show and didn't get one, and she was relieved. She had dreaded whatever tricks this creature might be up to.

The crowd stirred, had a laugh here and there, slapped one another on the back. There was Harley, toothless as a crone and shaking hands as if running for county office, and Willie still peering into the chill pen hoping for a matinee performance.

She felt his arm around her shoulders and looked up.

‘Hey,' she said.

Dooley drew her to his side. ‘There you go. Your pet bull.'

She could feel his heart pounding. ‘When does he get to meet the girls?'

‘First he gets five or six days in th' pen. He needs to get used to being here. He'll probably walk th' perimeter of th' fence a few times, checking for a way out. But there's no way
out, I guarantee it. Clean water, healthy grass, a little clover. He'll have a good life at Meadowgate.'

She looked at the set of Dooley's jaw, his determined gaze. Laughing, exhausted, working over a sick or wounded animal, whatever—he was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with looks, in a way she believed only she had eyes to see.

‘On th' fourteenth,' said Willie, ‘you gon' be lookin' at a full moon.'

‘Yayy!' Clapping around the supper table.

‘If it don't rain and hide it.'

‘Bo-o-o! Hiss-s-s!'

Willie grinned. He liked to stir up this crowd.

But she couldn't find it.

It was either backless or had an uninspired neckline or the fabric was synthetic or it cost too much or it was just
wrong
.

Why was she punishing herself with the idea of a hundred-dollar dress? She would not touch the amazing amount of money that would be wired into her account on receipt of the paintings, but she could put a For Sale sign on her ancient BMW and park it in the lot next to the post office or dip into her savings just this once. She would never make
this special journey again; this was her
wedding
. Finding her dress should be a fun, even extravagant experience. But she didn't want extravagant—she was extravagant on canvas, and that was enough.

Having grown up with nothing, she might have spent all the money Hoppy and Olivia had provided along the way. But she had saved like a miser; the old I-will-never-be-poor-again scenario was real to her. Dooley was generous with his money but careful, and he had a stopping point—he knew how to think about the future. She was thinking about the future too, though most times it appeared in her mind as a complete blank.

‘That's the way the future should appear,' Olivia once said. ‘We're asked not to fret about the future and to take no thought for tomorrow. We must try to live in the present or we shall miss it entirely.'

Living in the present was exactly what she'd been trying to do. She wanted to totally show up for this incredible time in all their lives. She had two friends who remembered practically nothing about their weddings. ‘I remember starting the walk down the aisle with my dad and I just blanked out,' Lisa said. ‘When I sort of woke up, Tony and I were dancing. I was, like, are we married, what happened?'

The days were flying by. Everybody was constantly in a buzz, and as much as she loved living together as a family, she would be glad for a quiet house after the wedding, for just being with Dooley. They'd hardly had a minute together except for yesterday in the car driving back from graduation, where she and Cynthia and Olivia had cried as if it were a
funeral, which it was in a way, with all the goodbyes and that big chunk of their lives being over.

Now they were looking at the grand opening on Monday and Dooley coming up on his first scrotal hernia procedure, this for a ram lamb, on Tuesday. So it was a lot, but he loved his new practice, which just happened to be unusually busy right now. Already he could not get enough of the life they had been waiting to live.

‘Do
not
remove your dentures outside your room
at any time
.' She felt like a schoolmarm with a ruler.

Harley had lost his teeth again, and she was sick and tired of the let's-all-hunt-for-Harley's-teeth routine. Had he left them on top of the woodpile, as he had before? In the barn? In the glove compartment of his truck? Under the bed? On the roof? Maddening. Harley Welch was sixty-seven years old. When would he grow
up
?

‘Grow
up
!' she said. ‘
Find
your teeth.'

Harley saluted.

‘
Wear
your teeth.'

Boy howdy, ol' Dooley would be havin' hisself a handful.