Cold Rain by Craig Smith Read Free Book Online

time. ‘But I don’t like violent movies.’
    ‘What do you like to see?’
    ‘Love stories.’
    ‘That’s it?’
    She thought about it. Pretty much.
    I made a pitch for a diversity of experience. Besides, it was possible to dislike something and still understand it. She didn’t have to like everything she read.
    Denise left my office that day promising she would try to be more open-minded. It was a fine moment for me, I decided, teaching open-mindedness to an employee of the sex industry.

Chapter 5
    I TOLD MOLLY I was having trouble getting back into the routine. I had been away from it too long, I said. Molly hadn’t much sympathy. She wanted to know how many other professions offered a nine-hour work-week, counting an hour as fifty minutes and a year as nine months. Put that way, the whole thing seemed less awful, and I reconciled myself to my fate.
    It was not a bad fate actually. I was working on some new short stories, rising before dawn to write for an hour or so. Around six-thirty I would usually feed the dogs and horses, then let them out before I drove to town. In my office by nine o’clock most mornings, I had an enviable schedule, flexible in the extreme.
    I usually finished up around three o’clock, though on Wednesday nights I regularly taught a night class.
    That fall there were no emergencies at school, no grants to write, not even an excessive number of committee meetings. Molly and I owned sixteen properties, a total of forty rental units. At any given time, we might be required to clean a place or give it a facelift. We might shop a new property or unload something for the right price. Once a week or so, I could count on meeting her in town for some kind of business: leaky faucets, replacing furnaces, laying tile, meeting with bankers or our lawyer. That fall was no different. There was always something. Afterwards we would have dinner and once even took in a movie.
    Weekends we stayed close to the farm or went with Lucy to her races. In September we began roughing out an apartment for Lucy on the third floor. She was looking at a couple different schools, one in Texas, the other in Oklahoma, both offering rodeo as part of their intercollegiate athletic competition, but there would be summer vacations, and, ultimately, Lucy planned to come back and live on the farm, for a while at least. She was even toying with the idea of going professional once she had completed an undergraduate degree in equestrian studies. The other option, the one I had gently put forward, was an advanced degree in veterinary science. We had a good school only a couple of hours away, so the apartment would get plenty of use for quite a few years.
    We were in no hurry though. We wanted Lucy downstairs until she turned eighteen. Besides, we had spent five years getting the house in shape. This was the last step, and we took it almost with a sense of leisure.
    Sometimes Molly and I would reflect on the inevitable feeling of getting old, even though she had not turned thirty-four and I was still three winters from the dreaded forty. We made a joke of it, but I think it bothered both of us. Lucy was almost gone. We had raised her.
    We had built our lives from the ground up, and though we were not in the financial league of Walt and Barbara Beery, we had accomplished everything we had set out to achieve. While that created a sense of satisfaction, we both also felt, I think, a nagging sense of what now ?
    Our success had come with a great deal of planning and careful risk assessment. As with most fortunes, however, the bulk of it arrived unexpectedly. In our case it came as a result of the death of Molly’s aunt.
    After years of refusing Doc’s attempts to get her to sell Bernard Place, Doc’s sister left her share of the farm not to her brother but to Molly. Doc, realizing Molly would be no more cooperative than his sister, deeded his share of the farm over to Molly. At the time Molly and I were scrambling to acquire