Cold Rain by Craig Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

property, wrangling contracts from distressed sellers and juggling rental income against a formidable array of mortgage and contract payments. Rather than sell off part of the two hundred acres, tantamount to a mortal sin among the landed gentry, Molly used the property value to leverage more favourable bank loans. With the increased cash flow, she then began to work a series of trade-offs and sales until we found ourselves the proud owners of three small apartment buildings and several very decent old homes in town, Victorian treasures we rented out with extreme discretion.
    Over the next five years Molly was certainly active, but her greatest energy she devoted to the old mansion Doc McBride had wanted to raze ever since he moved his family off the farm. Now, with even that almost finished, Molly found herself at loose ends. My fate was no better. Though I had been a part of Molly’s professional ambitions, the extra hand a good carpenter needs on any given project, my real passion had always been writing. With Jinx published I was not certain what I wanted to do next and so was marking time.
    If someone had told me that September my world was about to turn upside down within the next couple of weeks, that my job, my marriage, my freedom, and finally even my life were all about to come into jeopardy, I probably would have laughed. My fate, as I understood it, was set in stone. I was going to get old with Molly. Molly might take the leap she longed for and start building houses instead of renovating them, but essentially neither of us expected or planned on much excitement.
    The irony is that even then our world had begun to break apart. We just didn’t know it.
     
    ‘IT’S A BIG ONE,’ Walt Beery told me one morning not long after I had agreed to look at his son’s novel.
    The size of the box he set down on my desk told me I had made a mistake. Seeing my expression, Walt laughed cheerfully. ‘ Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was about this length before it was edited, David!’
    I thought about complaining. I didn’t have time to read two or three thousand s, but all I did was smile. The minute he was gone I set the box on my file cabinet and tried to forget it. I was not even tempted to look inside.
    It soon became invisible. I knew it was there, of course, just waiting for me, but I learned to avoid looking at it, my good deed to do, my debt of friendship.
    Sometimes, when I sat alone in the office, my back to it, I tried to convince myself that I could skim the entire opus in fifteen minutes and be done with it.
    Then I would look at the tape holding the box together and decide it would take fifteen minutes just to get the thing unpacked. Methodical man that I am, I told myself to open the box and then have a go at actually reading it later. It wasn’t a bad idea, but I could never quite summon the energy to cut the tape.
    What finally moved me to read it was a run-in with Buddy Elder. He and Johnna Masterson had presented copies of their short stories at the end of the third full meeting of my night class. The following week they were each treated to a sixty-five minute critique from the class. Johnna Masterson went first. She had written a story about a teenage girl’s sexual awakening called
    ‘Sexual Positions.’ It was the sort of thing that should have come out badly but was, in fact, one of the funniest things I had ever read.
    The technique she employed was reminiscence, the older and wiser woman recalling earlier times, whether real or imagined I could only guess. The encounters showed men and boys in a painfully comic light as they came forward to test young ‘Joan’s’ virtue.
    It was difficult for the class to evaluate the piece because it was, like Johnna Masterson herself, perfectly put together, and it was the first story we had evalu-ated, so they had no idea what kind of stuff they were going to see later. A few people blundered into it, as people will, suggesting changes that