The Rain Barrel Baby by Alison Preston Read Free Book Online Page A

thanks, Gus, but I’ll sit with you a while.” He climbed the steps to the porch and plunked himself down on one of the two straight-backed chairs.
    “Do you want to go inside, Frank? It’s pretty chilly out here.”
    Both men wore winter parkas with the hoods up.
    “No, I’ve got enough clothes on. I was suffocating indoors.”
    “How ’bout some cocoa?”
    “No thanks, Gus, but you go ahead. The caffeine in the chocolate keeps me awake and I sure don’t need that.”
    “Water?”
    “No thanks, I’m fine as is. If I drink water after supper, then I end up going to the bathroom all night long.”
    “Jesus, Frank. What the hell are you going to be like when you get to be my age?”
    Gus sat down in the other chair.
    “Trouble sleeping?” he asked.
    “Yeah, most nights, I guess.”
    “Is it the baby in the rain barrel, Frank?”
    “No, Gus. Awful as that is, it’s not what keeps me awake nights.”
    Gus was quiet and Frank was grateful to him for not pushing. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to talk or not. Maybe just sitting a while would be good. They could start with sitting anyway.
    Venus was so bright it looked like more than a star. Frank stared at it till his eyes lost their focus and the light became fantastic. He pulled himself back.
    “How are you getting along with it, Gus? The baby, I mean.”
    “Well, I must say, it’s not an easy thing to put behind me. I think about it a lot and dream about it a bit, but it’s not as bad as it was.”
    “I wake up after three hours,” Frank said, “and then I can’t get back to sleep. It’s always just three hours. I don’t think I can live on that.” He looked over at Gus. “Sometimes I think I’m going insane.”
    “Jeez, Frank, that sounds horrible. All I can say is that I’m sure it’ll eventually pass. I know that doesn’t do you much good right now. I went through a similar bout once. Around the time they forced me to retire. I used to sit out here for hours — thank God it was summer — and watch the sun come up. But it wasn’t fun, I’ll tell ya. I wasn’t really worried about anything in particular. I just couldn’t come up with anything good to think about. And my mind was too jittery for sleep.” Gus put his feet up on the wooden railing that ran around the porch. “I should put something more comfortable out here to sit on,” he said. “Something that would accommodate a man’s legs and feet. In the daytime,” he went on, “I would roam around the house and yard lookin’ at things that needed doing that I didn’t have the energy for. I swear to God, I broke down and wept more than once, scared the bejesus out of Irma. I felt like my life was over, except I hadn’t died. And then I got better. Just like that.”
    “I wish I could have met Irma.” Frank stretched out his long legs and rested his feet on the rail next to Gus’.
    “I wish you could’ve too, Frank. She was great.”
    “I knew her to see her. I knew who you both were way back when. She was pretty. I remember thinking she was pretty.”
    “That she was, Frank. That she was.”
    Frank was worried about his kids. He worried a lot, especially about Em, who seemed so old somehow. He wondered if they shouldn’t have named her Emma. Maybe a little girl’s name like Amy or Tracy would have been better.
    Morning had come early that day to the Foote house, with Sadie leaping into action at the first sign of light. Her mother’s absence hadn’t made her any less joyful. She sat in her yellow pajamas atop Frank, who was trying to stay inside his daydream for a few moments longer. Or maybe he was asleep. Anyway, it was a marvelous dream in which he was ordered by some higher law to have sex with Audrey. They were in the desert at night, under a million stars like in that old Eagles song. They were sometimes their young selves and sometimes their present selves. They gazed into each other’s faces and at some points, if the concentration was strong enough, they