Read Online One Hundred Days of Rain by Carellin Brooks - Free Book Online

her off. Too late she realized she could have paid the extra for the girl. Should have. Too late, as the bus pulled away from the stop. Patient girl, and she failed her.
    Later, after she has dried out and changed, eaten until her stomach is a drum, and put the child to bed, M calls. M wants to know, though she doesn’t say so, why her visits with the child are suddenly curtailed. The answer, what she won’t say in reply to M’s unspoken question, is that her child’s father persuaded her to it, against her own better judgment. Her son’s grief for artifact.
    I called him but he never called back, M says instead. What exactly is happening tomorrow?
    Call him.
    He didn’t call me back.
    M asks to talk to her son. She says the child is asleep.
    I don’t believe you.
    It happens to be true. She laughs and says goodbye and hangs up on another one of M’s threats.

55.
    This morning rain goes from scattered drops to downpour in a seeming matter of moments. The mechanic glances outside the windows of the bike shop where he bends over the slowly revolving wheel.
    Another lovely day.
    I’d still rather be biking, she says, thinking of her adventures on the bus yesterday, and the day before that.
    Wheeling her fixed machine out of the shop, she hunches ineffectively against rain going about its work. The noise of rain, the not-noise really, blots out anything else. A rushing, a pushing, a surround. The world through a screen, a fine mesh. Even traffic exists far behind it, an afterthought. Soon enough the rain becomes aggregate. The individual drops melt together and hang on her, their weight palpable. Soon after that rain takes over entirely. A mass of rain, a mob of it. Soon afterwards she gives up. Nothing happens, only she knows she’s drenched and accepts it, as it’s said you eventually accept death.
    A leap of rain. A plummet of it.
    A suicide of rain, falling.

56.
    They were still living together. M never liked to be called her wife.
    I’m your spouse.
    Trying to humour M was tiring, especially when there was no return on it. Eventually she gave up.
    They were arguing in a hotel room on their annual trip to the resort. M had promised to give up the rum and Coke. She’d come back to the used glass, the discarded tin. So obvious. She’d been in the bowels of the building, reading the historical plaques. She found the pint in M’s suitcase.
    That’s mine, M cried. Her child watched as they sawed back and forth.
    Not in front of the child.
    Give it back.
    She took the boy and left the room. M followed her, jumping up into her face. Outside rain smattered them both. She took the steps turned dark down to the gritty beach under the hotel. Instinct, going to the sea which had always soothed her. The shore coloured slate, sky and water both, private docks and boats in the cove with that deserted wintry look. Nobody was coming back for them for quite some time if ever. The wood under her feet felt slick with the rain that lay on the boards where they were hollowed out by clanking landlubber feet, the boards themselves swollen with moisture. She knew this weather inside out, it ran in her veins. The interminable view of fat splattered drops and sullen indifferent sky.
    M bobbed in front of her, trying to get a rise. I’m going to follow you around the beach the whole way. I’ll follow you all day. How do you like that? Huh? Huh?
    It’s okay, she said. I’m always trying to get you to take walks with me.
    M turned abruptly and went back to the glassed-in lounge.
    There were a lot of arguments and most of them not even that cute. Why couldn’t they fix things anyway? Ah that was the question. The psychiatrist was avuncular, he sat back in his big chair and gave advice. The therapist who phoned her afterwards concerned. Another one told them they were in the conflict stage. You don’t say. Once they got a man at the plumbing store to arbitrate. It