120 Minutes of Rain

120 Minutes of Rain

The white wood siding, leaden and flaking, looks yellow in the porch light. The color of an old coffee stain on a white shirt. Moths try to wrangle their bodies into the fixture to feel the warmth just a little better. What would I do if I broke through, my wings cold and wet from the rain?

We moved out to this old property to get away from the city. An old repurposed carpenter’s shed, electrical wires and ductwork exposed like the inner workings of a hollowed out animal. Tracing of bone work and the design put down on paper then implemented to a degree that just works. Barely.

Still, you’d be surprised what $15,000 can get you in South Louisiana.

I’d seen her once or twice on the television at work. Kind smiles and hopeful words projected over the shoulders of a young couple, too drunk to order their two egg special. Some actors are just born with it. Experience melded to their face like someone in heaven planned out wrinkles in advance and gave her all the right ones, and she really knew how to use them. In my mind, while I'm washing syrup off of dirty plates, I’d see you cast as me in my true story.

Young mother with a child so good it actually hurts and a taste for men with a taste for other women. I’m sorry I didn’t do better, baby.

Then she was there.

In front of me.

At my table.

More gracious than I counted on, and she felt like an old friend. Even told me the same thing, although my manager bucked a laugh at me like I was a wistful child when I told him so. He laughed again when I showed him the tip, but that kind of laugh someone does when they are confronted with physical proof of what they once thought was impossible.

Twenty grand, just for me.

She was good, too. Left no room for interpretation on how that money was supposed to get divided up.

You probably wouldn’t believe it either. Mama just had a good day at work. We’ve had those nights before. Nights where you get meat instead of instant noodles. Nights when your father was working late, so you wouldn’t have our laughter ruined by a cold entrance. But this... We’d have good nights for a long while.

You love it here as well. It’s old, and it needs work, but the field goes on forever, and when it rains the sound is hard to measure. Our first night you stood outside looking up at the steady shower, hands held out and chin held high. You let out the kind of laugh that said “I knew there was something more that we deserved, I just never realized that this was it”

I asked you what you wanted.

“Anything?” you said, looking up and over at me from our seat on the train, our boxes in hand with everything important to us.

“Anything”, I let you know.

And all you wanted was a cassette recorder and a microphone. Something so strange it took me out of myself. Did I really know my kid? Don’t they like TVs and toys? But I get it now, with your little hands gripping the microphone, held out to the rain as if waiting for a reply to a question that was never asked. Your jacket, short. Skinny arms sticking out a bit further than they should from what were once long sleeves.

Ever so often you make a note in the little black book I used to take orders with. You must’ve filled the rest out by now. Made your way to the receipt she signed, smudged with grease and taped to the last page.

Please don’t scribble on that.

Back before...it was like night never came. It was there for other people. The moths that could walk back and forth between that barrier holding in the light source. We were stuck, baking under the heat of a bulb that never turned off. No way out. No map to a dark and stormy place to cool our selves and rest a while. I don’t love the dark, and as a matter of fact, it scares me a little bit, but there is a comfort there. Especially when you’ve been under the light for so long you forget how to close your eyes and just breathe.

Somehow, someday, I’ll find a way to really thank her. Maybe I should get a TV, and one of her movies. Watch it on a night like this instead of looking out on you. You deserve to have that peace, too.

When you came in from the night, you were everything I’ve always loved about you all at once. Quiet. Discerning. Innocent. Playful in the way a fawn is when they just get up on four legs.

“Mama?” you said, eyes barely visible from underneath the hood of your jacket.

“What is it, baby?”

“I made something for you. Here, listen”

You set the recorder down on the dusty table and pressed the play button with a loud clack. The track garbled a little static, and beneath that I could hear your hands rustling to hold out the microphone. Then it was just the sound of rain. Clearer than I ever thought something like that could capture. The grass whispered out its stolen water to the edge of the field, and I could just barely hear the scribble of pen on paper every now and then.

“What’s that sound?”

“The rain, Mama” and you smiled because of course that’s what it was, but there was something else.

“No, that other sound, like the sound of you writing in that book”

“Oh yeah… I was”

“Well what were you writing?” I smiled back, a little tickled by the course of this conversation.

“Just keeping track of how long it was raining. And thinking of what to write on the outside of the tape.” You wiggled a little underneath your jacket, tried to pull down your sleeve, then looked back up at me.

“Okay then, what’s it called?

“120 Minutes of Rain”

“Hmmm… You know,” and I walked over and knelt down by you, pushing your hood back to look right into those eyes. “I think that really captures it.”

You let me ruffle your hair, and then you gave me one of those smiles that made your missing teeth better then the ones that were there.

“You know what I’d call it?” I said.

“What?”

“Just you and me, breaking out of light in the middle of a rainstorm.”

Then you laughed. Hard. The kind of laugh that needs no other undercurrent of meaning. You thought I was being silly, and it got to you. It actually kind of offended me, but what was I thinking? Really, that was what I was thinking, but there was now way you could know that.

“What’s so funny about that? I liked it!”

“That takes too long, Mama!”

And you were right. It did take too long.