Because the Rain Read Online Free Page A

She stood with her back to the camera and wore a black thong. He knew she was Vietnamese by her skinny legs. The Thais and Filipinos got more meat as children. Their bones were bigger.
    Annie put her phone on the glass table. He asked her last week to come in a yellow ao dai. He wanted to reach up through the panels and feel her stomach. He would splay his fingers before drawing them into a slow fist. But she came into his condo wearing a suit and walked across the oak floor in thick boots. The girls always wear what you want, Nick said. You tell me if there’s a problem. Goetzler had even turned the heat up because he knew she’d be cold in the yellow silk. Maybe, he thought, it was folded in her bag.
    “You need to get changed?” he said.
    “I can’t wear an ao dai for you,” she said. “You are not my husband.”
    Goetzler nodded at her reflection in the glass. Geese flew over the rooftops along Clark Street, a tight V formation.
    “The war’s old,” she said.
    Annie lifted her head up and blew like she exhaled smoke. Her arms were long and thin and the American weight never formed right above her elbows. She’d been looking at his books.
    “You have a nice place,” she said. “A lot of women would like to sit and look out.”
    Goetzler put down his drink. The wind lifted the rain up the window. He saw himself reflected in the window, the drops shadowed in his glasses.
    “I caught my wife with a supply sergeant over in Germany,” he said. “I was a captain.”
    Annie laughed. Her smooth lipstick cracked when she opened her mouth.
    “I bet he was handsome,” she said.
    “She wanted to drive around Europe in an Alfa Romeo convertible and wear nice sweaters. We did that—right after I got assigned to Berlin. We rented a red one and drove down to Mont Blanc.”
    The rain held Annie’s eyes and he watched them in the window. She pointed at him, her nail long and red.
    “Your first anniversary.”
    “It rained outside Annecy and a tire blew out. We couldn’t get the top back up.”
    “Perfect.”
    Annie stood and stepped from her boots as if deep in water. She took off her jacket and laid it over the sofa arm. Her shoulders were small, like sticks. She walked over to him and lay down upon the couch with her head against his thigh. He picked up her foot and waited for her to look away from the window. Her heels were white and hard, blanched by hot sand.
    “You learned to walk over there,” he said.
    She was silent.
    “You get out on a boat?” he said.
    “No. I flew with my wings.”
    Goetzler watched her stare at the rain before looking out the window, never knowing where the sky and the lake separated.

3
    The window blinds muted the streetlight when Mike Spence sat on the bed after his tenth night of Loop traffic control. Susan lay with two cats over one leg, eyeing the bulge where he kept a .38 on his ankle. The snub-nose was backup against the H&K Nine on his hip ever failing. She’d been looking at the concealed pistol for a long time, and he hadn’t taken off his uniform. Since Mike went on the job, they spent nights paused in silence rather than fighting about the life he’d just quit.
    Susan thought the hidden .38 was ridiculous because Mike waved Sonomas and GMC Jimmys onto the Congress Parkway from State Street.
    “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he’d told her. “I’ll need it one day.”
    After that, Susan stopped seeing him, and looked with unblinking eyes upon the things he now wore. Mike just went to work.
    He touched his wife’s ankle, but she didn’t move. He left his hand until it made him feel uncomfortable.
    “You’ll still write?” she said.
    “I know what we did for me,” he said, “but I don’t want to write anymore.”
    “I didn’t choose a cop, Mike.”
    “It’s like the army but I get to come home at night,” he said.
    “You haven’t been a soldier for a long time,” she said. “This is just another idea you have of