Because the Rain Read Online Free Page B

yourself.”
    “No,” he said. “The idea was being a writer.”
    Susan looked at his light blue Kevlar vest, the same color as his police shirt, then the .38 again. She became a wraith when they talked about this, terrified and near levitating, but he’d stopped feeling bad about it. Susan already knew the answers to her questions, and he believed she didn’t have to ask them.
    “I can only write about veterans,” he said. “And people don’t think about veterans the way I know them to end up.”
    “You can put veterans and their wives in different places,” she said. “We’ve been to Mexico and France. Barcelona. Women will read that.”
    “I’ll never sit alone in a room again,” he said. “Todd didn’t care about my buddy Dilger and how the lifers ruined him. Todd also has the money to buy books.”
    “I don’t know you,” she said.
    “I won’t keep letting some dream humiliate me,” he said.
    “We’ve killed for your dreams,” she said.
    Mike smiled into his wife’s eyes while he undid the Velcro on his Kevlar vest. He was done trying to explain.
    “Just like soldiers have for ours,” he said.
    Susan’s eyes wilted, then glassed. She looked from his ankle as if her turning had changed his police blues back into Levi 501s. She then closed her eyes and held them shut. Mike sat for five minutes, stitched inside his wall shadow, and watched her feign sleep. Her eyes never reopened so he stood to raise the blinds.
    That night they made love in the hard streetlight, but not to each other. It was what they were doing to forget the problems. They imagined couples from supermarket lines, waitresses in Polish restaurants, women who ran with their dogs. Susan told him things and he told her things, too. They always kept their eyes closed and sometimes he felt her smile while he kissed her. But tonight, among the wind sounds, her lips were straight and coldly wet, and he felt her imagining nothing while he dreamed another man kissing her breasts. Mike tried parting his wife’s lips with his tongue, but they wouldn’t come open, and the man was licking Susan’s stomach when Mike finished. He never let the guy get far.
    She touched his arm after he rolled away and looked at him. Her brown eyes once made him angry they were not one person. Now, he did not know when her eyes became only eyes. The wind lifted the curtains and they fell and covered her face before lifting again. He could smell the cold in the wind.
    “You’re not into it anymore,” he said.
    “I love you,” she said.
    She cried and her eyes shook. She lay upon her stomach hugging a pillow.
    “It was not a baby,” he said.
    “They taught me that,” she said.
    He looked at his dirty uniform on the floor and knew that Susan’s eyes were closed without having to see her.
    In time, they included visuals into their lovemaking. They used the computer after his traffic shifts, the amateur sites with group sex pictures, the free downloads of home swinger video shot in a Naperville, Illinois, basement, and joined adultfriendfinder.com. They browsed profiles and found many couples like themselves, naked men and women with neither hope nor despair. After they clicked the stranger’s thumbnails, they looked a while before smiling and going to bed.
    But they didn’t own a digital camera and felt uncomfortable with posting pictures, so their ad received no hits. She wanted to keep pretending they swung and Mike felt better. He knew this was a game and that they’d return to normal again. After a few days, they stopped using the computer because the different sites used the same pictures and seeing the people again made them sad. They spent the morning dark quietly while Charlie Rose did a whole week interviewing Wharton School of Business professors about the American economy and neo-conservatism.
    One night, Mike and Susan saw an Asian woman in the second-flat window across the street. They’d been watching a Good Times marathon on TV