Chapter 28: The Roof in the Rain
The second monsoon came up out of the south on a Thursday, and it did not bother with warnings. By four o'clock the sky over the flats had gone the color of a bruise ripening, and the wind was walking the dust down the highway in long sheets, and Evie stood on her porch and watched it come with her hands on her hips and her chin up, which was new. A year of storms had taught the whole town to flinch at that sky. She made lemonade.
Claire's car was in the drive for the week, which meant the house held what it had not held in years: a family at full strength when the weather turned. Noah had come down from Flagstaff with a duffel and a deck of cards. Sadie was in the kitchen being instructed, for the fourth time and as if for the first, in the matter of her grandmother's enchiladas. And Hank Breslin arrived at five with his overnight bag and his pill organizer and the air of a man attending a social event, because Evie had gone over that morning and issued the invitation as an order.
"Your roof is older than mine was," she had told him, "and mine was a disgrace. You'll sleep in the spare room and you'll like it."
"I have survived seventy-eight years of weather," Hank said.
"You have survived it badly and alone. Bring the good pillow. Mine are all spoken for."
The storm hit at dusk like something with a grudge. Rain came sideways off the porch roof hard enough to sting through the screen, and thunder rolled down the valley and rattled the windows in their new frames, and the whole house stood in it and took it, and that was the miracle nobody remarked on until later: the roof was silent. No buckets in the hall. No towels laid along the baseboards in the old defensive lines. The new roof simply shed the water the way a roof in a story is supposed to, and the rain became weather again instead of an enemy β noise on the other side of shelter, the oldest comfort there is.
The power dipped twice and died the second time with a sad little click. Noah found the lanterns without being told where they lived, which meant something in Evie went soft and private. They played cards by lantern light at the kitchen table while the enchiladas stayed warm in the cooling oven. Hank cheated at gin rummy with the serene confidence of a man who believed the statute of limitations protected him. Sadie caught him twice and fined him a dollar each time into the cookie jar that served as the Marsh Fund's humble local branch, and Hank paid with the air of royalty dispersing alms.
Claire washed dishes that didn't need washing, just to stand at the window and watch the rain come down on a house that could hold it. At one point she said, to no one in particular, "I used to lie awake in Phoenix listening to weather reports for this ZIP code," and Evie, dealing, said, "I know, baby," and dealt on, and that was the whole conversation and it was enough.
They put Hank in the spare room with the good pillow. They put Noah on the couch he was too long for and Sadie in the room that had been Claire's, where she slept in her mother's childhood bed under her mother's childhood stars, the glow kind, still faintly holding a charge. The rain softened after midnight into a steady, decent rain, the kind the desert drinks instead of endures.
And Evie Marsh, eighty-two years old, slept through thunder for the first time since Walter died.
She did not know it until morning. She woke slowly into gray light and the smell of coffee already made β coffee made by other hands, in her own kitchen, before she was up β and she lay there a moment taking inventory the way old people do, and found no alarm in herself anywhere. The thunder in the night had been weather. Just weather. It had rolled over the roof and the roof had held and she had slept like a woman in a house, not like a sentry in a ruin.
She came into the kitchen in her robe to find her grandson burning toast with his grandfather's hands and her daughter reading the rain gauge figures off the porch like stock prices, and Hank at the table with the paper, already lying about the cards. Outside, the flats were washed clean, every creosote bush beaded, the wash running coffee-colored and loud, the whole desert having a drink.
"Well," Evie said, and poured herself the coffee somebody else had made, and sat down in her chair in her own kitchen in the middle of the noise and the people, "it rained."