Lino had gone to the highlands by chicken bus.
After that night, three rainy days passed before they managed a truce. They avoided each other. Only once did their eyes meet across the courtyard. A clap of thunder had shaken the house. Kate opened her bedroom door and stood barefooted, staring out, her hair unbraided; she wore sweatpants and a T-shirt, wrapped in a scratchy wool blanket, with the rain walling her in, the birds-of-paradise blowing about as though their flowers might break. Dixie stepped to the kitchen door with Posh a green shiny blur on his hand and even with the steely cadence of the rain Kate could hear that he was soothing Posh, saying all the comfort love he could to keep the bird calm, for Posh hated rain. Their eyes met through the rain and Dixie’s broadcast a question and hers closed in response.
She had to cut her losses. Close down.
Once or twice a day she went out to the corner store to buy a carton of yogurt or a few bananas. The Cherokee that had followed her was never in sight, though she watched for it. A chill came over her whenever she turned to the spot on the street where she’d first seen it, the way your body shivers at the place where you’ve once been burned or cracked your shin. She would return wet from the rain and light the gas oven and open the oven door and stand in the kitchen drying her clothes and listening to the BBC. By the light of the sixty-watt bulb in her room she read biographies Sunny had left behind, bits and pieces of musty paperbacks whose pages bloomed damply and contained the rain of many rainy seasons. She read until her eyes ached but sometimes she would find herself reading the same block of type over and over while her thoughts wandered farther and farther away. Paul would send the money. She wanted to feel sure of that. He was efficient and responsible that way; he did not want to talk to her, but money, that was a different story, easier to give than love buried in sorrow. She imagined the crisp bills she would receive from Lloyd’s. Her thoughts turned to one woman after another whose babies she had caught in their slippery birth grime. And to Maggie, all mental roads led back to Maggie, her greatness of heart. Kate had been less at war with herself when living with Maggie; she had been more whole.
Jude returned on a rainy morning and packed a plaid suitcase. She was going back to New Orleans on business, for how long she could not say. She sat in the kitchen with Kate, waiting for Dixie to come home from the market so she could say good-bye. Kate made her a mug of coffee. Jude kept one eye on the foyer.
Posh screamed, a sound like a tormented child, when the rain rang down hard from the red tile roof like thick gray cords into the abandoned courtyard. And Dixie was not there to console him.
Out of the blue, Jude said, “What do you want in your next life?”
What a peculiar phrase, your next life.
“Ordinariness,” Kate said. “Time to think about myself instead of others.”
Those answers seemed to bring Jude some relief. She couldn’t wait any longer. She shook Kate’s hand and said, God bless, have a good life, and it was obvious that Jude thought they would never meet again.
On July 4, Kate and Dixie managed a truce.
He invited her out to Doña Luisa’s to watch the news. They told each other Fourth of July stories: the worst and best. Watching fireworks over the Wabash. Making homemade ice cream. Humidity so thick you thought you could drink it. Too much drinking. There was always that, the longing for a change of mind, a dilution of what you could not confront, whatever troubled you. She said she was sorry. She said she was going to quit drinking and suddenly that seemed a possibility. Easy. Not a big sacrifice. He did not press her to talk about that; he did not scold or instruct.
Kate waited. Once she had waited for her best friend; now she longed for congruence. A galvanizing.