15.

Rain overwhelms her as she plods from foot to foot. The kind of rain that can’t be ignored. It envelops her, it makes even walking to the corner a misery. Each drop weighs in, another small burden, and the splashes coming up from under make it impossible to stay dry. There hasn’t been a kind of covering invented that works. People with umbrellas duck under the overhang, everyone threading their way from shelter to shelter on the dark street. There was a dawn, hours ago, and hours from now there will be a sunset, so she’s told or remembers from long ago. Meanwhile this obliterating rain obscures everything. The luckiest maddest ones are swathed in coats, hoods pulled up over their faces, pants of rainproof drip-dry material. They move through the world as through an alien landscape, astronauts, swaddled & untouchable.

Rainproof. Like quick and easy weight loss, a demonstrable lie.

S is visiting again. S wants to know if she possesses an umbrella. As if. Her son dressed in fire-licked rubber boots with little eyes. They are all miserable as they trudge from place to place. Should we take the bus. Yes, yes, pipes the little one, sodden. The adults grudging the cost.

All the time now she makes mistakes. The next morning she forgets her wallet. Let me off, she says to the driver. Last week they were on their way to school in the rain, she and her child, when the driver stopped the bus with a jerk. The child somersaulted head over heels down the aisle. She came stomping up to the front to complain, her son in her arms wailing. Would you stop driving that way, she hissed.

I didn’t do anything. The wail impossible to ignore, he capitulated grudgingly. Okay, okay, I’m sorry.

So she doesn’t expect mercy today. But he says it’s fine, waves a hand. Settle up with me later. She sits back down, indignation leaking from her pricked. Unfamiliar, this curdling mix of outrage and gratitude. Outside the windows, what else, rain.