Cloudburst

Jerry, bless his heart, told me I looked nice that day and never did question why I wanted to go to Dean’s grandmother’s funeral. Yes, the same Dean who left me knocked up and broken-hearted at seventeen. Water under the bridge. Deanna, the gorgeous daughter he left me with, only knew Jerry as her daddy, and that was how I preferred it.

 

I knew Dean when mascara came in a cake. You’d take the little brush for your eyelashes and get it wet, then stroke it against the cake which came in black or dark brown. This was long ago, before mascara came in a tube and had qualities like waterproof.

 

Jerry called up the stairs to see if I was ready yet as I blotted my lipstick. I quick tucked my tube of lipstick and a compact in my pocketbook and took one more glance, running my hands over my dark brown hair, sprayed and teased into a helmet about my head.

 

As Jerry drove us to the church, to my dismay, I saw that his jacket was worn thin, a little shiny in spots. Nothing to be done. We were already late. I aimed to slip us in the side door, familiar with the layout as it was the parish of my youth.

 

I felt good. Teenage daughter with a good head on her shoulders, staying in school and not playing hooky and smoking with the boys like I had at that age. I had a man who loved me and, perhaps even more important, loved my daughter like she hung the moon. It was after this that I told Deanna about her father, and she said Jerry was the only daddy she ever wanted to know.

​

As Jerry drove into Crescent township, we passed by houses older and more broken down than I remembered. Massive trees lined the street, showing off their peak fall colors. Made me think of hair colors: harlot red and alarming orange. The sky grew black, clouds not so much gathering as descending like judgement. I looked out the windshield and up, sweating from my armpits, hoping that I wasn’t staining my good blouse.

 

“You’re going to have to run for it,” Jerry said and because he is a kind man, drove to the curb to let me off so I wouldn’t have to run as far and could get into the church first, before the sky opened and rained its shame down upon me. I opened the car door and glanced up. The church was there, rising into the sky with its stone face closed, expressionless, its wide staircase a stage for many a wedding party. I put my pocketbook up on top of my shellacked hairdo and clip-clopped in my navy pumps up the sidewalk, but not fast enough as a right downpour opened up and drenched me like a bucket slung sideways.

 

The shock of it made me draw in my breath as I reached the door where someone who must have seen me coming held it open. I sputtered and gasped in the relief of reaching the dry indoors as the rain puddled around my feet and streamed down my hair and face.

 

There were two black rivulets, I was sure, running from my eyes to my jaw. I lowered my pocketbook to thank the parishioner who’d kindly held the door only to see him. Dean. Older, a little gray, in a suit that fit just so: expensive.

 

I swiped at my face with my hands, clearing my vision from the fat droplets of rain still falling from my hair.

 

One side of his mouth turned down. He cocked one thick eyebrow at me and called me by someone else’s name. Before I could correct him, he turned to greet another parishioner, another person who shared his grief. At his back, hand to my mouth at the shock of being misremembered, I breathed him in; aftershave, spearmint, and overwhelming it all: whiskey.

 

Suddenly I saw him clearly for the man he’d always been. That man for whom I’d never been enough, no matter how hard I tried.