The Rain It Raineth
But only on the unjust [fiction]
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.
—Charles Bowen
At the end of February, Mami gets sick.
Simon notices it before her, but he’s always paid better attention to Mami than she has to herself. It starts with more frequent naps. She used to never take naps, but now she takes a siesta every afternoon. She says its because she’s an old lady and has less energy, but Simon notices.
She starts to eat less, too. She still cooks dinner by the time Simon gets home from work, and wraps repurposed leftovers in bread and newspaper for lunch each morning, but she picks at her own food. Simon notices this too, and says something, and Mami dismisses it with more old lady talk.
But when the weeks pass and Mami complains of stomachache for two, three days, a week, Simon finally convinces her to come to the doctor.
There’s a chance. A small chance. An expensive chance.
Simon is still reeling from the news the next day at work, when the plant gathers them together and tells them of the layoffs. Changes at corporate, nothing personal. Their retirements won’t be affected, which will be a comfort to Simon in about twenty years, but not now.
He eats lunch outside on the park bench overlooking the creek that runs behind the plant and stares at the water, wondering what to do. He was going to move out years ago, but then he promised Papi before he died that he’d take care of Mami. He thinks about Papi’s funeral and planning it. He remembers being surprised at how expensive flowers were, and ashamed for considering the cost.
He tears off a scrap of newspaper and tosses it into the water and watches it float downstream and out of sight.
When he gets home, he doesn’t tell Mami he’s lost his job and their insurance. She has enough to worry about. He cooks dinner for the two of them tonight, and they eat it quietly.
All through March and April, Simon goes from job to job to home and Mami to job to job. It’s hard to find work, and even harder to find a company that will consider a new employee that requests special breaks during the day, even when he tells them why and explains that it probably won’t be for long, just a few months.
On the last Saturday of April, Simon plants a garden. It rained the day before, and the backyard smells alive and fresh. He’s never planted a garden before, and he gets a little dirt on the library book he’s following, but there was a little dirt on it already from the last reader, so he figures it’s okay. The book says he’s a little late to be planting some things, but it might make the difference to have a few vegetables in a few months. He spends the whole day outside, from dawn until dusk, and covers as much of the yard as he can. From time to time, he comes inside to get some lemonade for himself and Mami, and updates her on the progress. He doesn’t tell her why he’s doing it. Just a new hobby, something to try.
It doesn’t rain in May. Every morning, Simon waters the garden with the hose from the house before the heat of the day comes in, hotter as the month goes on. At first, the dry weather is welcome. They’d had a sloppy, wet winter, and the morning breeze carries with it a reminder of something Simon can’t quite remember that he’s forgotten.
By the end of the month, Mami has deteriorated enough that Simon spends the whole day at home. He tells her he was moved to third shift at the plant, and consoles himself for the lie with the fact that he does look for work at night, and finds some. It doesn’t pay well, not enough.
Simon’s savings are gone. If it was just him, he could manage. He could tighten all non-essentials until he could land a steady job. But it’s not just him, and Mami’s medicine is expensive.
The city puts water restrictions out, and Simon is afraid to break them. On some mornings, he sees the meter checker making the rounds, and he can’t afford a fine. So he walks to the creek every other day to fill two buckets and carry them back and water the garden with a rusty watering can he found in the crawlspace of the house.
The creek isn’t far. It’s the same one that runs behind his old work, but they live upstream, so he figures it’s safe to put on the plants.
In June, Simon sells his car to a teenager with money, and he walks to the two part-time night-time jobs he’s scrounged up. He’s sold most of the furniture, but Mami doesn’t notice because she’s in bed all the time, unless he carries her to the bathroom. She does notice the records being gone. He tells her the record player is broken, which might be true. The girl he sold the records and turntable to didn’t look like she’d take as good care of them as he did.
The creek evaporates, and the garden struggles to stay alive. Simon starts taking only one shower a week, and uses the water from the other days on the garden, watering only the worst-looking plants each day, the ones that won’t make it to the next watering.
In July, Simon digs his toe into dry dirt next to a tomato plant clinging to life almost as strongly as Mami. He wonders for a moment which will die first, then hates himself for thinking it.
“I’m a terrible son,” he says, squinting up at the empty sky.
327 miles away, Juniper massages her feet by the side of the road.
Who knew running away would make you so sore?
She sits for a moment under the overpass, appreciating the shade and the breeze of the cars roaring by, driven by people who have no idea who she was.
The weather matches her mood. Gray, moody, and on its way to Somewhere Else. Anywhere else other than a room full of people who laughed at you and hated you and made you want to kill yourself.
Traci and Stuart would have called the police by now, but Juniper figures she’s far enough away to put her hood down and relax a little. The first thing she’d done anyway was get her hair cut and dyed and buy new clothes.
Traci and Stuart. Her friends used to think it was odd she called her parents by their first names. But they didn’t feel much like Juniper thought parents should. Traci treated her more like a friend ‘cause she was so young when she had her, and Stuart wasn’t even her real dad. And her “friends” could think anything they wanted. Apparently, they weren’t her friends, anyway, or they would have done something. Anything.
Juniper found out something was wrong on Monday.
She gathered from overheard whispers and points and mock-horror gasps that she’d done Something on Friday at the party.
She didn’t remember much about it, which had been gnawing at her all weekend. Juniper wasn’t much of a party girl. She focused on good grades and not doing anything stupid, partially to keep Traci and Stuart off her back, but partially because she kind of liked being smart. She thought she normally made pretty good decisions, actually. But Carson had asked her to his party, and so of course she had to go.
By lunchtime, she was shunned. Nobody would sit with her, and nobody would talk to her. She caught Carson’s eye, once, across the hall. He winked at her—not in a good way, boys can’t wink—and laughed, but he walked away with his friends when she approached.
On Tuesday, Juniper hid in a bathroom stall before break and caught enough snippets of gossip to know that she had done something embarrassing with Carson. To Carson. In front of everyone. She shuddered, not knowing what it was and wishing someone, anyone, would talk to her instead of about her.
On Wednesday, she saw the video. A number she didn’t recognize texted her a link during history class. She almost blocked it because she recognized the URL and what kind of creep just straight sends you a link to there? But then her stomach sank. She asked to be excused, and went to the bathroom. She watched the video, then turned around and threw up.
On Thursday, Juniper stayed home from school. She told Traci she was sick, which was true. She didn’t want to rewatch the video, but she played it over and over again in her head. She clearly wasn’t herself in the video. Her friends’ faces in the video had been blurred out. Hers hadn’t. She hated herself, her friends, Carson, whoever had put whatever it was in whatever her drink was that robbed her of herself.
The worst part was the comments. And the most stomach-turning of those: “Ayy Juniper!” She tried to follow the links to get it taken down, but she kept getting sick and couldn’t think.
On Friday, Traci and Stuart found out. You’d think they’d have been more understanding, especially Traci. She’d done a lot dumber stuff when she was younger, but that was before everyone recorded everything, so it didn’t count. They grounded her for life, and Stuart almost killed her, it felt like.
That night, she curled in bed with crusted tears and red eyes, and heard them talking into the night. She heard Traci get up and go to bed. She heard, very quietly, the sound of the video again.
She left early Saturday morning.
Juniper stands up by the roadside and wonders where she’ll end up. Maybe she can find a town without Internet. Or work at an old people home where they don’t even know videos like that exist and they all have dementia anyway.
The wind whips her hair around her face, too short now to pull back really well. The clouds scud past, full of water sucked out of somewhere on their way to dump it on somewhere else. One fat raindrop splats into the gray roadside scree and disappears, with no followup. The clouds don’t notice it’s gone.
Juniper thinks about her name and decides not to change it. Junipers are tough. They don’t need much to get by—not a lot of water or care or love—and that works pretty well. She thinks about who she is now after the party. Who she’s going to be. What she’ll do.
“What kind of girl am I?” she wonders aloud, brushing her hair back and smelling
the rain pass by.
That night, 773 miles away, Carl lay in bed, arms crossed behind his head, and listened to the rain patter on the roof.
It would be perfect for his experiment. In his original conception, he would have had a clinically perfect result. But this way, he could have a hardier experiment as a whole. He could incorporate the randomness of true rain into his analysis. He would have to do more math, but that would be easy. He’d have the final, definitive answer.
Everyone knew compost was the best thing for a garden. Rich, organic compost. But now people would know exactly which kind. Who makes the best compost?
A peal of thunder rattled the windows, and Carl laughed aloud at his roof.
Lycopersicon esculentum. Bloody Butcher tomatoes. He’d chosen them for the irony. They required organic-rich, well-drained, and well-watered soil.
The organic-rich part was the point of the experiment, and the one that excited Carl the most.
He’d made sure to get their names, to give proper credit in his reports. He would be writing this all up, of course. And he looked forward to the delightfully colloquial terms he could use, simply by using their names for their beds.
Alice’s tomatoes are doing well. Kevin’s have been struggling with a bit of blight, but he’s recovered well.
Granted, the names were a bit scattered throughout the alphabet, which wasn’t ideal, and he ended up with two “R” names (Randy and Rachel, no relation), which he knew would bother him, but it would have to do.
Carl sat up in bed, too excited to drift off.
The well-drained part had been the hardest. It hadn't been thoroughly tested, but he knew it would work. Of course it would work: he had designed it. But scheduled, exact waterings wouldn't exactly be a stress test, so the storm that started yesterday morning had tantalized him. He'd been following the weather patterns the week prior, so he knew it would be enough water to test his drainage system.
There was a satisfactory irony to digging the garden. Carl had decided to dig beds six feet deep, on principle. The drainage ditches he'd dug shallower, and routed them away from the house.
Given what the water would be soaked in, he hadn't wanted any coming into the sun room or den that faced the backyard.
Carl got out of bed and padded downstairs to stand at the floor-length back windows and watch the rain come down.
He didn't worry about neighbors seeing him naked. It was the middle of the night, for starters, and he knew he wasn't the most appealing sight, so maybe it would make them not look so close. He didn't mind people finding out about his garden—he intended to publish his findings, after all—but he knew the more close-minded people out there would want to stop the experiment. It would be silly, of course, since the "damage" was already done. To stop the experiment now would be to rob Alice and Kevin and Randy and Rachel and Luis and Madison of the only meaningful contribution they would ever provide to society.
Carl opened the door and stepped outside. The well-watered part was best experienced in the flesh. He stood in the rain, and savored the shiver as rivulets trickled down his skin.
This garden would be his life’s work. It was their life’s work, too, of course. It deserved this rain. He deserved it.
Another flash of lightning lit the garden around him.
Organic matter was the best compost, no doubt, and it looked indeed like Madison’s was the richest. She was the smallest, so Carl hadn’t expected her tomatoes to grow the best, but such was life. Always a delicious surprise. Of course, when he published his findings, it would be less of a surprise to everyone else what kind of person made the best compost.
But he got to enjoy it, all of it … the people, their fruits, the plants, the rain … because he was a genius.
It was only just.
Carl turned his face up to the rain and screamed with glee.