I Walk Between the Raindrops by T.C. Boyle

Author:T.C. Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

Key to the Kingdom

He had a glass in his hand when he answered the door. By this point—his third drink—it might as well have been grafted to his fingers. His problem was boredom, Caroline away for an extended visit with her mother, who was dying of a cancer so rare it didn’t even have a name, and the afternoon suspended in a haze of midsummer sun while the clocks stood still and all the dogs in the neighborhood held their breath. His deeper problem, of course, was far vaster than a touch of ennui on a stifling summer’s day—it wore a face of self-pity and despair, compounded by alcoholism, though he wasn’t about to admit that, not even to himself. The cure for boredom was alcohol, and the cure for alcoholism was death. As he’d said somewhere once in one of the interminable email interviews he found himself responding to on sleepless nights when his fingers seemed to function on a higher level than his brain, “All writers are drunks, drug addicts and betrayers of trust, any trust, on any level.” He’d meant it as a joke, or at least partly, but as he crossed the living room in his bare feet, the furniture lurching at him and the shadows infested with ghost images of the past, the joke didn’t seem all that funny.

The doorbell rarely rang, and when it did, invariably at one or two in the afternoon when he’d overcome his fear and vapidity and was just beginning to enter into the tranced world of his work, Caroline would deal with it. On the odd occasion when he did answer the door, if he didn’t instantly recognize the face of the person standing there on the pressure-treated boards he’d personally nailed down himself in a time when his knees and back were more cooperative, he slammed it shut before whoever it was could make his plea or pitch or whatever it was going to be. If that was rude, well, he wasn’t the one doing the doorbell ringing, was he?

This time it was different. This time he was drunk. And bored. And there was something in the face of the kid at the door that gave him pause. The kid (midtwenties, testimonial haircut, Levi’s jacket with the collar turned up, and a pair of eyes that were already holding a conversation with him) said, “Hi, um . . . Mr. Riley?”

Riley didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no. He was standing at the front door of his own house, the number of which was clearly indicated in the custom-made wrought-iron numerals Caroline had selected from a catalog and he’d set in place with the screws in the cellophane packet they’d come in. Really, who else would he be?

“F. X. Riley?”

That was when he should have slammed the door, but something held him back. The eyes. And the nose that had the slightest out-of-plumb twist at the tip of it, a familiar nose, intimately familiar, maddeningly familiar, though he couldn’t quite place it—or not yet anyway.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.