Clouds in August

August came in waterlogged gusts, pouring evening rain for tomorrow’s afternoon to burn off. Late summer storms never changed. The sky dumped puddles of water droplet white noise for a quarter hour, and dried up into the bluish evening. Fallen cloud puffs got caught in car headlights as they fled the smoldering asphalt. In the morning, creeping mists filled colossal dimples the surrounding hills conspired to create, and along the poured rock road leading down into one such depression, pans clattered in the Erstwiles’ kitchen.


“You’ll be late again,” Molly said to the sweet smelling tobacco smoke hanging around Ernest. Her hands dripped a strong, fresh-cut onion smell, and her voice sounded over the clanging cast iron like cracked eggs and popping oil. Salt water leaked from the corners of her eyes, and she raised the heel of her hand to brush it back.


“It’s early yet,” said Ernest from around his pipe. He half-smiled into the steam coming off the metal on the stove by Molly. “Come and set with me awhile, if that’s done. The coffee’s pretty fresh.”


“Couldn’t sleep again?” Molly ground a pinch of salt between her fingers over the food.


“Not for long. Woke up around four-thirty.”


“Marty called yesterday.”


“I saw it on the pad.”


“He’s anxious to hear back from you.”


“I’ll bet he is.”


Molly peppered the plates and brought them over to the round, wooden table tucked against the kitchen’s back wall. Looking down at the bacon grease sheen on the hashbrowns, she remembered Ernest turning the potatoes around his knife as she scored the backs of her onions. Ernest always peeled the potatoes. Molly always diced the onions.


“You might sleep a little better, if you talked to him.”


“Might.” Ernest bit down on the pipe’s mouthpiece, and let the word hang unresolved between them.


They ate quietly for awhile, each thinking about Marty in their own way. Molly remembered his younger, radiant self, before the catastrophe of marriage and children had befallen them all; Ernest remembered a particular day in mid-July. Somewhere out in the fog, June, Marty’s wife, pushed a gray hair back from his sleeping forehead. The two women smiled a little sadly.


“It isn’t as though the children are still here, you know.” Molly felt the air around Ernest prickle at her words.


“Do you think that’s what this is about?”


“No, but it’s one less thing in your way.”


“And what about you? Are you in my way?”


“You know I’m right behind you; June’s right behind Marty, too.”


“So you’ve talked about it with her, then. Molly, this is our – this is my business. Do we have to talk about it now?” An old pain worked the muscles around Ernest’s eyes, and Molly reached along their table’s edge to touch the bristling hairs that sprouted from the back of his hand.


“We’ve dealt with this for twenty-five years by not talking about it.” The great well-trodden stretch of time opened up between them, and with their food steaming up onto their faces, they sat remembering. Ernest remembered touching radiant young Marty’s hand; the silent months that followed; weeping, snotty and wretched, in front of Molly; how he and Marty began to talk, always around these memories, again. Most of all, he remembered Marty’s face when they touched; he would never forget the horror in that look.


“Exactly, this is older than our oldest kid. It’s dead, or it ought to be. What good would it do now?”


“It might do you both a lot of good. We were all in love with him, Ernest. Isn’t time you stopped having to feel ashamed for that?”


Ernest drew deeply on his pipe, and pushed the cleaned plate away. He exhaled down onto his chest, and raised his head to look at Molly. He thought about Marty’s call in July. He couldn’t have done it face-to-face, Marty had said. He couldn’t have said what he did with the brandy-thick words slurring together.


“I want you,” he’d said. Ernest had never been angrier, and remembering the weight of the phone in his hand, he felt the anger bloom fresh and red again.


“I’m going to be late,” he said to Molly.


“Just tell me you’ll call him. Just tell me you’ll hear him out. June and I can’t stand to see both of you this way.”


“I’ll think about it,” he said.


That evening, as he stood holding the phone, Ernest felt a pang for the Marty of a quarter century ago. Before the drink took its inevitable watery hold, he’d been a fire burning itself out under coal-black hair. He wrote things that seemed beautiful and true. Rooms burst into light within his eyes. Ernest squeezed his free hand into a fist, and began to dial the number his fingers could only remember while holding the phone. Outside, the rain came down in sheets. Late summer storms never change.