Late Rain by Lynn Kostoff Page A

frying.
    Jack took out a bandana and wiped his forehead and wished he’d remembered to put on his cap.
    He wondered why he’d decided to walk to Burger King. He didn’t even like Burger King. He wasn’t hungry either.
    He started walking again. After a while, he ran into a large green and white sign that read: Thank you for visiting Magnolia Beach. Come back soon.
    The sign made no sense. He lived in Myrtle Beach, not Magnolia Beach, with his wife Carol. They were expecting their first child in two months.
    She was a good woman, Carol was.
    He loved her more than breath.
    He didn’t want her to worry, but he knew they were in trouble.
    A tight spot, for sure. A child on the way and the Myrtle Beach he’d grown up in disappearing right in front of him. It was no longer the small sleepy tourist town full of family-owned and run businesses, a place where someone like Jack Carson could start his own construction company and count on his reputation for doing quality work to bring in the jobs. It had been like that when he first started Carson Construction, but there was a new ethos at work now, housing developments springing up all over, national hotel, restaurant, and shopping chains moving in, the promise of money everywhere, and Jack was finding it harder and harder to compete with the big construction outfits. They used cheaper materials, bought them in larger quantities and for bigger discounts from wholesalers, paid more and had better benefit packages for the crews, and met deadlines more quickly than Carson Construction. The owners and managers of the large outfits had also quickly figured out whom they needed to buy off to expedite processing and approving permits and inspections.
    The air smelled like car exhaust, and the feeling arose again that something was tugging at him. Jack looked at the sign once more and then turned around and started walking.
    He was a little dizzy. The joints in his knees felt like they were packed with sand.
    The sky was white, as if it had been bleached.
    He heard a dog barking and then a lawnmower start up.
    He walked by a large wooden house in need of paint. There were mold streaks along the eaves and around the windows.
    A while later, when he walked past the house again, he pushed down the panic opening like a hand inside him and tried to walk faster.
    He’d just remembered his wife Carol had died giving birth to their daughter Anne.
    He wiped his face with a bandana. He had trouble getting the bandana back in his pocket.
    The air felt baked.
    Then suddenly he was surrounded by four boys on bicycles. Jack wasn’t sure where they’d come from. They circled him like lazy bees.
    The boys looked to be around eight or nine, and they all had buzz cuts, and they were all wearing green T-shirts with X-Men on the fronts, and Jack wasn’t sure which one of them said, “You got any change, Mister? We’re really thirsty.”
    Jack was thirsty too. He’d just realized that.
    One of the boys said, “Forget it, Brian. That’s Paige’s grandpa. She said he’s a head case.”
    Another said, “Paige Carson is a bitch.”
    “He walks funny,” another one said.
    “My dad says he’s the one who got lost driving a bus with all the kids still in it.”
    “Ask him what day it is,” one said. “I’ll bet you a quarter he can’t tell you.”
    The boys kept circling on their bikes and firing questions, and a lot of the questions were simple, and when Jack answered them, he couldn’t understand why the boys laughed, and then he was getting angry and was going to tell them to stop, but before he could, they were gone as suddenly as they’d appeared.
    And then Jack was very tired and a little afraid because he’d begun to suspect that a lot of what he’d set out to do this afternoon had already happened.
    He suddenly knew, for example, that he didn’t live in Myrtle Beach anymore and hadn’t for over ten years.
    He wanted to get home, but he was afraid of getting confused again, so he