My thumb was hooked into the strap of my heavy canvas handbag, and I was staring hard at the small, greasy smear on the glass of the payphone outside the bait shop on Highway 90. It had been raining for three solid days in that corner of Louisiana, the kind of heavy, gray drizzle that gets into the wool of your sweater and stays there until you smell like a wet dog. I wasn’t even supposed to be out in it, but the water pump at the rental house had started making a noise like a bucket of bolts, and old Mr. Henderson wasn’t going to fix it before the weekend.
Arthur was standing six feet away from me under the rusted corrugated tin awning, holding a black golf umbrella that had seen better decades. He had on a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up past his elbows and a pair of mud-spattered rubber boots that looked like he had been wading through the marshes behind the bayou since dawn. I remember thinking he looked harmless enough, the sort of steady, quiet man who spent his Sundays watching college football with an old hound dog at his feet. When he tipped the umbrella toward me and asked if I was headed down toward the post office, I didn’t think twice about stepping in beside him.
We walked three blocks together in that gray, heavy silence where you only hear the squelch of rubber in standing water and the rumble of diesel trucks on the elevated highway. The rain was coming down sideways now, hitting the side of the brick hardware store with a sound like dry peas rattling in a tin can. Arthur didn’t talk much, just muttered something about the shrimp season being ruined by the freshwater runoff from the spillway. I nodded and kept my eyes on the wet pavement, watching my own worn-out loafers dodge the red clay puddles.
When we got to the corner by the dry cleaners, the wind kicked up and nearly turned his umbrella inside out with a loud pop. We had to squeeze in tight against the brick wall of the building to keep from getting soaked by the runoff from the gutter. That was when he reached into his front pocket and pulled out a small, crumpled piece of receipt paper with a string of numbers scribbled on it in blue ink. He didn’t make a big production out of it, just held it out between two fingers with his palm turned down toward the wet sidewalk.
“Call me sometime,” he muttered, not quite looking me in the eye.
Three days later, I was sitting at the oak kitchen table with a cold cup of chicory coffee, looking at that bit of paper tucked under the corner of the bread box. I told myself it didn’t mean anything. I told myself that people meet in the rain every day down here and most of them go right back to their separate lives before the sun comes up again. But the town was small, and people like Arthur didn’t just hand out their phone numbers to strangers unless they had a habit of collecting things they shouldn’t.
Seven days later.
That was when the district supervisor called me into the regional office on the second floor of the parish courthouse. My company had been bidding on the parish drainage maintenance contract for three months, and winning it meant keeping three crews employed through the slow winter months. I straightened the front of my gray knit cardigan, smoothed my skirt, and walked down the long linoleum-floored hallway past the framed photographs of old parish judges from the nineteen-fifties.
The door to the inner office was half open, and I could hear the low murmur of voices before I even knocked on the frosted glass. A woman with sharp blonde hair pulled back into a tight twist was leaning over a spread of blueprinted maps, pointing a red grading pencil at a section near the lower basin. When she looked up at the sound of my knuckles hitting the wood, her eyes didn’t look like a stranger’s eyes at all. They were the same pale, washed-out blue as the man standing awkwardly by the side filing cabinet.
Arthur was wearing a clean white dress shirt with the top button undone, but he wasn’t looking at the blueprints or the parish maps. He was staring straight down at the toes of his wingtip shoes like he wished the floor would open up and drop him down into the drainage pipes below.
“Come on in, Clara,” my wife said, her voice dropping into that cool, professional register she used when she was about to tell a contractor his bid was twenty percent too high.
I stood there in the doorway for three seconds, maybe four, with my hand still resting against the brass door handle. The silence in that little room was heavier than the three days of rain out on Highway 90. My brain didn’t want to make the pieces fit together, because once they did, I knew I was going to have to look at both of them across the dinner table for the next twenty years.
She didn’t scream or throw her red grading pencil across the room, which was honestly worse than if she had lost her temper right then and there. She just picked up the small slip of crumpled receipt paper that Arthur had left sitting beside her coffee mug and smoothed it flat with the side of her thumb.
“Arthur was just telling me about how he helped you out in the downpour last Tuesday,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake by so much as a fraction of a millimeter. “He said you looked like you were in a real bind with the water rising by the post office.”
Arthur didn’t say a word. He just kept his hands jammed deep into his trouser pockets, his shoulders pulled up toward his ears like a turtle retreating into its shell.
“He’s a very helpful man,” my wife continued, looking right past him at the wall behind my head. “He even mentioned you were looking for work on the parish drainage crews before you took this job at the office.”
I didn’t try to explain about the umbrella or the way the rain had been coming down so hard you couldn’t see across the hood of a pickup truck. There wasn’t any point in telling her that I didn’t know he was married, because the look she gave me across those blueprints told me she already knew every single word he had said on that sidewalk. She slid the crumpled piece of paper into the metal wastebasket under her desk without looking at it again.
“The contract went to the other bidder this morning, Arthur,” she said, never taking her eyes off me. “You can go on back down to the field office now.”
He turned around without looking at either one of us, his shoes squeaking slightly on the freshly waxed linoleum as he let himself out into the hallway. The latch on the frosted glass door clicked shut with a small, dry sound that seemed to echo off the walls for a long time after he was gone. My wife picked up her red pencil again, tapped the eraser twice against the edge of the mahogany desk, and told me to sit down if we were going to get through the rest of the paperwork before five o’clock.
