Sometimes after I'd get across the driveways and the grass islands into number 15, it would start to rain. There was something wonderful about that, and yet it gave me a lost feeling too, knowing that my family was snug in a cabin across the chasm of downpour, while I was here alone. When it rained I usually spent as much time watching it as I did writing. I opened the door to a blast of cold air, and the sight of a lead-colored, darkening sky. Or I looked through the slats of the Venetian blind. I could see the sparkle-spattered highway shimmering like a smooth sheet of glass, glittering with the reflection of lights from the service stations, and rippled by the gusts of cold wind that danced continually across it. There were pools of black water in the gravel of our driveways, and the Chinese elms waved their wet, lacy branches mournfully. The neon signs glowed through the rain, and water trickled off the curbs of the islands of grass and the island of geraniums beneath our sign. Thunder shook all of San Gorgonio Pass intermittently, and lightning flashed the trees to a wet, brilliant green. The fury of it, and my own solitude, filled me with a kind of exultation. Rainy weather never interfered much with David's school. We always drove him to the school, which was about a mile away, and got him after school. I usually drove him to school in the morning with Donna sitting primly in the back seat; by afternoon Grant was awake, and he picked him up after school. David was experiencing the usual juvenile difficulties in learning to spell "cat" and "dog" and in mastering the shape and sounds of the multitude of confusing squiggles that made up the alphabet. During the first few weeks of school his class learned the first half of the alphabet. One day David came home and told me happily that he was getting ahead of his class. Moejy, who was in the last half of the second grade, was helping him, he explained. He exhibited a sheet of hieroglyphics, and said proudly, "I've memmerized every one of them! Moejy told me how each one sounds. This one, like a 'S' with a tail, is a 'doo'. And this one here's a 'sof'." The marks on the paper were meaningless lines and curlicues; yet, to the untrained eye of a child they might look as much like letters as real letters do, I realized. "I'm afraid Moejy has been fooling you," I said gently. "Those aren't real letters. They're just scribbling. They aren't anything at all." David was furious. He pulled a long string of gum from his mouth, drawing it out so far that it broke. "All that memmerizing for nothing!" he wailed, picking the sticky gum from his chin. "Just wait'll I get my hands on that Moejy! I'll--" "You'll what?" He must have remembered then that Moejy was quite a bit bigger than he was. "Oh--nothing, I guess," he said, nibbling gum from his dirty fingers. But I knew exactly how he felt about Moejy. I felt the same way, myself. CHAPTER EIGHT