Rich In Rainwater

RICH IN RAINWATER

A Novel

Kevin Williams

[A concurrent novel to Betton On Me and Betton On Me Again]

The timestamp is 14:32.

I’ve been sitting here for a while now, which is not something I do. I edit clean. I find the shape of a thing and I follow it and I don’t second-guess the material. My grandmother Loretta taught me that about a lot of things before I ever had a camera, and the work taught me the rest. You trust what happened. You don’t try to make it something different in the edit.

But I keep stopping at 14:32.

At 14:32, I kiss her on the forehead.

It’s not a decision. It’s not a content choice. It’s the kind of thing that happens when you’ve been in a particular kind of quiet with someone long enough that your body makes a small decision without asking your brain first. She lifts her head afterward and looks at me for what I’ve since counted as approximately twenty seconds, which in the context of this kind of work is a very long time, and then she puts her head back down like she received an answer to something she hadn’t quite finished asking.

I’ve watched it four times now.

I’m trying to remember what I was thinking at 14:32, and I don’t think I was thinking anything. Which is either the most honest thing about this whole situation or the most complicated, and I haven’t decided which yet.

Outside, it’s raining. It’s almost always raining in Highlands. You stop noticing after a while, the same way you stop noticing the elevation, the same way you stop noticing how quiet it gets up here after dark when the last tourist has gone back down the mountain and it’s just the town and the trees and the specific quality of air that four thousand feet produces. You grow up in it and it becomes the baseline. Everything else sounds loud by comparison.

I grew up in it.

Here’s how I got to Atlanta.