Most people don't think rain has a color; but they're wrong. They see it coming from the cloudy sky and wish they were indoors or driving with better-than-average windshield wipers. They don't see the colors. Even my mom saw wet, and trouble, and a reason why her hair looked so terrible.
Not me. I like the rain. And I see the colors.
When it rains I watch as the droplets hit the cement and travel to the grass. Inside the grass, the rain is green. I watch the rain hit the windows. Long snails slide down the glass in streaks of gray. When the sky is sunny, I see rain droplets drying up and that's when the rain is the nicest because the rain has been made into a rainbow.
When the rain is blue it is still in the sky falling down. When it's against my shirt, the rain becomes the color of whatever I am wearing.
The day mom died, I was wearing red. My shirt was tight, and my thick belly felt snug against the cotton fabric, but I didn't care. As the drops from heaven hit me, the red darkened to a bloody blot…
It was the blood I saw first, all red and pasty next to her mouth. She was on the floor in her bedroom. I don't remember screaming, but father told me later that I did. I don't even remember calling for him, but suddenly he was there pulling my mom to the bed and feeling for a pulse.
Mom didn't move. She lay there still and I knew she was dead. I couldn't believe she was dead, but I knew she was. I started to miss her in that very second--even more than I missed my sister, Sue, who'd died a year earlier…
When you have a father who doesn't talk to you, you have a lot of time to think. Milking the cows early that morning I was thinking about my life and father was out tending to the crops when I felt a sudden tugging in my heart. I should have known what the tugging meant, but I kept on milking. A short drop of water fell from the barn window, and I could see the clouds gathering.
I was finished with the cows when I thought to check on mom-but not before that. Pouring the last of the milk into the bucket I raced into the house, spilling half of the milky contents onto the wet and muddy ground on the way over. I didn't even wipe my feet on the mat.
I was sopping wet when I entered the house, but mom didn't say anything about messing up her hardwood floors and I thought that was strange because she always said, "Wipe your feet, Danny, I just mopped," or something like that. Her voice didn't come out clear that day as I sloshed up to her room to see what she was doing and found her dead.

CHAPTER 1

A few months after mom's death, near July, father sold the farm. I was ten years old and our home near the Utah border was going to a family with a bundle of kids and two parents who looked as if they needed more space but not just because they had loads of kids. Sometimes a person just needs some space to think and I figured these parents needed lots of it by the sorrowful way they looked.
For my father, it seemed he didn't want any memories of mom and thought he would forget her best by moving far away from them. He was wrong.
I didn't forget. As I sat in the station wagon eating my bologna sandwich, chips and chocolate bar, all I could think about was mom. The way her red hair smelled after a bath with lard soap. The way she bent to kiss my cheek; her voice sweet and mellow as she called me in to supper. Even the way she frowned when I did something wrong, like a child who had just lost her puppy.
Fortunately, the skies were clear and our old junk heap sped across the freeway like a racecar. Father rarely turned to me. I had decided to sit alone in the back seat with my lunch and uninterrupted thoughts.
Not that father would have interrupted me; ever, it was just nice to have the space to think just in case he had something to say.
Before mom died, father had talked very little-the only evidence I had of his feelings for mom were his occasional looks of love across the room. I remember he hugged little Sue a lot but when it came to me it was more of a pat on the back. I don't think father hated me, I still don't, but there was something inside him that he just couldn't let me see.
After over an hour of driving in silence I saw a sign. "Welcome to Utah." The large mural rested near some pine trees on a tall wooden stand overlooking a wide valley of mountains.
Father stopped the car and got out. "Come here," he said.
I sat my half-eaten chocolate bar on the tan seat and opened the squeaky door. It opened with a crink! and shut almost as dramatically, crushing the tip of my big toe on my right foot.
I didn't even yell. I hobbled to the tiny rocks and looked up at my father's pointer finger. "Another hour and we can begin a new life," he said.
I muttered something and turned to leave, my big toe throbbing like a heart.
Father stopped me with his hand. It was strong. "I hope you can leave mother here," he said.
I thought about mom under the ground, her skin crawling with worms and things, and suddenly the food in my stomach grew sour.
"She isn't in the trunk?!" I asked, totally confused at his comment.
"Fool boy…of course not," father answered, bending my chubby cheeks up to his
slim ones. "We are starting a new life. I want you to leave your mother here."
Now I understood. But it just didn't make sense. Father wanted me to forget mom ever existed. He wanted me to pretend something that wasn't true. He wanted me to lie.
My father didn't like me but he'd never asked me to lie about anything.
"Listen, son." He wiped a stray hair from my eyes in somewhat of a loving gesture, "your mother is gone. It's best if we got on with our lives."
"Why?" I asked, thinking of the pictures father had stacked in one box and glued shut with many pieces of tape. Would we never open the box and smile down at mom, even when we got to Utah?
The pictures of mom were all we had left. Her clothes had been shipped off, and most of the kitchen stuff too. The pretty things mom had made to decorate the walls, even the furniture had gone to some needy folks. I just didn't understand it. I had my clothes, a bed, and a few books-and something else I would never show father, but everything else was gone.
Father's heavy arm was draped around my thick shoulders. "Let's go," he finally said as I tried to blink away the tears.
* * *
I will never forget driving up to the apartment in the heat of August even if I live
to be a million years old. Our new home was made of old, cruddy brick falling off in places, and the lawn had more weeds than grass growing like ragged bushes even in the cement cracks.
Inside, the apartment was smaller than a closet if that's possible. We lived upstairs, and every time I had to walk up to the white-painted door, my legs got tired.
One day I counted. There were eighteen steps. Eighteen! Father bought one new couch, purchased from ZCMI, and one small television. He bought a dresser for my bedroom. It was cherry red and looked like a square monster with mouths. But it comforted me.
I wore red almost every day now because somehow it made me feel closer to mom. I went out in the rain without an umbrella whenever I could, and in the night I took out the small, frameless picture of mom under my mattress cushion. When I could hear father snoring in the next room I looked at it, and told mom things I could never tell father. I could almost see her smiling at me in the darkness.
However as each day passed, I could see mom in my mind less and less. I looked at her picture as often as I could. I would tried to remember her voice, and once I thought I heard her behind my back, but when I turned there was nothing and no one but my bed and the fluttering of drapes in the wind.
I'm not sure I believed in God then, but it felt right for me to believe in angels. I thought of angels after that, flapping in the wind, whenever I could. I knew mom and Sue were angels and that they were watching out for me up in heaven.