Page 42 of After the Rain

"Actually," Kane said thoughtfully, "I think 'fucking harpy' might be too generous. She's more like a sentient case of food poisoning."

"Kane!" I stared at him in shock. "You never swear."

"I make exceptions for people who try to destroy good teachers because of their own prejudices," he said calmly. "Mrs. Garrett has been a cancer in this community for years."

"So what do I do?" I asked. "How do I figure out who I am without destroying Ezra's career in the process?"

"Carefully," Kane said. "Thoughtfully. But Wade, you can't protect everyone from the consequences of living authentically. Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone you care about is show them it's possible to choose courage over fear."

Jazz stood up and grabbed another beer from the cooler, twisting off the cap with more force than necessary. "Besides, from what I've heard around town, Ezra's not some delicate flower who needs protecting. He moved here from Portland where he was dealing with similar bullshit, right? He chose to come to Cedar Falls knowing exactly what kind of small-town politics he'd face. That suggests he's got more backbone than you're giving him credit for."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean he's been fighting these battles longer than you have," Jazz said, settling back onto her makeshift seat. "Gay teachers in small towns don't survive by being fragile. They survive by being smart, strategic, and tougher than they look."

"Jazz is right," Kane added. "And from what I've observed, Ezra handles himself well in social situations. He doesn't back down from difficult parents, he advocates for his students, and he's built a solid reputation in the three years he's beenhere. That's not someone who needs you to protect him—that's someone who might be worth partnering with."

We worked through the afternoon installing the built-ins, the conversation flowing from renovation details to relationship advice to Kane's endless stream of dad jokes that made Jazz threaten to duct tape his mouth shut.

"Why don't scientists trust atoms?" Kane asked while measuring cabinet spacing.

"I swear to God, Kane, if this is another science pun..." Jazz warned.

"Because they make up everything!"

Jazz threw a wood scrap at his head. "That's it. Next weekend I'm bringing real duct tape."

"You say that every week," I pointed out, marking measurements for the shelving.

"And every week I forget because I'm distracted by his actual competence at construction work," Jazz admitted. "It's like being annoyed by a golden retriever who happens to be really good at electrical wiring."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Kane said cheerfully.

"It wasn't," Jazz shot back, but she was grinning.

By five o'clock, we'd finished the bedroom project and started demo on the bathroom. The transition from careful construction to therapeutic destruction always felt like switching from meditation to exorcism.

"Jesus Christ," Jazz said, attacking the pink tile with a sledgehammer like it had personally offended her ancestors. "Whoever designed this bathroom didn't just hate joy—they declared war on it."

"It was the 1980s," Kane said, carefully removing the pedestal sink with the precision of a bomb disposal expert. "Everyone hated joy in the 1980s. It was considered bourgeois."

"The 1980s explain the color choices," I said, prying up linoleum that had been installed over the original hardwood floors like some kind of crime against nature. "They don't explain why someone thought a toilet positioned so close to the bathtub that you could wash your hair while taking a shit was good design."

"Efficiency," Kane said with absolute seriousness. "You could multitask. Very modern."

"That's not modern, that's dystopian," Jazz said, but she was laughing despite herself. "This bathroom is what happens when cocaine makes design decisions."

"Speaking of bad decisions," Kane said, wrestling with a medicine cabinet that appeared to have been installed with construction adhesive and pure stubbornness, "remember when we tried to remove the wallpaper in the kitchen and discovered there were seven layers of it?"

"Each layer more hideous than the last," I said, remembering the archaeological excavation that had revealed decades of questionable taste. "Like digging through the geological record of bad interior design."

"And under all of it was this gorgeous original plaster work," Jazz added, taking a break from tile destruction. "Sometimes I think houses are like people—all their beauty gets covered up by other people's damage, and you have to strip everything away to see what was always there."

The metaphor hit closer to home than she probably realized, and I found myself thinking about layers of expectation and assumption that had been built up over thirty-eight years of living as someone I'd never really examined.

"Speaking of stripping things away," Jazz continued, "have you thought about what you're going to tell Cooper? About any of this?"

The question made my stomach clench. "I don't even know what to tell myself yet."

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