Leaving Before the Rains Come Read Online Free Page A

tested, all I could remember was that there were conjugations and rules, and beyond that I froze. I knew the vocabulary of British behavior, but its syntax often caught me out.
    I was rooted in 1980s Zambia with its dearth of suitable men and zero birth control. The AIDS epidemic was burgeoning, our silent war; you could see the walking dead everywhere, smell disease on the rapidly diminishing bodies of the victims. And in spite of the foreign press dubbing it “the gay disease,” we knew different. It would be a quarter of a century before we knew that twenty-five million people in Sub-Saharan Africa were living with the disease, but we could see it coming. Men, women, and children were struck down seemingly without discrimination, as if an odorless, invisible toxic gas had fallen over our world. One day a man would seem healthy and virile, and two weeks later he would present at the kitchen door with boils and lesions. In a month, he would be dead of malaria, or diarrhea, or a blood-spewing cough, and six months later his wife and mistresses and half their children would be dead too.
    Since having a Zambian boyfriend seemed suicidal for all sorts of reasons, and overseas men had to run the life-threatening Fullers-of-Central-Africa gauntlet to get anywhere near me, I split the difference and took up for a while with a Zimbabwean woman. “Double ouzo, hold the Coke,” Mum ordered at the Mkushi Country Club bar, during spanakopita night. “My daughter’s a lesbian.” The Greek farmers blinked at her uncomprehendingly. “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You bloody people invented it.”
    However, in spite of its built-in conveniences, lesbianism hadn’t stuck with me. And although I had moved in with a Canadian boy at university—generous and caring from a steady middle-class family—I could not imagine Joey surviving afternoon tea with my family, let alone a summer vacation or a lifetime of get-togethers. Even from a distance, Mum reacted badly to the news that I was sharing not only a bed but also kitchen appliances with a man from the New World. “Double brandy, hold the water.” Mum slapped the bar at the Mkushi Country Club again. “My daughter’s gone off with a bloody Canadian.”
    But I couldn’t see how anyone could object to Charlie. True, he wasn’t British, but his other virtues more than offset this otherwise serious deficiency. He seemed accomplished in the manly arts, rubbing shoulders with Eastern Bloc military, powder skiing in remote European mountains, smoking cigars; Dad might at least think twice before setting the watchman on him. He could ride horses and he had moved to Zambia with his dog; that was likely to endear him to Mum. He seemed enthralled with me, finding me funny and clever; Vanessa would hate that. But before I could ask Charlie back to the farm, he asked me to go canoeing on the Zambezi River with him for a week.
    “We can camp below the wall, after the bridge, at the confluence, in the park.”
    “One tent?” I clarified. “Just us?” And I thought about the way in which this would hop around the Zambian gossip circuit.
    “Yes,” he said.
    I took a deep breath. “You should know my dad will wave a shotgun at you.”
    Charlie didn’t flinch. “That’s okay. I’ve spent every summer of my life on my grandmother’s ranch in Wyoming and she waves her shotgun at everyone, especially after cocktail hour.” Pressure I didn’t even know had been there eased off my chest. I pictured a whisky-drinking, gun-toting woman propped up in the frame of a cabin door surrounded by swales of sagebrush and prowling wolves. Then Charlie said that although Wyoming was the land he loved best, he had been raised and schooled in Pennsylvania. His family, he told me, were Main Line Philadelphia on both sides, and having no idea that this implied bluestocking, old-money elite, I happily pictured heroin addicts, pale and thin, draped over souring bedclothes,