The Rainmaker

through college. I think I spoke to him twice during the four years of my undergraduate studies. The day after I learned I had been accepted to law school, I proudly returned home with this great news. Mother told me later he stayed in bed for a week.

Two weeks after my triumphant visit, he was changing a lightbulb in the utility room when (I swear this is true) a ladder collapsed and he fell on his head. He lasted a year in a coma in a nursing home before someone mercifully pulled the plug.

Several days after the funeral, I suggested the possibility of a lawsuit, but Mother was just not up to it. Also, I've always suspected he was partially inebriated when he fell. And he was earning nothing, so under our tort system his life had little economic value.

My mother received a grand total of fifty thousand dollars in life insurance, and remarried badly. He's a simple sort, my stepfather, a retired postal clerk from Toledo, and they spend most of their time square dancing and traveling in a Winnebago. I keep my  distance. Mother didn't offer me a dime of the money, said it was all she had  to face the future with, and since I'd proven rather adept at living on  nothing, she felt I didn't need any of it. I had a bright future earning money;  she did not, she reasoned. I'm certain Hank, the new husband, was filling her  ear full of financial advice. Our paths will cross again one day, mine and  Hank's.

I will finish law school in May, a month from now, then I'll sit for the  bar exam in July. I will not graduate with honors, though I'm somewhere in the  top half of my class. The only smart thing I've done in three years of law  school was to schedule the required and difficult courses early, so I could  goof off in this, my last semester. My classes this spring are a  joke: Sports Law, Art Law, Selected Readings from