TWENTYThe regulars at the JoeHaus had already become accustomed to John by the time the weather began to change and Sandie finally broke out a denim jacket. The sign on the Baptist church down the street still flashed “Pray For Rain,” but the grass on the sides of the highway was no longer spontaneously bursting into flame every few days, and the sound of fire truck sirens became a slightly rarer occurrence. The cedars turned brown and shot their pollen into the air like so many allergy-inducing smoke bombs, and all of San Antonio was covered in a thick pall of brown cedar dust until the prayed-for rain finally washed it away.
John commandeered Sandie’s laptop, spent two hundred hours on the internet, and came away with a working knowledge of the written word and a lackluster understandin
