Excerpt: Raining Mercy

Monica had decided at some point early in the summer, when it became clear that it was going to be a continuation of the year and a half of drought already, that the heat and lack of rain were in some ways a metaphor for the recession. She was old enough to have been through both drought and recession before. She knew there would be an end; it might not abruptly announce itself. More likely it would be a subtle improvement of things that gradually continued till one day you realized things were better. But it seemed that having them concurrently lent a weight not encountered before. It would be so easy to become discouraged and disheartened.
She tried to take the approach that things would improve, if only incrementally, but on the dark side was the looming fear that there would be no improvement, that the work she did would never come back, that all was lost. Monica was no Pollyanna, but she had been around long enough to know that things were cyclical, and the bad times, too, would pass, eventually.