The Scent of Rain and Lightning

14

ALONE AT THE RANCH with Jody, Annabelle scurried around to get things done before the power went out, as it often did during electrical storms. Her granddaughter trailed her everywhere, chatting up her own storm and “helping” in ways that caused more work, but for which Annabelle had endless patience. It was more patience than she’d ever had with her own children, she knew, but then that was the way of grandkids and grandparents. Boom! went the thunder, which didn’t scare little Jody at all, but only caused her to clap her hands and yell “Boom!” right back at it. Whenever the lightning flashed and cracked very close, the child flinched, but then giggled, which made Annabelle laugh, too. “Storms are exciting, aren’t they?” she said to Jody, who threw her arms up in the air and yelled “Boom!” again.

It pleased Annabelle that this child was so open and fearless.

At the same age, Belle had been a nervous girl, terrified of electrical storms, of horses, of barking dogs, of anything that startled her sensitive nervous system. Annabelle had dreaded storms of all kinds then, and knew that a long night was ahead of her as she tried to calm and comfort Belle.

Eventually Belle got over most of those fears, if not the hypersensitivity.

Annabelle thought the thunderstorm was carrying on as if it might wash the ranch into another state. When it rained like this, she pictured everything sliding east until it landed in one massive mud pile in Kansas City. She could only imagine how it was beating up on the poor little town of Rose.

When Hugh called from the Rose Motel to tell her he couldn’t make it home, he told her that the smaller trees in town were bending half over and there was hail the size of ball bearings.

“The highway is already flooded?” she asked in wonder.

“Yes, it is, and I’ll bet you’ve never seen whitecaps in Kansas.”

“Whitecaps! You’re pulling my leg.”

“I’m not. Right there on the highway. It looked like a river.”

“Have you talked to the kids-”

Annabelle lost her connection to Hugh just when she was about to ask if he had seen Belle, Bobby, Chase, or Laurie. Surely they’d have enough sense to get in out of the rain without their father telling them to do so. She also wanted to tell him their granddaughter was at the ranch. On the other hand, she was relieved when the phone went out, because it meant she didn’t have to tell him why he might have to finance a trip to Colorado Springs for his spoiled-rotten daughter-in-law.

“That was Grandpa,” she told Jody.

“I talk to him?”

“The storm knocked out the telephone, sweetheart.”

“Pow,” said Jody.

Annabelle, wondering if a child that young was smart enough to make a joke like that, laughed and hugged her. When Jody laughed, too, Annabelle realized, with no small wonder, that Jody had heard “knocked out” and put it together with “pow,” all the while knowing that’s not what it meant.

“You are a smart little girl,” she told her.

It gave her an idea: maybe she could “knock out” Laurie’s bad idea of going to Colorado by herself-supposedly by herself-by getting Belle to go, too. After all, Belle might be jealous and resent the expensive treat for her sister-in-law, and Laurie had already talked about inviting a friend. She and Belle weren’t all that close, but they were friends in the way that people who had gone all through school together in low population counties were.

Yes, Belle definitely deserved a short trip to Colorado.

Glad of a solution, Annabelle hurried to get some laundry done.

She occupied Jody with sorting whites from colors.

Annabelle picked up a pair of Bobby’s work jeans and started going through the pockets. She found three pockets clean, but he had missed clearing out his back left pocket. She pulled out a wad of stuff: a feed store receipt, an AA battery, a piece of wintergreen gum, which she unwrapped and stuck into her mouth, his (now useless) K-State student ID card, and a small photograph of his sister-in-law and his niece.

Surprised to find such a sentimental thing in his pocket, Annabelle smiled at the discovery.

“Look, Jody.”

The little girl hopped up and came over to see.

“Is that baby me?”

“It sure is. That’s you and your mommy.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“From your uncle Bobby’s pants pocket.”

“What was it doing in there?”

“He wants to keep you close to him.”

“Really?”

“Yes. He’s proud of you. You’re his only niece.”

Annabelle had no idea if any of that was true, but she liked the sound of it, and judging from the way Jody’s eyes were shining, so did his niece.

“I love Uncle Bobby.”

“Well, he loves you, too.”

“Mommy’s pretty.”

“Yes, she is.”

Bobby was better with children than he was with grown-ups, Annabelle thought. Or at least he was better with this one child. He was willing to pick her up and swing her when Laurie asked him to, and not opposed to walking out to the barn with her to visit the cats. She suspected that Laurie only wanted to get Jody out of her hair when she made those requests, but that didn’t take anything away from Bobby’s willingness to fulfill them. It seemed to make him almost as happy as it made Jody.

Annabelle felt delighted to think that her most difficult son wanted to keep a picture of his niece in his pocket. It was a small thing, and she knew she might be giving it too much weight, but she couldn’t help what it made her feel. It gave her hope for Bobby, who could be lazy and sarcastic and sometimes even a little mean. She laid the photo carefully on top of the dryer and told herself to remember to tell Hugh about it. Maybe it would soften him a little bit, and then maybe Bobby would respond to his father’s softening…

The only thing you should soften by pounding is steak, Annabelle thought. Children were not cuts of beef, and parents shouldn’t be meat mallets.

There was a ferocious crash of lightning, and the basement laundry room went dark.

“Grandma, what happened?”

“We’ve lost power, honey. Here, take my hand. We’ll find candles.”

“I’m hungry.”

“Then we’ll find a flashlight, candles, and something good to eat.”

Feeling grateful for her gas stove, Annabelle made grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup for the two of them, and followed that with a special treat of hot fudge sundaes. “May as well use up the ice cream before it melts.” She lit kerosene lanterns, put one on her reading table, and after dinner took her granddaughter onto her lap and read to her, in the flickering light, from Make Way for Ducklings, a tattered copy that was now on its third generation of handling and love.

Outside, the storm battered the house.

Inside, they were cozier than any pioneer women could have been.

As she turned a page and Jody snuggled against her, Annabelle thought, I’m the luckiest woman in the world.

AT THE ROSE MOTEL, Hugh Senior peeled down to his skivvies and crawled between the thin white sheets of the lumpy motel bed, for lack of anything else to do. There wasn’t any light to read by, except a flashlight, and the television was out, and it was raining too hard to go anywhere, even over to Bailey’s Bar & Grill for supper. He would have loved a couple of big fat pork chops with a baked potato and some green beans, but his stomach was just going to have to grumble because it wasn’t getting fed anytime soon. Unlike the motel, Bailey’s place would have electric generators going, so they’d still be serving, but that didn’t do him any good if he couldn’t get there. He wasn’t hungry enough to pay the price of getting soaked to the skin when he didn’t have a change of clothes, and he’d stupidly left his rain slicker in his truck. He thought about forcing his way through the downpour anyway, and driving over to the grill, but decided that he’d had about enough of his own kids for one day. He knew they were at Bailey’s because when he’d driven past he saw Bobby’s truck and Meryl’s. A phone call to Bailey himself had filled in the blanks: his two younger sons, his daughter, and his daughter-in-law; they’d take care of themselves and each other.

Truth to tell, they’d probably had enough of him, too.

He ran his hands over the sheets-so cheap and rough compared to the soft, good-smelling ones that Annabelle used on their bed at home-and wished she was there with him to complain about them.

“At these prices, you’d think they could afford decent sheets,” she’d say.

In truth, at the prices the local motels charged, they probably couldn’t afford anything but old towels and sheets, but his wife was careful about money, which was one of the things he loved about her-as opposed to some other wives he could think of, including one in his own family.

He liked staying in hotels and motels with Annabelle-well, nice ones, at least-especially now that the kids were grown and got their own rooms. And, frugal or not, Annabelle loved room service. She would never get that at the Rose Motel, but she could have awakened to fresh coffee made in the room by her very own husband.

Hugh Senior crossed his arms behind his head on the pillow and smiled at the ceiling. His kids drove him crazy half the time, the ranches were heavy responsibility and hard work almost all of the time, there were various problems that he’d just as soon he didn’t have to deal with, but overall, life was pretty good…

Especially now that the Billy Crosby problem was solved.

Any second thoughts he’d had were gone.

We’ll be fine, if we don’t lose any cattle in this storm, he thought.

He felt a bubble of laughter in his chest, knowing what Annabelle would have said if she’d heard him think that: “You’re just an old farmer,” she’d say, “always happy to find the cloud in the silver lining,” and then she’d put her arms around him and kiss him.

In his imagination, he kissed her back.

He wasn’t through thinking, though.

He was convinced-again-that he’d done the right thing about Billy: get him arrested, put him in jail. A lot of things got tolerated or overlooked in small towns because people had to live together, but this wasn’t going to be one of them.

Satisfied with his own intentions, Hugh Senior closed his eyes.

Outside, lightning crashed as if the end of the world had come.

Exhausted from the day of stress and hard work, Hugh Senior slept through most of it.

TWO DOORS DOWN from his father, Bobby ran in from the rain.

He’d brought a six-pack with him, provided by a cowboy he’d asked to buy it for him. He proceeded to get started on it by pulling a chair up to the window and drinking while he sat in the dark and watched the deluge. The gutters were lakes by now, water stood deep in the valleys of intersections, and tree branches had come down all over town. There had been a couple of times when he was sure his truck was going to stall, but he’d managed to roll it on through the high water, feeling like a barge captain.

Half a beer down, he smiled with satisfaction, remembering how he had manhandled Billy Crosby at the tavern.

Bastard.

One beer down, he glanced over at the two beds.

He was thinking of fading into one of them, but Chase didn’t have a key to the damned room. What the hell was taking Chase so long anyway? All he had to do was drop off Laurie…

“What the fuck are you doing?” he muttered to his absent brother.

When he was away from his parents, who forbade such language in their home, he liked to let loose with it. The word “fuck” made him nervous, however, when combined in the same sentence with his brother and Laurie. It wasn’t easy being crazy in love with his own sister-in-law and never letting anybody know it. It was painful knowing it was probably never going to come to anything, and always looking for any little sign that she even liked him, and knowing what his fathers and brothers would do to him if they ever so much as guessed what he thought about in bed each night. And when he was driving his truck. And when he was doing practically anything. Like, when he should have been studying.

He’d flunked out of K-State because he couldn’t stop thinking about Laurie.

He had this one fantasy he loved, even though he was deeply ashamed of it because it required both of his brothers being dead. It made him feel kind of sick every time he let it play in his brain. He already felt bad enough about betraying Hugh-Jay, even if it was only in his imagination, and this story only made that worse. In his fantasy, they were all back in biblical days and it was the law that when a man died his next oldest brother had to marry his widow, just as things had been back then in real life. That was why in the fantasy Chase had to be gone, too, of the plague or something, or being stabbed by a jealous husband, maybe. Laurie’s and Bobby’s parents and the whole community insisted on their marriage, so Bobby and Laurie didn’t have any choice in the matter. They had to get married to satisfy tradition and religion, so it didn’t matter if Laurie didn’t want to. In his fantasy, Laurie came around to appreciating that he was honorable and noble, and that he was only doing the right thing because he wanted to help and protect her. And then she’d have a chance to fall in love with him, like he was with her.

It was also hard to be in love with her because of Chase.

When he saw Chase talking and joking around with her, making it look easy, it ate him up with jealousy. It made him want to grab Chase and slam him up against the house and then stomp on him. Talking to women was easy for Chase, like swinging up into a saddle, or smoking a cigarette. Nothing to it, if you had the bullshit for it. It was hard for Bobby to talk to most people, but it seemed like his tongue swelled to twice its size when he was anywhere near Laurie. About all he could get out of his mouth was grunts, which sometimes made her give him a look like he disgusted her. Like this evening, when she’d complained he was too big to sit by her.

That’s real attractive, he thought, loathing himself.

Thinking about what really was attractive, Bobby reflexively reached for his left rear pocket where he kept a little photo of her.

When all he felt was denim-and he remembered where the picture was-he had a scary moment of thinking, Oh, shit! What if his mother found the picture when she washed his other jeans? He told himself she wouldn’t think anything of it, because little Jody was in the photo, too, so it was just an ordinary picture of his sister-in-law and his niece, like any loving uncle might keep.

Next time, though, he would put the photo in a more private place.

He didn’t know how he’d explain it if his dad or his brothers saw it, and how ragged and worn it was, which could only be from him handling it so often. Stroking her face. Her hair. Her mouth. And other parts of her. Chase would immediately suspect something, and he would never let go of it.

Where was Chase, for God’s sake?

This was pissing him off.

Bobby squashed the empty beer can in his right hand.

If Chase didn’t show up soon, he thought that he might have to get in the truck and go after him.

BELLE JUMPED when she heard pounding on the side door of the bank.

At first she thought it was noise from the storm, maybe a big branch blown into the door. But when it kept up, she made out a human voice mixed in with the thunder, rain, lightning, wind, and pounding. She weaved her way toward it and jerked the door open. As hard as it was raining, she was surprised that whoever it was hadn’t just come on in. Then she saw the screen door and remembered she had latched it to keep it from blowing open.

Meryl Tapper stood outside in the rain, looking in at her with a sheepish expression.

“Meryl! Come in, get in here!”

He had dropped her off and then gone back to his office to check on things there. She hadn’t expected him to come back, which made it all the sweeter that he had gone to the effort, especially in the storm. He had his shirt pulled up over his head for cover, leaving his belly and half of his chest and his back exposed. It didn’t keep him from looking as if he had been swimming in drainage ditches. His sandy-colored hair was plastered to his face and neck. Water streamed down his raised arms. His blue jeans were so wet they looked as if they’d be heavy to walk in. He looked like the most beautiful drowned rat that Belle had ever seen, and she was so eager to let him in that her fingers fumbled with the latch on the door.

Belle wasn’t feeling too steady. She didn’t often drink more than one beer, and the three she’d had that evening made her feel dizzy and reckless.

“You’re wet as a sponge!”

“It won’t kill me.”

“It might.” She started fumbling with the bolo tie she’d given him, trying to get the silver horse to slide down the twined leather so she could lift it over his head. “You need to get out of those clothes.”

He put a hand over her hand to stop her.

“I don’t have anything to change into, Belle.”

Belle, who was a virgin, swallowed hard and said, “That’s okay.”

Meryl instantly realized what she was saying. He took her forearms in his wet hands and said, “Then I’m going to ask you now before this goes any further. Will you marry me, Belle Linder?”

Belle laughed a little. “You don’t have to marry me to have sex with me, Meryl.”

“Yeah, I do.”

She stared at him, feeling confused, not sure whether to be disappointed or glad.

“We’re going to get married first,” Meryl told her, “if you ever remember to say yes.”

“What about your wet clothes?” she asked, feeling stupid the second after she said it.

“They’re going to get wetter because I’m going on home.”

“Did you come here just to ask me to marry you?”

“Yeah.” Meryl grinned. “Come hell or high water.”

“Are we in love?”

“I’m pretty sure we are, Belle.”

“Yes!” she said. “I’ll marry you, Meryl Tapper.”

He kissed her without holding her, for fear of soaking her, but Belle wasn’t having any of that kind of restraint. She pulled him toward her, wrapped her arms around him and got just as wet as he was.

WORKING ON his third beer can, Bobby peered through the heavy rain and recognized a truck that splashed by.

“What’s Hugh-Jay doing here?” he asked the storm. He was positive that was his eldest brother’s truck, the one that was supposed to be in Colorado by now. Bobby raised up out of the chair so he could follow the truck’s rear lights down the dark street. It was hard to see, so he could have been wrong, except there wasn’t another silver truck like that in Rose.

He watched Hugh-Jay’s truck turn left, toward the big stone house.