Nancy Pickard - The Scent of Rain and Lightning

A LITTLE LATER young Red Bosch drove by Bailey’s Bar & Grill and thought he saw somebody lying flat on the pavement in the parking lot in the pouring rain. He turned in to take a look, shone the headlights of his pickup truck on the object of his concern and saw it was Billy Crosby lying there. Red put his truck in park, threw open his driver’s side door and ran through the rain to see if Billy was dead. He wasn’t. He was just dead drunk, from what the teenager could tell. Red managed to prod Billy to his feet, more or less, and guide him to the truck with the heavens nearly drowning both of them before they got there.

He drove Billy home to Valentine and their little boy.

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.