Nancy Pickard - The Scent of Rain and Lightning

“Hi, Grandma.” She dropped her voice to a gentle tone. “Are you and Grandpa okay?”

“We will be as soon as we see you coming up the road.”

Her grandmother wasn’t given to laying guilt trips on people-that was the job of her sons-so Jody took her statement at face value as a simple statement of truth. She also took it as an example and held back her urge to lay a guilt trip on her grandparents for not taking her with them to see the governor. It was done. This was awful for them; she would not make it worse.

“I’m just leaving. Do you need me to pick up anything for you?”

“Child, I do. I have enough milk to mash the potatoes, but not enough for gravy.”

“Oh, no, not that!” Jody teased. “Uncle Bobby can’t live without gravy.”

“I think his veins run with it.” Even under these circumstances, there was humor in her grandmother’s reply. “That can’t be good, can it?”

Jody thought that if a person didn’t know her grandmother well, they’d never suspect from her voice on the telephone that anything was troubling her. It was only in person, where you could see her expressive face, that a stranger might get a glimpse of pain or trouble.

Jody said, “One day science will discover that your gravy cures cancer.”

“In that case, I’d better take out a patent on it.” There was a smile in the warm voice. “Pick up two half gallons, please?”

Her granddaughter knew without asking to get two-percent milk. “I’ll do it.”

“How are you, dearest?”

Jody’s throat closed on tears for a moment and she waited until she could talk. “Let’s see.” She cleared her throat. “I’m stunned. Confused. Sad. Pissed off. That about covers it, I think.”

“Yes,” Annabelle said gently. “That would about cover it.”

“I’ll be out as soon as I can get there, Grandma.”

“If you run into your uncles, tell them to be on time for supper unless they want cold fried chicken.”

The words “fried chicken” made Jody’s stomach rumble with hunger.

“I’m pretty sure I can smell it from here.”

“Well, then, I’d better check to make sure it’s not burning.”

“Chase and Bobby aren’t there yet?” They’d been in such a hurry to get her out to the ranch. “Where are they?”

But her grandmother had already murmured a soft goodbye and hung up.

JODY FELT ON high alert during her short trip to Main Street where George’s Grocery was still located. As she spotted people she knew and waved to the ones who noticed her, she wondered if she was only imagining that they, too, looked wary. Was everybody as nervous about seeing Billy Crosby as she was? Many of them had known him a long time ago, and they probably wondered what in the world they would say to him or he would say to them.

A couple of them had served on his jury.

She wouldn’t have wanted to be in their shoes today, either.

Jody walked into a grocery store that was far different from the bustling enterprise it had seemed in her childhood, when it was called George’s Fresh Food & Deli. With a falling population in the county, Byron George had been forced to cut back in every way, including closing a quarter of his floor space. There wasn’t any deli now; if you wanted a ham sandwich, you bought the bread and made your own at home. Everything about his store seemed smaller to Jody, and she knew that wasn’t just because she was bigger. The ironic exceptions were the products that kept arriving in ever larger containers containing ever less inside.

At least a half gallon of milk was still a half gallon of milk.

She walked into a store kept dim to save on the lighting bill.

Just inside, Jody halted, because she heard raised, heated voices.

She looked to her right and saw Byron surrounded by three of his customers who had him backed against a soft drink refrigerator. Taller than all of them, he looked red-faced and frustrated above his butcher’s apron.

Even from the rear, Jody recognized her grandmother’s friend Phyllis Boren and also one of the men, her own next-door neighbor, Samuel Carpenter. It might have seemed a coincidence, since she had just been thinking about him only minutes earlier, but it was hardly ever a coincidence to run into somebody she knew in Rose. There just weren’t that many people, and they basically all had the same errands to run. The other man wasn’t anybody she knew, which likely made him somebody from one of the neighboring towns that had lost its own grocery store and whose citizens were forced to use a lot of gas to pick up bread and milk. All three of them were in their seventies, at least, but that wasn’t weakening their voices or tamping down their anger.

“You can’t possibly believe what you’re saying, Byron!”

As Phyllis Boren yelled at Byron George, Jody decided the wisest thing to do was slip down the bread aisle to avoid them. Everybody knew Phyllis was argumentative, and Byron wasn’t any shrinking violet himself. Sam Carpenter was a tenderhearted sweetie who’d brought Jody housewarming flowers and tomato plants, and she had a soft spot for him because of how much he always cared about what happened to the Linders. He was as thoughtful a neighbor as anyone could wish for, but even Sam Carpenter looked as if he’d like to kill somebody.

Then she heard Byron say, “I do believe he didn’t do it, Mrs. Boren.”

“That’s just sex talking,” Phyllis shot back, shocking Jody into standing still as her grandmother’s very proper friend said with a nasty tone, “You and that wife of his.”

“That’s insulting,” Byron retorted, looking ready to strangle one of his oldest and best customers. “Don’t you talk to me like that and don’t you be talking about Valentine like that!”

Jody flinched at the name. She looked around for its owner.

A lot had changed for Valentine Crosby, too, in the years since she’d been left at home with a child and a part-time job. She had hung onto one of the few steady jobs in Rose and done it the old-fashioned way. Byron had once told her Aunt Belle, “It’s real hard to fire somebody who works as hard as three people and never misses a day of work.” His wife, Livia, had passed away of a brain aneurysm five years ago, and he’d moved Valentine up to manager. The talk around town the last year or so was that he’d have married her if she didn’t insist on staying married to Billy.

Jody didn’t see Valentine in the store.

At her grandmother’s insistence, she had never been anything but polite to Mrs. Crosby, who had without exception returned the courtesy. But now her feelings toward the woman who was welcoming Billy Crosby home were not so friendly.

The other man-the one Jody didn’t know-stuck his own opinion into the fray: “If you’d of married her by now, he’d never have come back here.”

“Oh, now you want us to get married?” Byron’s words were sarcastic. It made Jody remember how offended a lot of people were when it became obvious that he and his manager were keeping company outside the store.

At the ranch, nobody had felt that way, or if they did, hadn’t said so. “They’re probably the two loneliest people in Rose,” Annabelle had remarked at the time, “and this may be a good thing for both of them.”

But now the gossip worm had turned, Jody observed, as Byron said, “Well, Val believes she needs to stay with him to show she believes he didn’t do it, which she does and which he didn’t!”

Jody’s neighbor, Samuel, said with a deep sarcasm that shocked her, because it was so bitterly different from his usual manner, “Oh, well, yes, let’s make sure he looks good, the murdering bastard.”

“I swear to you he didn’t do it,” Byron insisted to them.