Nancy Pickard - The Scent of Rain and Lightning

“I have a right,” she said out loud in the dark house as she stepped onto its first floor. The Linders were stingy, in her view; if they weren’t so stingy, she wouldn’t have to pad her own bank account with such pitiful little amounts of… change, really, just a few dollars here and there to buy herself something nice, or to make Jody look pretty so people would admire her daughter. Besides, she was doing the work that Hugh-Jay was supposed to be doing but had no aptitude for, and so therefore what she was taking was only a salary, the one they were too cheap to give her.

“They owe me.”

TWO MILES AWAY, on the front porch of an abandoned farmhouse where he had sat and watched the rain for hours, Hugh-Jay finally made up his mind about what he was going to have to do.

He’d gone to the farmhouse after seeing his mother and daughter in Rose. Upon leaving them, he had mentally kicked himself for turning right-in front of his mother’s car-instead of turning left so she would believe he was heading for the highway to Colorado. It didn’t matter, he tried to convince himself. She would assume that he had errands to run before he left town; she would never suspect that he wasn’t going at all.

So he had made his right turn and kept driving out of Rose.

Five or so miles east he signaled and turned into a road leading to a farm that had failed a few months before and hadn’t been sold yet. Hugh-Jay was depressed to see that prairie dog towns had already popped up in several places. Eventually they’d join into one huge underground mammal city with upright furry sentinels spaced outside atop their holes. He might have found them cute if he didn’t know the destruction they wreaked on farm and ranch land. His sympathy was for the farmer who had gone bust and whose belongings had been auctioned as his family looked on.

Agriculture was hard, Hugh-Jay thought as he parked beside the empty farmhouse.

But not as hard as marriage was turning out to be.

He got out of his truck and slowly walked up to the front porch.

The wooden slats creaked under his boots.

He put a hand on a post and felt the rough surface of peeling paint, inhaled the smell of dirt rising from the humidity beneath the broken steps.

People he knew had lived here. There’d been small children playing on this porch and in the yard, filling the air with their laughter and the crying that accompanied skinned knees, bumped heads, and hurt feelings. He’d have sworn he could still hear one of them yell, “Mom!” It made his own heart hurt to think that if he didn’t find a way to fix the rift in his marriage, it might be his house that would be haunted by the sounds of a family that didn’t live there anymore.

Hugh-Jay had sat down on the porch swing and pushed off with one boot.

He had a bad decision to make and felt paralyzed by it.

His dad wanted him to check out the honesty of the Colorado ranch manager, but Hugh-Jay knew that it didn’t need checking. There was nothing wrong with the man’s honesty, or ethics, or morals, or whatever else you wanted to call it when a person either did or didn’t take money that didn’t belong to him.

The ranch manager didn’t even know there was anything amiss.

When the manager sent his bills, everything was in order.

It was only when it left Hugh-Jay’s own house that holes appeared in it.

Because he hated office work, he had asked Laurie to help him, and she gradually took over responsibility for the accounting that he was supposed to do. They’d both been surprised-and pleased-to discover she had an aptitude for it, and even though she complained about doing it, Hugh-Jay thought she took pride in being better at it than he was. He’d been proud of her, too, and relieved to let go of a job he knew he’d botch. He’d looked forward to telling his father that he and Laurie were a team now. He hadn’t anticipated that she’d find a way to siphon a few dollars here and there for herself.

That came as an awful shock.

Hugh-Jay had felt sick to his stomach ever since he realized the truth.

He’d raised the subject, ever so delicately-he thought-two days ago, and Laurie had gone through the roof, accusing him of “calling me a thief!” He knew their fight was part of the reason he’d gone off so furiously on those strangers who threw the cigarette out of their car on the highway, and also why he’d overreacted to his brother’s return visit that morning to Laurie. He couldn’t bring himself to yell at her, so he took it out on other people.

She was still furious at him, and letting him know it.

It was why he had surprised her at lunch. He’d wanted to make peace with her, show her he still loved her, but he didn’t want her building up a head of angry steam before he got there.

It hadn’t worked so well, he thought, with wry, grim recall.

He’d be lucky, at this rate, if she didn’t kick him out of their bedroom.

Hugh-Jay knew he could go out to the Colorado ranch and lay the blame there, but there was no way he could blame an innocent man. That left him two choices, because his father wasn’t going to be satisfied-or let it go-until the problem was solved and the thief revealed. There was just enough money missing, and the disguising of it was just suspicious enough that Hugh-Jay knew he couldn’t pass it off as his own bad arithmetic. That left him the choice of telling the truth, which meant that Hugh Senior would never forgive his daughter-in-law or think of her the same way again. His mother would never forgive her, either, and they didn’t like her very much to begin with. And if he took that way out, Laurie would never forgive him. The whole thing could just spiral forever.

He had one other choice: he could take the blame himself.

If he did that, his father would never trust him again.

Hugh Senior drew lines in the dirt, and honesty was one of them.

As the day pulled to a close around him and rain started to fall, and prairie dogs popped out of their holes to check the weather one last time, he stopped the movement of the porch swing, bent over and put his head in his hands.

He felt anguished. Lose his wife’s affection, or lose his father’s respect?

“It’s such a little bit of money!” Laurie had cried out to him. “Who cares? Why are you making such a big deal of it?”

And it was, just a little bit, really, compared to all that the ranch owned, earned, spent.

But in his father’s eyes, stealing a dime was as bad as stealing a dollar.

It was a big deal to Hugh Senior, a mark of character or lack of it, maybe not as bad as cutting fences, but still, a sign of… badness. He might forgive a starving woman for doing it, but he would never forgive a woman who had all the food she could eat, and pretty clothes, and the house she’d always wanted.

Hugh-Jay remained there as the rain got heavier and night settled in.

Near midnight, when the roads were flooding, he gave in to what he had to do and then worked up the courage to do it. If he had to choose between the respect of his parents or the love of his wife, he would choose his wife so that he could keep their little family together.

He prayed that his parents would find it in their hearts to forgive him.

Hugh-Jay ran through the pouring rain to his truck.

He was going to tell Laurie that he would take the blame, if she would promise never to do anything like that again. And then he would face his father and tell the necessary lie, and the old man was never going to forgive him, but he could spend the rest of his life, if need be, trying to regain his father’s trust again. His decision killed him, because he respected his father above all other men, but his love for his baby daughter wouldn’t let him brand her mother a thief.