Free The Truth About Love and Lightning by Susan McBride Page A

final look before she left the room. A few seconds after, Gretchen heard the thump-thump of the suitcase as Abby pulled it slowly up the stairs.
    “Good grief, aren’t you going to help the poor girl with that? We’ll stay with your patient,” Bennie chastised her, and Gretchen scurried out of the parlor, pausing at the base of the steps.
    “Abs,” she called up, “you should let me do that!”
    But her daughter had already ascended to the second-floor landing. “Can you get my bag?” she asked, peering down around the whitewashed balustrade. “I left it in the kitchen.”
    “Of course,” Gretchen said as Abby disappeared around the upstairs railing, suitcase wheels clacking as she rolled it toward her old room.
    Abby’s heavy-looking satchel lay on the breakfast table, tipped on its side, spilling some of its contents. Gretchen righted it and began to stuff the loose objects back in: a black marker, several quarters, a tube of pale pink lipstick, and a paperback-size drawing tablet from which a photograph protruded.
    Gretchen couldn’t help herself. She slid the photo from the pages, and her heart leaped into her throat when she realized its subject.
    “Sam,” she breathed his name, seeing a sixteen-year-old version of the man who would eventually leave Walnut Ridge with his heart broken. It was a long time since Gretchen had glimpsed this image. She’d given the photo to Abby when the girl was in nursery school. Her daughter had constantly peppered her with questions about why all her classmates had a mommy and a daddy while she had a mommy and two aunts. “You do have a father, Abs, and this is him,” Gretchen had fibbed.
    She ran a finger over the slender face, his features frozen in time. Sam sat on the porch steps in his overalls, his long legs extended, an unruly black cowlick curled upon his brow. His silver eyes were bright though the curve of his mouth was barely detectible. The photo was limp from handling, faded in spots around the edges.
    “Oh, Abs,” Gretchen said and sighed gently. No wonder the girl was so taken with the thought of her father returning; she had never let the idea of him go.
    Who was my daddy? Abby had asked so many times. What was he like? Why did he leave? How did he die?
    “Sam was a lot like my own father, Hank,” she recalled Lily Winston saying not long before she’d passed away. “He needed to make his own destiny, even if that destiny was ill-fated.”
    Lily was the one who’d first told her that Hank Littlefoot had been marked as a shaman, his own grandpa having been a tribal shaman before him. “He could have stayed and used his gift for the good of his people, but he didn’t want to remain on the rez. He felt no real connection to the government land or even his people.” Lily had then smiled one of her rare smiles. “Only when he settled here on the farm did he understand what having a home truly meant.”
    From that point forth, Gretchen had imagined Hank Littlefoot as a medicine man, healing the sick, and she’d often wondered if he wasn’t the reason why Sam had wanted to go to Africa to help those less fortunate. Sam liked looking out for the underdog, maybe because he’d always felt like an underdog himself.
    “Gretch? Are you still in here?” Bennie’s voice cracked her reverie, and Gretchen let the photograph slip from her hands.
    “Just getting Abby’s bag,” she said, scrambling to pick up the picture from the floor near her feet. “A few things had fallen out.”
    “Well, Abby hollered down and asked for a glass of warm milk.” Her sister began banging around, opening cabinets. “If you wait another few minutes, I’ll send it up with you.”
    “Great,” Gretchen said, her heart thudding. As quietly as she could, she flipped open the sketchbook, prepared to quickly tuck the photograph inside and be done with it. Only something else caught her eye, the pencil drawings themselves. She looked at one and then another, turning pages