Free The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone

according to Mr. Peebles, a soon-to-be national favorite. “We’re going to put Hormel out of business.”
    Standing at the conveyor belt, Abigail wore a clean but orange-stained smock and a hairnet, as did the other two women who worked the line alongside her. The three inspectors were to ensure that cans of Roger’s Gourmet Pork ’n’ Beans were filled to the third line (counting down from the top of the can, Mr. Peebles explained, as if she were an idiot), no more and no less, before they entered the sealer. “It’s the most important job,” Mr. Peebles had stressed. “Imagine: You’re about to feed your family dinner. You open up the can and there’s a white sticky mold because there was too much air in the can. It’s about consistency and quality. You work quality control.”
    In the last year, Abigail had lost one hundred and twenty pounds. One year married, she was miserable. She wore long-sleeved shirts and long pants despite the Arkansas heat to hide her sagging skin, and she was determined more than ever to save enough money to leave John Whitehouse and her mother, Winter Pitank, behind. She was going to take Buckley and move away from Mont Blanc, Arkansas. She wanted to see the ocean.
    When her mother asked her why she wouldn’t eat, why she’d lost so much weight so quickly—“Are you sick? Do you have a tapeworm?”—Abigail didn’t have the courage to tell her that it was John, that she had made a huge mistake—that watching him hoard tuna-noodle casserole, the noodles sopping and dripping down his chin, had made her nauseated. It just happened one day: She sat across from him at the kitchen table, and she lost her appetite. She looked down at her own plate of casserole, the noodles like fat white worms, and felt sick.
    Working the inspection line at Roger’s, there was a lot of time to think about the mistakes she’d made, what she might have done differently. The past, like the slop she inspected, sped by, can after can and memory after memory, making her wonder if forgetfulness wasn’t a blessing. She remembered her weddingnight, John saying, “Tell me you like it. Tell me you like it,” and she whispered back, “I like it,” wishing the mattress springs wouldn’t creak so. He said, “I know your fat ass does. I know it.” Later, he said he’d been in the throes. He hadn’t meant nothing hateful by what he said. She hadn’t always had a fat ass, as John would say. She’d been slim before Buckley. Before Richard, Buckley’s biological father, went away to the University of Florida to play football and study medicine.
    Buckley R. Pitank is Buckley Richard Pitank.
    Watching the cans rush past, she thought,
John is not a bad man, not as far as I can tell, and I can stomach him on top of me, inside me, calling me “fat ass” and “big girl” in the bed, and he treats Buckley like a son
. But therein lay the problem: That first week after they married, John taught Buckley to shoot. He taught Buckley to drive his truck and to lay brick and to hang drywall. He told him that Job had betrayed God, that he got what he deserved. John had even thrown a football with Buckley in the Holy Redeemer churchyard. The churchgoers were watching the stepfather and son, and John was encouraging Buckley, saying, “You got a good arm, Buck.” When Buckley fumbled and dropped the ball, John said, “The boy’s hands are greasy from the chicken.” John’s face had turned red. Buckley had embarrassed him, and John carried the football away, tossing it in his truck.
    Shifting her weight from left to right, her back hurting, Abigail remembered her mother’s face, pleased as punch, when Abigail told her that she was marrying the reverend. She would finally be somewhat respectable, a little less white trash. But now Abigail didn’t want the husband. She never had wanted him, but now she didn’t want the father for her son either. She had married John for Buckley and because John had proposed. He