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

liked her cooking. He liked her fat ass, and he was quickly turning her only son into a young man doomed to lay bricks, hang drywall, shoot guns, drive pickup trucks, and probably pick up whores and gamble. She didn’t know where it would lead, but shooting and whoring was not what she’dintended for her only son. She wanted him to go to college and read books and be a professional. She knew what John was about, and it wasn’t about God. It was about scheming and living lazy. Despite all his promises, they still lived in Winter’s pea green cinder-block house, and John’s congregation was fewer than thirty. She had hoped John might just up and leave, but he licked his fingers at the dinner table, put his boots on the furniture, and smacked her on the behind in front of Buckley and Winter. He wasn’t leaving any time soon.
    The conveyor belt jerked and stopped. Pork ’n’ beans slopped the belt and Abigail’s smock. “Wake up,” said Linda, who worked the line, and who for some reason didn’t like Abigail. “I’ll get Horace. Clean that up.” Abigail tossed the nine slopped cans and wiped the belt with her rag. She wiped the sauce from her cheek with the back of her hand. Samantha, the other inspector, said, “I’ll be back.” She was going for a smoke.
    Abigail’s own daddy had taught her that a man or woman doesn’t have anything if they don’t have their word.
If you can’t keep your word, you can’t keep nothing
. And she had certainly kept her word. Maybe that was a mistake. The line started moving again, and she was alone at the conveyor belt. Samantha took long smoke breaks, and Linda was always looking for an excuse to leave the line. Abigail knew from experience that Linda wouldn’t be back for at least twenty minutes. The balls of Abigail’s feet ached. She wished she smoked or had some reason to leave the line, but she couldn’t go anywhere with those two gone. It was two o’clock. She had three more hours to go. Mr. Peebles had reminded her this morning, “No break this afternoon. I let you leave early yesterday.”
    “My son was sick. It was a half hour.”
    He hadn’t answered.
    It was a mindless job and so her mind wandered. She thought on Richard and the promise she’d kept, not even telling her own mother his name. When Richard had said, “You tricked me. Mydaddy’s right about you. You’re a whore,” she had said, “I would never trick you. Never. I love you. I won’t ever tell anybody this is your baby if you don’t want me to.”
    “How do I know it is?” He was handsome, with a golden crew cut. At his hairline, he had fine tufts of hair like a baby’s first hairs, and he had the shiniest green eyes. In one more year he was leaving for the University of Florida to play football. She remembered him saying something like
I should’ve known you’d try something like this. In another year, I’m getting out of here. Nothing you can say will change that
. That’s what she remembered, and she’d thought then, at three months pregnant, that despite what he said, he wouldn’t really leave. That if he did leave, his conscience would bring him back. He would want to know his child.
    In her mind she could still see him there behind Moore’s Grocery. She remembered saying, “I was a virgin.” It was August 8, 1958. She remembered writing the date in her diary. She had left the whole page blank to fill in later when he changed his mind, when he said
I want us to be a family. That page is still blank
, she thought. It would remain forever blank.
    What had she looked like then? She tried to picture herself, the two of them standing with their backs up against the bricks, him hardly looking at her. She kept moving in front of him, trying to make eye contact, to see into his heart. She was so naive.
    “I’ll deny it’s mine.”
    “No, you won’t.”
What did I look like then?
She let a can of Roger’s Gourmet Pork ’n’ Beans pass at the sixth line.
White mold. Some