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

woman is going to be entirely destroyed in another year’s time when she opens this slop to feed her family. How terrible. Mr. Peebles won’t approve
.
    I was thin then
, she remembered,
and I had on that white skirt I bought in Fayetteville, the one patterned with French ladies and parasols. I had washed and pressed it, and it got dirty against the
bricks. Stained forever. Pretty means pretty and nothing more. It doesn’t pay
.
    “I gotta go” is what he’d said.
    Didn’t he know Jiminy Cricket’s “Always Let Your Conscience Be Your Guide”? If Richard doesn’t want to know Buckley, then Buckley doesn’t want to know him
. She let another can pass, this one at the tenth line.
Richard got out of here. No doubt about that
. He left Mont Blanc for good, but not before he saw Abigail wheeling her baby boy down Main Street. She remembered walking proudly, trying not to seem obvious, but eyeing him. He crossed the street. He hadn’t even tried to sneak a peek at his own son.
He’s your baby
, she’d thought. She wanted to scream,
He’s your son. You need to claim him!
But who was she to him?
A good time. An easy lay. What did her mother say? “Why pay for the cow when you can get the milk for free.” “Pretty’s just pretty. It doesn’t pay.”
    When Buckley was four or five, she ran into Richard at Bronco Billy’s Drive-in. He was in town for the holidays, visiting his folks. She was fat then, and Richard hadn’t recognized her, but she knew him. He looked the exact same, except his hair was long down his back, which suited him. Had she been thinner then … had her hair been washed … had she been nicely dressed … had she had more confidence, she might’ve approached him then to tell him how amazing his son was. She wanted to say,
It’s me! Abigail
. She wanted to tell him about Buckley Richard Pitank.
    Instead, she drove away with her cheeseburger and milk shake, her palms sweaty on the steering wheel.
    Linda came up behind Abigail. “What the hell is going on?”
    Abigail said, “I’m doing my job. I’m checking the cans.”
    “Has Mr. Peebles seen this mess?”
    Abigail shook her head that no, he had not, thinking that if Linda and Samantha weren’t always wandering off, this type of thing wouldn’t happen in the first place.
    “Thank God,” Linda said. “And Horace didn’t come by?”
    “No.”
    “When the line started back up, did you check each can?”
    “Not really.” Abigail didn’t lie. She kept secrets, but she didn’t lie.
    “Why not?”
    “My mind wandered.”

Excerpt from
THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS
    A farmer from Waryo, Montana, struck thirteen times in the last ten years, told reporters, “I don’t feel nothing. I’m numb. I won’t run from a storm. I ain’t seeking no shelter. I think it’s God’s way of letting me know he’s here. He’s waiting for me, but it’s not my time. I’ve been to the hospital every time I got hit, and every time I tell them, ‘Listen to my heart. Hook me up to one of them machines you got,’ and every single time, we look at that monitor thing and there’s my heart, still ticking, all crazy fast and slow and fast and slow, and they keep me there until my ticker settles down again, and then I go home. I guess I’ve had a dozen cardiac arrests and somehow she keeps on ticking. I’m like Timex.”

[9]
This mortal coil, 1979
    Grandma Edna goes to bed at quarter past nine. She unfastens her watch and drops it on the nightstand. She tucks the heavy knotted quilt under her arms and, anxious to dream, forgets what she should remember: forgets that tomorrow she has to buy tracing paper, red construction paper, snowflake paper, and tubes of silver glitter for the Sunday school Valentines; forgets to take her antacid (her stomach bubbled after supper); forgets the back porch light and the four pills in the white plastic Friday slot of her pill bin; forgets to defrost the chicken.
    Tonight the February wind squalls. It