The Truth About Love and Lightning (17 page)

“That walnut tree was hit by lightning years ago, before I was born. Before
you
were born,” she told him, because it was at the heart of a story her mother had recited, passed down from Sam’s mother, Lily. When Sam’s grandparents had just moved to the farm, a lightning storm had scorched the barren grove and made the earth come alive again. “So maybe you’re mixed up,” she began in the most sensitive way that she could, “because everyone knows that lightning never strikes the same place twice.”

“Well, they’re wrong.” He slowly turned to her, and the furrows deepened in his cheeks. “It’s not true that lightning can’t hit the same spot. It does, all the time. Just like a lost love, it can find its way back if you give it half a chance.”

Abby gazed at him, unblinking, her heart pounding something fierce. She was hardly a New Age crystal-wearing hippie who saw auras and took directions from her dreams. But something strange and complicated was happening here, and it had to do with this man who stood before her.

A sense of light-headedness overtook her, and she wobbled, a soft “oh” escaping her lips as she closed her arms around her belly. She felt a flutter inside, even though logic told her it was too early to feel the baby move within. “Quickening,” the first movements were called, according to the pregnancy sites she’d scoured these past few days. At eight weeks, her baby was no bigger than a raspberry with a heartbeat. Still, what she’d sensed was very real, and she wondered if what she’d felt wasn’t the baby at all but a sense of her own reawakening, like everything she’d loved wasn’t really lost.

“You’re expecting,” the man said, and Abby realized he’d been watching her. The directness of his silver-gray gaze was unsettling.

She could have denied it. That would have been easy. Or she could have said nothing at all.

But a shaky “Yes” emerged before she could stop it. “I just found out. It’s why I had to come home.”

“Does the father know?”

She shook her head.

“Do you love him?”

What a strange question!

“Of course I do,” Abby said, defensive.

“Then why?” he asked, his tone so raw that it made her want to cry.

Even his own eyes seemed to glisten, and Abby found herself wondering, if he wasn’t her father, why would he care?

“He left before I knew about the baby,” Abby admitted, willing herself to stay calm despite how her chest ached. “He wanted space to figure things out.” She wasn’t sure why she was sharing so much with him, but she couldn’t stop herself. “I can’t make Nathan feel the way I feel. He has to come back on his own terms or not at all. I don’t want the baby to be why.”

He sucked in his cheeks, making them appear even gaunter. “I understand how hard it is to find your footing when you’re certain of your heart and the one you love isn’t sure at all.”

“It stinks,” she said, the mere thought of Nate’s indecision tying her stomach in knots. “I just want to be with him.”

“Then don’t let so much time and space come between you that, when your minds are made up, it’s too late.”

She shivered, suddenly wondering if coming home and putting distance between them only pushed Nate further away. Had she made a mistake?

“You’ll do the right thing,” he said, giving her arm a nudge.

“How can you be sure? You don’t even know me,” she said, and a sob caught in her throat, despite how she tried to be strong.

“What I know is that you have a very kind and generous mother.” He turned toward the scarred walnut tree, catching thumbs in his jeans pockets. “Surely the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.”

“I wish you were him,” Abby found herself saying, under her breath, so she thought.

But somehow he heard. “Who’s that?” he asked and looked at her.

How tempted she was to blurt out:
my father.
Instead, Abby told him, “Sam Winston. He was an old friend of my mother’s, and this farm was once his. No one’s seen or heard from him in forty years.”

“Hmm” slipped from his lips like a breath. “That would explain it.”

“What?”

He shrugged. “Just something your mother said when I was looking over some photos on the mantel. I got the sense she hoped I’d recognize somebody in them. Could be she wishes I were this long-lost friend too.”

Abby nodded, saying nothing.

He glanced around him with an uncertain expression, as if absorbing the red of the barn, the blue of the sky, and the green of the grass, perhaps trying to remember or maybe just soaking it all in, imagining what his life would be like if he truly were Sam Winston. “This would be a hard place to forget,” he said.

Abby sighed. “You’re right, it would.”

He shot her that barely there smile, and she felt her spirits lift just as the fog began to lift from the air around them.

“Shall we go back before your mother has to holler?” he asked.

“Yes, let’s not make her holler. It isn’t pretty,” Abby said and accepted the arm he offered without hesitation.

With so much weighing on her mind, it didn’t register until they were out of the grove altogether that the once-bare branches of the walnut trees harbored tiny green buds.

They had come alive again.

Thirteen

Gretchen hovered over the sink, gazing out the window, resenting the appearance of the mist that kept her from seeing past the barn to the walnut grove. She was second-guessing herself, wondering if she’d done the right thing letting Abby take the Man Who Might Be Sam on a walk alone. Although Abby seemed better this morning, more her rational self, Gretchen couldn’t stop thinking of the old photograph tucked into the pages of Abby’s sketchbook and all the pencil drawings of an ever-changing Sam.

“She’s in such a fragile state,” Gretchen said aloud. “I shouldn’t have left them to wander off alone. I should have gone with them.”

“They’re fine,” Bennie remarked from the breakfast table. “You can’t worry about what may happen between them. What will be, will be.”

“It’s true, you can’t fight fate,” Trudy concurred, causing Gretchen to sigh for the thousandth time.

The twins had eaten already but had stuck around, keeping Gretchen company while she fidgeted. Trudy busily knitted a baby hat for Abby’s unborn child. Yellow yarn unfurled from the ball in her lap while her needles busily clicked.

“They should be back by now,” Gretchen said, leaning over the counter and so near the glass her breath clouded the panes. “It’s been nearly twenty minutes.”

She was getting ready to head outside and yell for them to come in for breakfast when she spotted the pair trudging toward the barn, their arms intertwined.

“Here they come,” she announced and wiped her palms on the thighs of her jeans, trying not to jump out of her skin. Quickly, she concerned herself with heating the skillet, adding a pat of butter before she cracked half a dozen eggs into a bowl and began furiously beating them.

She was pouring the eggs into the skillet when she heard the slap of the screen door, then the more solid click of the mudroom door. Suddenly Abby burst into the kitchen, her cheeks flushed and eyes bright.

“Hey!” she said and rushed up to Gretchen, giving her a hug. “You’re not going to believe this! But the walnut trees have buds!”

“Buds? Are you sure?” Gretchen stared at her daughter, concerned that a gush of pregnancy hormones was making Abby see things. “But that’s not possible,” she said and peered out the window to find the fog lifting; but there was still too much mist for her to make out anything but the ghostly shapes of the trees.

“I’m not kidding.” Abby sounded just a little out of breath. “The walnut grove seems to have risen from the dead.”

“Could be the lightning’s responsible,” the man offered, coming up beside Gretchen, their arms brushing as he washed his hands. “Some folks think that a strike can make bad soil turn fertile again.”

That sounded an awful lot like something Sam would say, Gretchen thought, and her gaze met his. For a second, it seemed that her heart had stopped beating. If he
was
Sam Winston, had he created the storm that brought him home and conjured up the lightning to bring the grove back to life, just as Hank Littlefoot had years before him? Was that why he couldn’t remember anything?

“I’ll believe it when I see it for myself,” Gretchen replied.

“Would I lie to you?” Abby said with a laugh, and she squeezed between Gretchen and the Man Who Might Be Sam to wash up before breakfast. Then she caught her mom around the waist and bent toward the stove. “Careful or you’re going to burn our grub!”

“Out of my way, child,” Gretchen teased and nudged the girl aside. She took a spatula to the skillet, pushing the eggs around and, every now and then, glancing out the window. Something had happened to the farm since the twister yesterday, that she couldn’t deny. Exactly what, she wasn’t sure, but there was nothing logical about it.

“Can I pour you a cold one?” Abby was asking the man as she lifted the pitcher of juice from the counter.

“Make it a double,” he said.

Chairs scraped and old wooden joints creaked as Abby took two glasses of juice to the table, and she and the Man Who Might Be Sam sat down alongside Bennie and Trudy.

“Did you show him around?” Gretchen asked, forcing a calm she didn’t feel as she slipped bread into the old toaster.

“Yes, ma’am, I sure did,” Abby said, a brightness to her voice that made her sound like a kid, one without the weight of the world on her shoulders. “We went to the very spot in the grove where you found him. I think Matilda was out there, or at least I hope it was her. Something brushed against my leg and ran off.”

“Matilda can come and go like a vapor sometimes,” Trudy quipped.

“Oh, I found something out there, beneath the tree where I was struck down,” the man said and got up from his chair, plucking an object from his shirt pocket. He brought it round to Gretchen at the stove and held it up so she could see. “The stones feel so warm, as though the sun’s been shining on them.”

But it was foggy outside, Gretchen mused, taking the beads from him. She felt the warmth he described only for an instant before the turquoise turned cool in her hand.

“Does it belong to him, or is it something you lost?” Abby asked as Gretchen stared at the necklace.

No, it wasn’t hers, Gretchen knew, looking at the pale blue beads in the light of the kitchen window. A knot tied itself up tight in her belly as she recalled the last time she’d seen the necklace. Sam had been wearing it around his throat. “Do you mind if I keep these for now?” she got out, never answering Abby’s question.

“Of course you can,” the man told her. “I found them in your grove.”

Gretchen nodded and quickly pressed them into her jeans pocket, wiping her hands on the dish towel, feeling even more discombobulated than before, if that was possible.

“Oh, and don’t freak out,” Abby piped up, “but I told him the truth.”

“The truth about what?” The skillet clattered against the burner as Gretchen dropped it along with the serving spoon, a smattering of scrambled eggs showering the stovetop.

“That he reminds us of the man whose family owned this farm,” Abby said, giving her a pointed look. “A long-ago friend of yours named Sam Winston.”

“You told him about Sam?” Gretchen’s tongue seemed to stick to the roof of her mouth. “How much?”

“Enough,” the man said, and he wrinkled his bruised brow. “It explains why you were so quick to take me in.” He shook his head. “Maybe it would be easier if I were this fellow Sam instead of having no clue who I am or why I’m here. Why can’t I remember such a simple thing as my own name?” He hit the table with his palm, rattling his glass so it slopped orange juice onto the table.

Gretchen jumped as the toast took that moment to pop out of the toaster.

“Give yourself a chance,” she heard Abby saying to him. “Even Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“And it took the town nearly six months to get up a new bridge over the river,” Bennie added in her crisp voice, and Trudy’s knitting needles stopping clicking long enough for her to add, “Though I think the Walmart in the next county went up in about two weeks. They don’t mess around, do they?”

Heaven help us,
Gretchen thought, drawing in a deep breath.

She managed to keep her composure long enough to fix two heaping plates of eggs and toast, taking them over to the table and plunking them down before her daughter and the Man Who Might Be Sam. Then she took a seat across from them both, watching as they dug in. It was like viewing her life the way it should have been if Sam Winston had never left Walnut Ridge. If she’d asked him to stay. If she had known then that she truly loved him. If he had actually fathered Abigail.

All those
if
s had haunted Gretchen for years and years, especially as Abby had grown up, asking so many questions. Until Gretchen had finally packed up all those
if
s and stored them away, like the boxes of Lily and Cooper Winston’s old clothes up in the attic. But clearly residual emotions couldn’t be so easily contained by plastic bins filled with lavender and mothballs.

“Mom? Did you hear me?” Abby asked, and Gretchen shook aside her thoughts to listen. “You really need to give him a haircut. He’s definitely looking better without that horrid beard, but he’s got a mullet straight out of the eighties.”

“A mullet?” the Man Who Might Be Sam repeated and picked up the butter knife, trying to catch his reflection in the blade. “What’s that? It doesn’t sound good, whatever it is.”

“It’s when your hair’s all business in front and a party in the back,” Abby told him matter-of-factly. “It’s very old-school Billy Ray Cyrus.”

“And that’s not acceptable?” the man asked, eyebrows arched against his bruised forehead.

“Nope,” Abby got out as she swallowed a piece of toast.

Gretchen sat like a spectator at a badminton match, surprised by the rapport between Abby and the Man Who Might Be Sam. He even seemed more relaxed since the walk, less unsettled. Abby, too, appeared to have let go of her worry. They were good for each other, Gretchen mused, but found herself thinking nonetheless,
Please don’t break Abigail’s heart
. What if this stranger who’d fallen from the clouds left their lives just as suddenly? Gretchen worried about Abby. It was so early in the pregnancy, and she was already under so much stress with Nathan walking out two weeks before. She couldn’t fathom the kind of pain Abby would feel if she were deserted by another man, equally important. To Gretchen, this baby was Abby’s miracle, just as Abby had been for her all those years ago, even if she’d been too young to know it at the time.