Fat Lightning Read Free

Candy, that everybody in Sam’s family was like that, even with each other. Nothing personal.
    â€œIt’s just the Chastain in him,” Pat would say, partly, Nancy felt, to drive her crazy. Pat was a great believer in blood, and he’d had a couple of Chastain brothers work for him at the cabinet shop.
    â€œI saw Frank Chastain cut an inch off his little finger one day with a circular saw,” he said, “and he didn’t even yell. Just asked somebody to take him to the doctor. He was a smart worker, though.”
    Sam’s saving grace, even the first couple of years they were married, was his penchant for the outrageous, made all the more outrageous because it came from the most deadpan man in Richmond.
    The day of her 25th birthday, Nancy had a 10 a.m. class. Sam kissed her goodbye and gave her a card on his way out at 7:30. They were to go out to dinner that night.
    On her way to the RPI campus, though, Nancy saw the first of the signs. She realized, by the time she got to the first main intersection, that there were three 25-mile-per-hour speed limit signs in their neighborhood, and that Sam had somehow managed to plaster a piece of white cardboard over the top of each, with black letters that matched those of the highway department, so that the signs read:
    NANCY
    CHASTAIN
    IS
    25
    He never once conceded that it had been his doing, even after Nancy found the paint can in the basement.
    â€œMust of been the birthday fairy,” he maintained.
    Her last two birthdays, Sam had been predictable as clockwork. He seemed to be too old—or too tired—for pranks any more. Nancy wrote it off to parenthood.
    â€œHe’s not deadpan, sweetie,” Suzanne told her over Thanksgiving. “He’s just dead.”
    None of her children, after puberty, ever called Suzanne “Momma,” and none of them, whatever age, called Pat anything except “Daddy.” But it never seemed to bother Suzanne. She was 24 when Nancy was born, but by the time her oldest child was in her 20s, people were mistaking her and Nancy for sisters.
    They had the same ash-blonde hair, the same slightly wide faces that turned beautiful into something between pretty and cute, the same toothy smile, the same impish blue eyes. But there was more to it than that. Suzanne never got tired, never failed to laugh at a dirty joke, never thought the music was too loud. “If it’s too loud,” she told Pat one time when he was complaining bitterly about the decibel level of one of Nancy’s Buddy Holly records, “you’re too old.”
    When they left Richmond that April day, Nancy didn’t know whether Sam was going to turn around and go back, or if they were gone to the country for good. She packed three dresses, four blouses, four skirts, and some underwear and sweaters. She threw two coats in the back and hoped she wouldn’t have to go back for her fall wardrobe.
    But she did pack her homing novel, just in case.
    Nancy had always liked to write. She won a sixth-grade fiction contest for all of Richmond. If Buddy Molloy hadn’t asked her to marry him the day after they were graduated from high school, and if Nancy hadn’t accepted and gone with him to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, to make it official, she probably would’ve gone to Richmond Professional Institute then, as several of her college-bound friends had.
    But Nancy was what Suzanne called contrary, which always made her daughter cringe because it sounded so country. After Buddy and Nancy told Suzanne and Pat that they were married, Pat ran Buddy off and told Nancy that he wasn’t paying her way to college unless they got “the thing” annulled. So, of course, Nancy stayed married. She and Buddy hung on for three years, she working as a waitress in Shockoe Slip, Buddy as a pressman at the Times-Dispatch. Nancy would catch a bus or a ride with a friend every day from their one-bedroom apartment west of