Fat Lightning Read Free Page A

the Boulevard, and she’d take a course or two at a time from RPI, determined to graduate out of spite.
    She and her family stayed unreconciled for six months, but after Pat and Suzanne came over and got them on a sleet-slick Christmas day and forced them to have dinner with the O’Neil family, even had gifts for Buddy, the worst of that was over. Robbie, the youngest, had made her a bookstand in Pat’s shop, and inside the card he attached, he wrote, “Please don’t leave again.” Pat even paid for some of Nancy’s tuition. Later, Nancy wondered if she and Buddy would have done better if they’d had the common bond of railing against her hard-hearted family.
    When Buddy and Nancy separated, she had 24 hours credit to show for three years of contrariness. She had $186 in a checking account and owed the school more than $1,000, even with Pat finally helping some. The only way her life had improved was that she was working in a higher class of restaurant.
    But she had started to write. She would walk over to a restaurant three blocks away every weekday morning when Buddy had worked the night before and was sleeping late. It had red-and-white checkered window sashes and dark paneling, and some of the most interesting people in Richmond walked by on the sidewalk outside. If she was early enough, there’d be a seat by the window where she could drink hot tea. She would take out her lined notebook and write what she imagined was happening with all those people going by on the other side of the glass. After a couple of years, they’d reserve her a space—by the window on chilly days, near the shade in the back during the heat of summer.
    The courses she took weren’t a total waste, but there came a point where, in writing and in marriage, she realized that she was on her own. There was a brief affair that Buddy never learned about, with another student, but Nancy finally came to see infidelity as just more material, another character for another story.
    She wrote short stories all the time, some of them good, some terrible. She’d turn a VCU professor with a Jewish last name into a survivor of the death camps who imported hams for a living; She’d remake the fat lady who cooked breakfast for early-bird workers into a former beauty queen living in the past; she even wrote a story from the viewpoint of the dachshund that hung around the back door whining for handouts.
    At some undetermined time, it occurred to Nancy that she could put some of these characters together and maybe, just maybe, what she would have would be a novel. What came to her, offspring of a pair of short stories, was about a disintegrating family’s trip to the New York World’s Fair. She called it “Fair Chance.” It soon was occupying much of her waking time.
    Buddy and she had shared bodily fluids since the 11th grade, but he really didn’t care much what she was writing or whether she was writing. She never pushed it on him, because he was always worn out after work and she was afraid he might laugh at her. Buddy never had any intentions of going to college. His father was a pressman, and he always assumed he’d be one, too. After a while, his friends and Nancy’s friends didn’t seem to have much in common unless they were among the precious few they still saw from high school. After a while, Buddy and Nancy didn’t have much in common, either.
    They argued a lot, both of them too young to ever give in. He was a good-looking boy, mischievous Irish face all dark and mysterious after he’d showered and shaved at noon, sometimes pulling Nancy back into bed with him if she wasn’t at work or at school. But Buddy was a rover, even when he and Nancy were going steady in high school. She answered too many phone calls where there’d be silence on the other end, then a receiver softly replaced.
    By the spring of 1964, not three years after graduation, Buddy moved out,