The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors by Michele Young-Stone

clatters the chairs on the side porch and tears the wind chimes from their metal hooks. They clank on the concrete and thud to the grass. The wind rattles the storm windows. She thinks someone is trying to get in. She thinks,
Come on. I don’t care
. She has gone to bed to dream and so she does.
    In the dream, her mother is young, washing petticoats in the sunlight. Wisps of hair fall from her bun and she catches them with the back of her wrist, pinning them to her face. She laughs. Edna smells lavender mixed with lye. Beneath the covers, Edna’s right hand opens and her fingers wiggle. She sees her mother’s teeth, including the chipped one, and her mother’s hands, wet and coarse from scrubbing clothes on the washboard. Her mother gathers her top skirt, drying her hands, calling, “Ed,” but Edna’s right there within reach. “Ed,” she calls again. Edna says, “I’m right here, Mom.” Every night her mother smiles or waves andthe dream ends, but tonight Edna feels the sunlight on her arms and after reaching for her mother’s skirt, feels the fabric. Both of her old feet kick beneath the tucked sheet. When Edna’s fingers touch the suds on her mother’s skirt, her right hand spasms under the covers. She hasn’t touched her before. She feels her mother’s wet fingertips on her forehead, sees the glowing red blur of sunlit skin. Her mother pushes a strand of hair from Edna’s eyes.
    Edna dies in her sleep at seventy-seven years old. Her mother, Rosemary, died at the same age.
    Five years ago, Edna had prepared for death. She counted crisp twenty-dollar bills into the palm of Morton Spank, Prospect’s sole funeral director, and waited for a receipt. Edna had never been a slouch. She took to heart the TV commercials that reminded her,
You shouldn’t burden your loved ones, nor should you suffer their whims
. They might cremate her!
    Her affairs were in order. She wasn’t much looking forward to seeing old Clayton. There were things she’d done since his death that he wouldn’t approve of. There was Old Man John, for one—who was colored. If Clayton knew about the kiss—even though it was on the cheek, just near the lips, and even though there’d been gin involved … Oh, never mind. If Clayton knew about the gin, he’d be upset. It was all right for men to drink, Clayton said, but not women. She wouldn’t worry about seeing him. She had missed him, but he had been hard to swallow, like castor oil, and she wouldn’t have known how difficult he was if he hadn’t died so many years before her, opening her eyes to all the kind people close by. Well, there were plenty of other people up there she’d be happy to see, like her mother.
    Rowan drove the Volvo to Prospect while Mary slept in the backseat and Becca told him about her grandmother. “Shecould see the watch hand go counterclockwise, and she wrote that I was blessed. I can’t believe she died. I can’t believe she’s gone.”
    “Everybody dies.”
    Becca’s neck, splotched red since her mother had told her about her grandmother’s passing, felt hot. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want Grandma Edna to be dead.”
    “She’s in our hearts,” he said, adjusting the side mirror.
    “Can you turn down the heat? I’m burning up.” Becca slid off her shoes and tried looking for stars, but there were none to see. There were the headlights and the black trees. “I just got to know her, and she’s gone.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Do you believe in ghosts?”
    He squeezed her shoulder. “What do you think about going to Richmond with me next month? I’ve got a couple meetings, but we could sightsee in between.”
    “Sure.” Even with her shoes off, her feet were sweating. She propped them on the leather console between the seats and thought,
When I get to the farm I’ll look for Grandma Edna sitting at the kitchen table, standing at the sink, shuffling up the concrete steps. I’ll listen for her laugh and her Marianne Pamplin potato