A Morning Like This (29 page)

Her head shot up, her expression full of disbelief.

And grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, too. But that would only come if some miracle gave Samantha more time.

“Most of all,” David said, “you and I are going to spend some days together. Now, how does that sound?”

Abby stood at the bottom of the empty grandstand, her hair in disarray, chocolate footprints of pheasant running like tire
tracks down the front of her jeans.

“Where is David?” she asked the empty chairs. Out of deference to the crowd on the square, they’d only brought one vehicle.
He had told her crisply that he’d wait for her here.

“Good heavens,” Edna Clements commented behind her. “You look like you’ve been run over by a stampede.”

“Oh, Edna,” she said. “Have you seen David?”

“Good heavens. Seen David? Oh, yes. I’ve seen David. Everyone’s seen David. He practically
marched
in the parade.”

“What?”

Edna shrugged as if she was shaking off a mosquito. “When you find your husband, I want you to tell him that I’m a woman of
great integrity. I want you to tell him that, even though he ran off, I cast his vote for him anyway.”

“Edna, what happened?”

“You tell him the vote was a tie between the player-piano float and the husky dogs. I told the parade committee he would have
voted the huskies if he hadn’t run away. The huskies took grand prize.”

“Do you know where he is now? I need to pick him up.”

“God only knows,” John Teasley said as he passed by with a bouquet of balloons. “He went running off after somebody named
Sam. He kept shouting and he pushed my chair off the side, trying to get off the stands. It was like playing king of the hill,
sitting beside him.”

“He went chasing after someone in the parade?”

“A little girl. Named Sam.”

Sam?
A tinder-spark of joy burned inside Abby, and then flickered out. She’d gotten here safe.
Thank you. Oh, thank you
.

Inside Abby there came an aching and pleasurable dissonance.

She’s here and she’s safe. But if I welcome her into my heart, then I’m welcoming what David did.

How can I do something like that?

“Thanks, Edna,” she said lightly, as if the information they’d just given her didn’t make any difference. She strolled to
the Suburban that they’d left in the bank parking lot. As she headed toward the rodeo grounds where the parade had ended,
she drove slowly, thinking that’s how it always was with people who drove toward something they knew was going to change their
lives. Either you drove fast to find out what was wrong, or you drove slowly because you didn’t know if you wanted to get
there.

She arrived at the dusty lot and parked on the farthest row away. At a smoldering charcoal grill by the swing set, a family
gathered and passed a bag of marshmallows around. A little boy, much younger than Braden, stood on the pitcher’s mound. Abby
watched as he wound up an invisible baseball, pretending to sail it over the plate in the red dirt of Mateosky Field.

Across the way, an anxious mongrel dog leapt on all fours to catch a spinning Frisbee in midair. And, there they were, her
husband and his daughter, the child of his indiscretion some nine years before, sitting together cross-legged in the grass.

“Oh—” And, from his end of the line, David could hear Susan’s astonished silence, then a little sob, then laughing and crying
all at the same time. “She’s
there?”

“Yep. Weak, but fine. Every hair on her head accounted for.”

She must have sat down hard on something because he heard the breath go out of her. “Oh, David. Thank you. Thank you for everything.”

“No. Not everything. If I could have done everything, I might have saved her life.”

“You’ve done so much, David. More than I ever thought you would.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

Susan’s voice came as little more than hiccups, as if joy and grief took turns jolting her. “You’ve done everything you could
do. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“It isn’t enough,” David said of his whole life. “It’s never enough.” For a half minute or so, they were like two sad teenagers
on the telephone, listening to each other breathe.

“While she’s there,” Susan said at last, “pretend she’s normal, okay? Pretend she isn’t different at all. And watch it when
she starts getting tired. It happens quickly.”

“I’ll do that.”

Then, “Thank you, David. Thank you for letting me come.”

He thought about that as he stood in silence. “When are you getting here?”

“I won’t have any luck flying,” she said. “The planes are full to Jackson in July.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll drive and then get a room at the Elk Country Inn again when I arrive. That will give you a little time with her, David.
That’s everything either of us could ask.”

Braden stood on one side of the driveway with his fingers jammed in his rear pockets.

Samantha stood on the other side of the driveway with her hands clasped in a knot in front of her, each wrist resting in the
saddle of a hipbone.

Neither one of them knew exactly what they should be thinking.

Neither one of them knew exactly what they should do.

Braden pulled his hands out of his pockets and began to walk in slow circles.

Samantha swayed back on her heels and surveyed the sky.

“I don’t know if I’m going to like this or not,” Braden said.

“Yeah,” she said back. “I guess I surprised you. I guess I surprised everybody.”

That thought kept them both quiet for a long time.

“I like your skateboard ramp.” Sam scrubbed the toe of her sneaker on the asphalt. “It rocks.”

“My dad made it,” Braden said proudly. Then, too late, he realized what he’d said. “Well, I mean…I guess…he’s
your
dad, too.”

“Yeah.”

“Weird.”

“I know.”

Silence again. Braden asked with caution, “Is the place you live different from this, or is it the same?”

A scrubbing of the toe again. “Different.”

“What do you like to do there?”

“My favorite thing to do is to chase seagulls. I go to the ocean every day.”

That was an interesting thing. Braden softened. “You do?”

“My best friend’s name is Tess and we walk to the beach from her house. She’s the one who brought me here. They came on vacation
and she snuck me into their camper.”

“What’s so good about chasing seagulls?” He couldn’t help it; he still wanted her to prove her worthiness. Then, with a hint
of pensiveness, “I’ve never been to the ocean.”

“We make sandcastles on the beach, too. Since you’re my brother, I’ll show you when I get the chance.”

“Will you?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like?”

“What?”

“When they all take off like that. All those birds.”

“Oh.” Her faraway expression interested him. “When all those birds go at once, it seems like anything could happen, like there’s
more wings there than just the birds’ wings, something I can’t see. I feel so small and so big all at the same time, making
so many things fly. Fifty of them at least.”

“Really?”

“Or maybe even a
hundred
. So close I can feel bursts of air from their wings.”

“I just play baseball.”

“I’d like to learn how to play baseball.”

“Would you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. I’ll pitch a few to you, then.” He thought about it hard before he said it. “It’d be good to have a sister who could
hit.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah.”

They started sauntering toward the house, toward this new odd thing between them. “The ocean’s so amazing,” she told him as
they scuffled along shoulder to shoulder. “You stand right beside it and it crashes all over your feet and you try to know
how big it is. Only you can’t because it’s bigger than the world. Bigger than anything you can ever understand.”

The afternoon was getting along. The shadows of the lodgepole pines had stretched to the full length of the side yard. In
the distance, they could hear the Grand Teton Music Festival orchestra tuning up for the outdoor concert. “You know what happened
last year on July Fourth?” Braden asked. “Mom was worried the outdoor concert would scare Brewster, so she put him in the
bathroom and turned on the radio so he couldn’t hear it. Only the radio station she turned on was broadcasting that same concert
she didn’t want Brewster to hear.”

For however long each of them would live, they would remember this first private conversation in the driveway. This was a
moment children explained in great detail during show-and-tell or scribbled down in a diary or whispered about when they were
supposed to be quiet in the school lunch line.

I have a brother
.

I have a sister
.

It’s the oddest thing
.

“If my dad doesn’t—” Braden stopped. “I mean,
our
dad doesn’t have enough time for both of us, will you make sure he won’t leave me out? I’ve been thinking some about that.”

“You’re so lucky,” Samantha said. “You’re the one who gets to live with him every day.”

“Yes, but…” Braden frowned. He scuffled his feet again as they crossed the pavement, sending a rock skittering into the grass.
“I don’t know. Do you think a dad can love two kids as much as he can love
one?”

“Don’t know.” She kicked a rock, too. “When I came here, I wasn’t thinking about there being anybody else.”

A pause. “Well, there is.” Then, “Hey, you want to see my favorite bat? I hit two homers with it in the game against Cody.”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll come see it.”

“It rocks. It’s an Easton, with Z-Core and titanium. You ought to hear the ping it makes whenever you connect up with a fastball.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Show me.”

So Braden led her to the garage where he displayed his bat to her, and his cleats (which his mom wouldn’t let him bring in
the house because of their smell), and his Rawlings Heart-of-the-Hide infield glove, which Brewster had chewed and his dad—their
dad—had used a leather thong to stitch and repair.

A
t the Uptergrove’s wedding anniversary party, Floyd Uptergrove decided to bring out his potato gun.