[storms]

I don't remember my father's voice. I don't remember his eyes, or his laugh, or the feel of his hair, or the smell of him. Maybe I used to. But those little memories have been swallowed, like pinprick stars into the daytime sun. Now all I remember is how he died.
         Mother talks about him. Mother talks about him all the time now. Her reminiscing used to be confined to anniversaries or the occasional late-night brandy. But since she was placed in the Honey Valley County Care Facility, she's begun to drift more and more into the past. I think it's where she's always wanted to be anyway.
         I see her every Sunday; I arrive at nine in the morning and leave around ten or eleven at night, depending on when she falls asleep. And for those thirteen or fourteen hours, I hear stories about the man that was my father.

He taught me how to tie flies. I don't remember that, but I am quite good at it. He carried me in his arms three miles to the hospital when I broke my leg and the car wouldn't start. I don't remember that, but that leg does throb when it gets humid. He built the shed by the garage in one long summer day. I don't remember that, but apparently I helped him build it.
         I remember these stories as she tells them to me (most of them I've heard many times now), but I don't remember them as she does. The smile on my face is simply there for her to see, so she knows I'm listening, while the smile on her lovely mouth is a beautiful window into a deep and happy past. A complete past. I see the look in her eyes as she remembers her Paul, and sometimes I'm sad that I'm just an observer, unable to partake in the pleasure of reliving that time.
         My mother loved my father more than anything, myself included. Her greatest gift to him was me. And (from her stories) he loved me more than anything, including my mother. She was not a cold mother, and he was not an uncaring husband. But each had their favorite in our little triumverate. As for me, the world had always begun at my father's death, and from that day on, there was only my mother to love me, so I loved only my mother. And of course she loved me, as every mother loves their child. But her heart of hearts was always with my father, and now that her duty raising his only son was finished, she could slip quietly back into the past with the man she loved and missed.

Last Sunday, my mother told me about the lightning.
         The only times she stops telling me about her wonderful husband are when she's eating and when it storms. A Sunday afternoon thundershower is a pretty sure sign that there will be no tales that day -- hardly any talking at all, in fact. So I entered her room that morning with a book in my hand, ready to read her the latest James Patterson novel. The staff tell me she loves his books; they're not exactly my favorite reading, but anything beats listening to your mother's breathing and rain on the window.
         "Your father knew lightning."
         I stopped then, my raincoat halfway down my arms, staring at her. She was gazing out the window, as she always did in a storm, but this time there was light in her eyes, the light of remembering. And she was speaking! After a moment I finished removing my coat and laid it on the back of a chair. "What do you mean, he knew it?" I asked.
         "He knew where it would strike, what direction," she answered. "He could stand out in the yard, soaked to the bone, pointing this way and that, and it was like he was directing an orchestra."
         "A conductor?" I smiled, sitting down.
         And in an unprecedented rainy Sunday moment, my mother smiled too. "You have his wit."
         "How did he know?"
         She shrugged. "Said he saw the pattern. Swore up and down that lightning followed a pattern, no matter what those smartass weathermen said. Your father didn't put much stock in weathermen. Said any fool could tell you 'fifty percent chance of rain, fifty percent chance of sun,' and they'd be righter than those weathermen."
         I sat down in the recliner next to her bed.
         "He caught cold more than once, even pnuemonia one March, but I never nagged him about it, never said, 'Paul, you get in this house this minute or you'll catch your death of cold.' I had to yell at you every now and then --" she dropped me a wink, and I smiled as though I remembered, "-- but never your father. I loved to watch him out there. When he got into it, it was as though he was shooting lightning from his fingertips into the sky. It was like magic."
         The book lay forgotten in my lap.
         She turned to me and took my hands into her own. Her skin was warm and dry. "Do you remember when lightning struck the tree in the corner of the yard? You would have been about six."
         This was a story I hadn't heard before, so instead of nodding and smiling wistfully (at least I hoped it looked wistful when I did it), I shook my head. "I remember the tree being black and dead, but I don't remember how or when it happened."
         "Make you a deal," she said. "I'll tell you about the tree --" her hands tightened around mine, "-- and you tell me how your father died."


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