Read Online A Morning Like This by Deborah Bedford - Free Book Online Page A

rumbled at them, so close they could feel it resonate beneath their feet. Seconds later, the sound
     ricocheted off the far side of the valley and a streak of lightning doglegged across the sky.
    “All those things the Bible says a man is supposed to be.” When David’s voice came at last, it came gruff and hard. “I don’t
     think I can live up to those anymore.”
    Nelson searched the sky, his hair lifting in the wind. “What brought this up?”
    David gestured wildly toward the lightning. “I don’t know. Life. The mountains.”
What I’ve done to my wife
.
    “Don’t get confused. Living the right life in God’s eyes has never been about trying, David.”
    “Oh, no?”
    “It’s about the things you’re willing to do each time you blow it.”
    The bluster bore down upon them from the Upper Saddle, blindsiding them because it came—as all Teton weather does—from the
     west. David hadn’t noticed when the warmth left and the wind became changeable and the far reaches of clouds became mottled
     by gray streaks of rain.
    Nelson paused long enough to survey Mount Owen and Teewinot below them. “Even up here, there’s no getting away from the storms.”
    “Storms in your life, Nelson?”
    The pastor nodded. “That’s why you’re a good friend. It’s nice, spending time with someone who doesn’t have such a messed-up
     life and who doesn’t expect me to know the answers to fix it.”
    David said nothing.
    “Guess we won’t get high enough to use the ropes.”
    “I never called Abby.”
    “Well, you aren’t going to do it now.”
    Wind sluiced over the mountain, threshing David’s hair and the tops of the trees below them, making it difficult to descend
     the trail. He started toward the steep ice gullies and crags rising above the mouth of Cascade Canyon. When the thunderbolt
     came, he didn’t have to count before he heard the rumble.
    Two seconds, at best. Hardly any time at all.
    “Nelson, let’s get out of here.”
    Stones came tumbling downhill as Nelson followed. David lost his footing once and slid several yards. A lightning flash underscored
     each crevice and outcropping of granite. David felt the roots of his hair begin to stand, negative ions attracting positive
     ones.
“Hurry.”
    Together they lurched downhill. The rain began in sparse, wet pelts before the sky opened. The wind caught the downpour and
     slammed it sideways against them. Rain needled their skin. They squinted against it but that didn’t help.
    The hail came all at once, hitting the ground and bouncing like popcorn around their feet, striking and stinging their ears.
     Water began to rush in little rivers past them, pursuing the way of least resistance. Rivulets joined in the gaps to become
     streams, racing downward, filling furrows and troughs.
    “We ought to find a rock to duck under,” Nelson bellowed as he scrabbled past his friend.
    “With this much water? I think we ought to keep heading down.”
    But then Nelson stopped so abruptly that David slammed into him. “Look over there!” Nelson hollered over the wind. He pointed.
     “Can you believe that?”
    David’s shirt was plastered against him. He pried it loose so it didn’t cling to his chest and squinted into the cold rain.
     “What are you talking about?”
    “Over there.”
    “I don’t—”
    “There.”
    Sure enough, as David squinted through the weather, he saw what Nelson had seen: two little girls crouched beneath the brow
     of a narrow ledge. Two coats—a pink one and a yellow one—flew like banners from where they’d been hung on the crooks of a
     stunted blue spruce. Two little girls, alone.
    For one instant David allowed himself to indulge his anger. Tourists visiting these mountains could do idiotic things. He
     had a saying for whenever the weekly
Guide
came out with an article about a sightseer. Every week in the summer, someone got lost in the mountains or burned in a hot
     pool or stranded in the Snake River or gored by a