Wish You Were Here(111)

My eyes flew to his. “You’re not supposed to curse in front of me.”

“Why not? You heard that word before?”

I nodded.

“Then I ain’t telling you something you don’t already know, am I?”

I inched closer to him and the stall. As a city girl, the closest I ever got to animals was the Bronx Zoo. There was something so visceral about this donkey, with its velvet eyes and nicotine teeth. “It has eyelashes,” I marveled.

I looked up to find Vietnam Tim staring at me. “You don’t get out much, do you?” he said.

“I’m nine.”

He nodded. “Fair point.”

“Are you here because there isn’t any rain?”

“I’m here because I’m betting there’s gonna be rain, real soon. I’m a tornado chaser.” When I blinked at him, he narrowed his eyes. “I go all over the country, trying to stay one step ahead of the storms.”

“I didn’t know that was a job,” I admitted.

“Me neither, but I been doing it for a decade,” he said. “Came back from the war so messed up in the head that I needed to find something worse off than I was.” He glanced down at me. “You ever seen a tornado?”

I shook my head.

“It takes three things to make one: vertical air movement—like the kind in a thunderstorm, a change in wind speed and direction inside that thunderstorm, and lots of space so the twister can expand.”

I wondered what it was like inside the heart of a thunderstorm. All I knew about tornadoes came from The Wizard of Oz and the Twister movie, which I hadn’t been allowed to watch. I looked nervously over my shoulder at the rectangle of light and sky through the open door of the barn. I didn’t even like it when I went to school and Mrs. Hathorne was out sick and we had a substitute teacher; the thought of a catastrophe that might sneak up on me was utterly terrifying. “How can you tell if one’s coming?”

“Hail,” Vietnam Tim said. “Roaring. Thunder. A yellow sky.” He reached out and gently stroked the ears of Nitpick. “Wind can get past two hundred miles per hour for an EF5 tornado. I’ve seen five of ’em, firsthand.”

“Why would you want to be there for that?”

His eyes lit up. “Because everyone else is running away,” he said.

Nitpick chose that moment to bolt at some imaginary slight and gallop out of the open rear door of the stall into a fenced pen outside. I imagined Vietnam Tim standing like a superhero as a dark black funnel cloud raced toward him. It was the way I sometimes imagined my mother in war zones and tsunamis and all the other gateways to hell—fierce and fiery and invincible.

“Your mom might have come here for the drought,” Vietnam Tim said, “but she’s an adrenaline junkie, just like me.”

I did not know what an adrenaline junkie was, but I knew a stupid idea when I heard it. “Well, I think it’s pretty dumb to sit around and wait to get hurt.”

Even as I said it, I thought of all the nights I tried to stay up, straining to hear the sound of my mother opening the door of the apartment, of the whir of her roller bag wheels on the wooden floor.

Vietnam Tim raised a brow. “Everyone gets hurt sometimes,” he said.

There was one restaurant in Ochelata, and it was full. I listened to the clink of glasses and tableware and watched a teenage waitress carry a sizzling steak with onion rings across the room. My stomach growled loud enough for my parents to hear.

“At least an hour?” my father said, repeating what the hostess had told them. “Why does it take so long to turn a table?”

“Because going out is a big deal here,” my mother said. “No one’s in a rush to get back home.” She squinted, looking across the street. “New plan,” she said, pointing to a business with a Budweiser sign blinking in the window. “You can get wings and chips and stuff at Pete’s.”

My father put his hands on my shoulders, pulling me closer. “We are not taking a nine-year-old to a bar,” he said.

Almost ten, I corrected silently.

My mother’s cheeks flushed. “Right,” she said.

“What about takeout?” my father suggested. “We can bring it to the playground we passed at the school. Have a picnic.” He smiled a little. “I mean, it’s not like it’s gonna rain on us.”

My mother stepped back into the restaurant to place an order with the hostess. Burgers, a salad to share, those amazing onion rings I’d seen passing by. A side of macaroni salad.

“Diana doesn’t eat macaroni salad,” my father interrupted.

My mother glanced down at me. “Since when?”

“Since she got food poisoning two summers ago after eating it.”

“Of course,” she said. “I knew that.”

Then why did you order it? I thought.

In the entryway of the restaurant was one of those carnival machines, where you’d put in quarters and try to pick up a stuffed animal with a claw. I had begged my father for money (and had been denied) enough to know that the odds of getting what I wanted were so slim, it wasn’t worth the expense. Instead, I jiggled the buttons, pretending that I could maneuver the claw. From the corner of my eye, I saw my father slide an arm around my mother’s waist, saw her settle against him like a ship coming to dock. He whispered something to her, and when she laughed, I felt a smile rise in me, too, like the fizz in a soda.