The truth was, I had grown accustomed to my mother missing huge chunks of my life—both the ordinary ones and the milestones. When I was in first grade and parents had to sign up to bring a snack for the whole class each Friday, my father was the only dad who came in. When everyone else had a mother at the Nutcracker recital last Christmas, I did not. Even Alistair’s mother, who was on a television show about detectives, managed to come in and talk about her work during Career Day. My mom was in Myanmar.
For this reason, or maybe because I was a masochist at heart, I clung to her like a shadow when she was home, counting down silently the moments before she went away again. This time, I sat cross-legged on her bed, doing a word search puzzle while she packed. She had a gift for filling every square inch of her carry-on suitcase efficiently; I suppose that’s what comes of practice. “It hasn’t rained in Oklahoma in eight months,” she told me.
“Oklahoma,” I repeated. “That’s the one that looks like a pot with a handle.” We had been doing timed quizzes in school, where we had to fill in the names of states on an empty map of the United States. The square ones all looked the same to me, but Oklahoma I could find easily.
“I guess it does,” she considered. “Anyway, that’s why I’m going there. To shoot a drought.”
“How do you take pictures of no rain?”
“You take pictures of what happens in its absence,” she said. “How the land is changed.”
She leaned across me to pick up her hairbrush and jam it into the spine of her suitcase. She smelled like lavender. Even now, years later, when I catch a whiff of that scent, I look for her. Her chin paused, notched over my shoulder, looking down at the word search. “I’m missing one,” I told her.
She knew that I would not be able to go to sleep until I finished it, crossing off each word on the list neatly and decisively. She pointed to a reverse diagonal, the last word in the puzzle. “SUNBATHE,” she traced, letter by letter. “People always forget to look in that direction.”
I circled the word with my red pen and crossed it off the list. My mother folded up the clamshell of her suitcase.
“Will the drought ever end? In Oklahoma?”
With a grunt, she zipped it shut. “Of course, Diana,” she told me. “Nothing lasts forever.”
My mother had been gone for two weeks when my father announced out of the blue that we would be flying to the Midwest to join her at her work site, so that we could celebrate my birthday together. I was shocked, for several reasons. First, my father and I were a tight little nugget of family, forged as a result of my mother’s dizzy swoops in and out of our lives. Second, my mother did not like to be bothered when she was working. Third, my dad didn’t believe in pulling me out of school for doctors’ appointments or routine dental visits, much less last-minute vacations.
I should point out that I did not like surprises. Above my bed was a color-coded calendar that reminded me I had piano lessons on Tuesdays and dance on Fridays and that every Thursday night I had to have my spelling test signed so I could return it to my teacher the next day. I was that rare child who never had to be told to pick up her room. I liked things in their places, which was maybe why it bothered me so much that my mother never seemed to be in hers.
Almost as soon as we left the airport in Oklahoma City in our rental car, we saw evidence of the drought: fields scorched black from brush fires, soil as parched and cracked as the throat of a man in a desert. The deeper we drove into the country, the worse it got: farms with foreclosure signs, heifers with ribs that pushed against their hide.
According to the sign at the town limits of Ochelata, there were 424 residents, and not much else. There was a Walmart distribution center within driving distance, which provided employment, and a slightly bigger town—Bartlesville—which had a motel or two.
My father turned right at a sign that said NEXT OF INN, 2 MILES. “Well, Diana Banana,” he said, his pet name for me, “looks like we made it.” We chugged down a dirt road, dust flying up around the car. A small gazebo rose from a dusty lawn. At the end of the drive was a small farmhouse with a screen door and a few ceramic pots of geraniums lining the porch railing. As my father got out of the car, the door opened and a woman stepped out of the 1950s. Her hair was curled in twin rolls on either side of her head, her feet grounded in sensible shoes, her apron covering a worn blue dress. She had one of those faces that might have been thirty or three hundred. “You lost?” she asked, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Actually, no,” my father said, giving his most charming smile, the one with both dimples that I had inherited.
“Well, I don’t have any vacancy. There’s a motel if you head—”
“We’ll be joining one of your guests,” he said, holding out his hand. “I believe my wife has already checked in.”
As if he’d conjured her, a rusty blue Jeep zoomed into the yard, parking behind our rental car. The driver was a man in his late fifties, with an explosion of white hair and camouflage pants and a T-shirt that said MISTER TWISTER. My mother got out of the passenger seat, a camera looped around her neck.