“Mom!” I cried, and I raced across the desiccated lawn to throw my arms around her waist. She caught me the way you catch the flu—squarely, and with a flutter of resignation.
Over my head, a whole novel was being written without words. My father smiled at her. “Surprise,” he said.
The owner of the Next of Inn was Mrs. Evans. While my mother took my father up to our room to drop off our suitcases and to make up the cot that had grudgingly been pulled in for me, Mrs. Evans got me a glass of milk and a chocolate chip cookie that was still warm from the oven. “Shouldn’t you be in school?” she asked. As she handed me a napkin, she peered at me like I was a bug she found in her coffee.
I nodded. “It’s my birthday this week.”
“Don’t expect a discount,” she said. She was scrubbing viciously at a frying pan with a sponge that looked like it was made of chain mail. “What do you think of Oklahoma?”
I’d only been here a couple of hours. “It is shaped like a pan,” I said.
“You’re from New York,” she said, and I gasped, thinking she was psychic until I remembered my mother would have told her this at check-in. “New York looks like a sea lion.”
Well, she wasn’t wrong.
“My mom came here for the rain.”
“Hmph. That could take a while.”
Upstairs, we heard voices being raised. Mrs. Evans looked at me, and for the first time, her eyes softened. She took an apple from the counter and handed it to me. “Why don’t you take this outside to nitpick?” she said.
I wiped my mouth with the cloth napkin and wandered into the front yard. I didn’t know if this was a Midwest thing—if nitpicking was some local way of peeling an apple, maybe. Then I realized that I was not alone. On the porch was the man who’d been in the driver’s seat of the car that carried my mother. He squinted at me. “You looking for something?”
I frowned at the apple in my hand, turning Mrs. Evans’s words over in my head, and then brightening with a conclusion. “Are you Nitpick?”
He laughed. “I am not,” he said. “I’m Vietnam Tim.”
“Oh. Okay.” I hesitated. “I’m Diana. My mom probably told you about me.”
“No,” he said. “She didn’t.” He stood up, moving down the steps of the porch with a noticeable limp. “You coming?” he asked.
I scrambled after him. “Are you a photographer, too?”
He crossed the dusty expanse of lawn and slid open the peeling door of the barn, which groaned on its track. “Sure.” He shrugged. “Sometimes.”
I blinked into the darkness. Suddenly there was a shriek like someone was having their skin flayed from the bone. I flattened myself against the wall, and then the barn flooded with light.
Vietnam Tim stood with his hand on the chain he’d pulled to turn on the bare bulb. In front of him was a single stall, in which a mangy brown donkey stood, making that horrible sound. “That,” he announced, “is Nitpick.” When I didn’t move, he plucked the apple from my hand and held it over the edge of the stall door. “He’ll take your fingers off if you’re not careful. He’s also the closest thing to a Democrat you’ll see in this fucking hellhole.”
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?”