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.
When our food came out in little white Styrofoam containers, the hostess stacked them in a plastic bag, which my father carried in one hand. With his other, he held on to me. My mom took my other hand, just like the way they used to when I was really small, when they would swing me between them and I’d feel perfectly balanced, like an astronaut hitting zero gravity or a roller coaster at its apex. I didn’t know of many fourth graders who wanted to go around holding on to their parents’ hands, but I didn’t feel like a baby at that moment.
“Mom,” I asked, turning toward her. “What’s an adrenaline junkie?”
She thought for a second. “Someone who lives for the things that make their heart pound,” she said, “even when they’re scary.” Then she squeezed my hand, like she was passing me a secret.
Like she knew that on the back of the green blotter on my bedroom desk, I kept a tally of every day she was gone. And that when she came home, I tracked how many days I had with her before she left again.
Maybe I had more in common with her than I’d thought.
I was allowed to stay up past my bedtime. My father and Vietnam Tim were drinking beers on the porch, my mother was nearby editing images on her computer, and I was beside her doing another word search. “So you got a warm, humid, restless air mass,” Vietnam Tim explained, “and it meets an area of cold, and the atmosphere gets unstable. The cap of cold air eventually gives way, but by then, you got yourself a funnel cloud of storm winds. If that touches down, it becomes a tornado.”
“But enough about Hannah,” my father joked.
She flicked her gaze toward him. “Very funny.”
Vietnam Tim laughed. It sounded like the wheeze from a pool toy that was losing air. “Tornado Alley’s the red carpet for twisters. They cut a swath through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, northern Texas. Here in Ochelata, the chance of a tornado coming is 145 percent greater than other places in the United States. There’ve been two category 4s here, matter of fact. One in 1974 that killed fourteen people and injured a hundred and fifty others, and one in 1991 that killed one person and injured twenty-four.”
“And you’re here because you figure Ochelata’s due for another?”