Tornado Weather

by Deborah E. Kennedy

  He’d pulled up alongside her in his truck and leaned out, long fingers toying with the door handle. Hummed something. “Crazy” maybe? He had on a work shirt and a baseball cap, the bill of which was pulled down low over his large-pored face.

  “Hey, Irv.”

  “Need some help?”

  “I seem to have gone and got myself stuck.”

  “Lucky for you I’m an expert at such things.”

  Shannon tried to smile but it was like the smile she’d attempted for Josh. Unsuccessful. She was thinking of Daisy Gonzalez, of Hector, of what he would do if Daisy never “popped up.” She was also thinking of herself, which was inexcusable given the private hell Hector must be going through. Still, self-pity would always win the day, especially when the source was love or something like it. She glanced down at the bracelet. It was pretty, sweet even, but it didn’t fix things. Josh had grown tired of her before she’d had a chance to grow tired of him. She was certain of this, gifts or no gifts, and loving him felt like trying to rebuild the same wave-ravaged sand castle over and over and over. A lost cause. A losing battle. And one that made her feel increasingly desperate and powerless.

  Shannon imagined a second, follow-up headline in the Record, her obit basically: DEAD WOMAN, ON THE CUSP OF A CHILDLESS MIDDLE AGE, MISSED BY FEW. The tears that started back at the house threatened again, but Irv was out of his truck and approaching her open window, so she choked them back.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  “How about I give you a push?”

  “If you think it’ll work.”

  He shrugged. “Got any better ideas?”

  “Fresh out.”

  “Well, there you go then.” He gave Miss Scarlett a playful punch. “This car used to belong to your mother, I believe.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  They were quiet for a moment. Shannon got a whiff of lilac. Also of Irv. Wood chips and beer and animal. Definitely animal. Odd. Maybe he didn’t shower often. Or was the bachelor equivalent of a cat lady—was there such a thing? Did men collect pets, too, to remind themselves that just because they were alone, they weren’t dead yet? A part of her wanted his little log cabin to be full of kittens or snakes or, better yet, domesticated rodents. Ferrets, perhaps. Guinea pigs.

  “Have you heard about Hector’s daughter, Daisy?” Shannon asked. “She’s missing.”

  Irv nodded. His shadowy face grew more so, and he crossed his arms over his chest. The biceps were strong and freckled. “I’ll station myself at your bumper and when I say so, give it the gas, okay? I mean, all you’ve got.”

  “Thank you,” Shannon said. She felt chastised, a little girl who’d spoken out of turn.

  “Don’t thank me yet.”

  Irv disappeared around the back of the car and an oriole shot past Shannon’s window like a neon-orange baseball. It dipped back, landed in a roadside sycamore tree, and trilled a few warning notes. Then a shrill and joyful song seemed to float upward on an invisible current of air. Hey, Mom, Shannon thought. Is that you? Rita had always wanted to fly. Not in the corny way that everyone wants—to be given wings and bird bones and, somehow, the permission. No. What Rita had wanted was to get on a plane and go somewhere because she never had. Disney World, maybe. Paris. Timbuk-fucking-tu. Shannon wanted that, too, but they’d never gone anywhere. Shipshewana didn’t count. Neither did Spencerville Fun Spot, especially since when Shannon was a girl she and Rita could get in there for free anytime they pleased. Her grandpa had owned the place.

  “Mama,” Shannon whispered. The oriole shook its tail and cocked its head, hopping to a higher branch just out of sight.

  “Go!” Irv yelled from behind her. “Bring it!”

  Shannon pushed the pedal. Irv groaned. She could see in her rearview mirror his thin cheeks straining, brown eyes going buggy. There was another groan, this one from the car, and she was moving. She was up and out.

  Behind her, Irv gagged, heaved. He slumped against the sycamore that had the oriole in it. Shannon hoped he was okay but didn’t dare stop.

  “Thanks!” she yelled back at him.

  “My pleasure,” Irv said. Then he straightened up and walked slowly back to his truck, sadness on him like a second shirt. Shannon decided that she was probably wrong about the pets. Irv didn’t collect animals. He was a loner. A lone wolf. So, what did he do all day? What was Irv’s life like? Did he have a family? A woman to see to his needs? Shannon had no idea. She’d never thought to ask him about himself and he never volunteered anything. Irv Peoples. International Man of Mystery.

  * * *

  Breeder’s Laundromat was on Beacon Street, sandwiched between a pet store and an accountant’s office. There were faded suds painted on the front windows and posters advertising specials on detergent. Over the door was a large banner declaring WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. Mr. Breeder had it hung there when local boy Kenny Garrety signed up and shipped off to Iraq a few years before. Mr. Breeder often said if he could do it all over again he would enlist in the army the minute he turned eighteen, just as Kenny Garrety had. Unfortunately, Mr. Breeder’s father needed him to step in and take control of the family business. “Otherwise,” Mr. Breeder said with a sigh, sometimes staring wistfully at the banner, “I would have spent my life engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy and I would not have ceased until the enemy was begging for mercy. That or six feet under.” He was very patriotic.

  Shannon had worked at the Laundromat since high school and did her job well. She knew what to expect of Mr. Breeder, who called her “darlin’” and came in every Monday to check on her and every Friday to do the accounts. She was friends with most of the customers, who had their routines, too, regular as a drying cycle. There was Josh’s aunt Pam Seaver, who always brought in two loads of whites in a white basket and one of colors in a blue basket; and Jack McElroy, who washed his sheets four times a week and his underwear once; and Zane Bigsby, who liked to take every washer in the place because, as he said the first day he came in with a girl under each tattooed arm, “I got needs, motherfuckers.” Also the Tucker boys, whose clothes were always heavy and often deafening—metal in the pockets, Shannon supposed—and little Tiara Peacock with her dirty mouth and quick eyes.

  Shannon didn’t necessarily love them all—Zane’s girls often laughed at her and played with her hair like she was a doll made for their own amusement, and the Tuckers scared her some with their barely concealed carries and growly voices—but in a way they were like her own relatives, familiar, maddening, easy to take for granted. When a customer died, like Mr. Blister had the summer before of skin cancer (“Now that is just wrong,” Rhae Anne said when she read the obit in the Colliersville Record), Shannon always went to the funeral, and it was guaranteed that she’d see a few other Breeder’s regulars there, shy around the family, a bit on the periphery, but still committed to getting through the ceremony because that’s what good people did. Mr. Breeder liked to say the Laundromat was its own little community, “a miniature Colliersville, Indiana, if you will,” which, if you asked Rhae Anne or Larry or Josh, was pretty microscopic already. Shannon didn’t mind the smallness or the sameness. It made her feel safe.

  Not that Breeder’s was immune to change. It took on a slightly different character when Helman Yoder began employing the immigrants at his dairy the year before. The workers all moved into the Ranasack Apartments, which Helman bought so, in his words, “his employees could have safe and family-friendly housing.” Family-friendly Shannon’s right ankle. The place was cockroach infested, full of mold, and a known firetrap. None of the apartments had washer or dryer hookups, so when the dairy was going full steam, Shannon could count on at least three Ranasack families a day lugging heavy bags of mud-crusted work shirts and jeans and socks through the doors. Post-shutdown, she still saw at least five groups a week, most of them hauled into town in a gray minivan with Michigan plates. Too many people, not enough seatbelts.

  There was someth
ing about the children in particular that hit Shannon in a physical place, started aches she couldn’t explain. They reminded her of the wonderful summer her mother invited a Puerto Rican waitress named Camila to live with them because her mail-order husband, according to Rita, “beat the snot out of her.” At twelve, Shannon didn’t understand how a beautiful girl could be got through the mail like a prize off a cereal box and she told Rita so. Rita said wait, “It’ll all be clear someday,” and it was, all except the weekend she spent helping Camila cover their front lawn in white crosses made of plastic forks. That she’d never figured out.

  Mr. Breeder did not share her fascination with his new clientele. Like Josh, he swore the whole lot of them symbolized a death knell to freedom and the American way, so when the families jammed the machines with Mexican coins, which had happened four times in the last five days, Shannon was careful not to tell Mr. Breeder about it. She fixed the machines herself if she could with an ice pick and a few well-placed kicks to the side. When the jam was too bad she called Rhae Anne’s cousin Scottie, who had his own hired handyman business and seemed to Shannon a sweet guy, even though he had the tendency to grumble that the Mexicans were taking jobs away from bona fide documented Americans. Shannon just flirted with him, paid him from her own salary, and hoped the little doe-eyed kids always turning up at her elbow didn’t understand English yet.

  Sometimes when the Mexican families took over the Laundromat Shannon closed her eyes and pretended she was back with Camila, the two of them painting their toenails while Camila told stories about her childhood in a village so small everyone had to share a car with four different-sized tires and one working window.

  “The Caribbean,” Camila said just before she went back to her husband and disappeared forever, “is magic.”

  Shannon knew, of course, that Puerto Rico and Mexico, or, as Mr. Breeder called it, “Meheeco,” weren’t the same place, but still the Mexican customers made Shannon wonder where Camila was now, if her husband was cruel or kind, if she still kept forks near her bed.

  A small family of death knells was waiting for her when Shannon pulled up to the curb that morning. There were four of them, a tiny girl and boy sitting at the feet of a toothless grandmother and next to her a pretty young woman staring blankly across the street. They were huddled together on the stoop in front of the Laundromat, their bony shoulders holding up Goodwill T-shirts.

  “Good morning!” Shannon called to them. “Sorry I’m late.”

  Technically she wasn’t late. She still had five minutes before Mr. Breeder would be there at seven, but they looked as if they’d been there for hours. They said nothing, just shrugged and parted like a broken chain to let her pass.

  When Shannon turned her key in the lock, the sound was scratchy and hollow, and a few ancient mosquito carcasses hovered near the front door handle, trapped between panes of glass. She flipped on the lights, and the street outside went dark against the fluorescent glare. Inside, the Laundromat smelled of baby powder and overheated electrical coils. Always. A bulb over the north row of washers blinked and hissed—she’d call Scottie about that later—and the cement-block room was cool.

  Shannon strode to the cramped space in the back to get her cash drawer from the safe. When she returned, the girl was whispering to the boy and they laughed behind their hands, maybe at her, but Shannon didn’t care. She smiled at them, and while the boy just looked down at the worn-out Velcro straps on his shoes, the girl returned the smile, her lips parting over two large front teeth jagged at their edge. The girl was cute, even pretty, if you didn’t count her teeth, and maybe she’d grow into them. Children did sometimes.

  She reminded Shannon of Daisy Gonzalez and not just because both girls had unfortunate teeth and black hair and brown skin. It was the strange mixture of vulnerability and fun in the face, of fragility and goofiness, that suggested a sort of sisterhood.

  “Shouldn’t you be in school?” Shannon asked.

  At first the girl giggled and shrugged at her. Then the toothy smile disappeared behind a set of chapped lips, and her large eyes widened in distress at something she seemed to see over Shannon’s shoulder. Shannon glanced behind her, but the room was empty except for the women dropping clothing into three superload washers.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The girl started to say something but was interrupted by the clank of the metal bells against the doorjamb and Mr. Breeder walking in, carrying his satchel of bills and accounts. He was just in time to see a yellow liquid puddle around the little girl’s feet and trickle down a crack in the floor toward a row of chairs pushed up against the wall. The girl’s brother inched away from her, but his shoe soles were already covered in urine, and he left wet spots as he went. Sticky by the sound of them.

  Later, Shannon would tell people that the whole incident might have blown over if the girl had cried and run to the bathroom in shame or if the grandmother, busy with a box of All Stainlifter, had scolded her and even smacked her wet behind.

  But the girl didn’t cry. She laughed.

  Mr. Breeder dropped his briefcase and clenched his jaw. His face, which was naturally red on account of high cholesterol and rosacea, turned almost purple. “Get out!” he screamed at the girl, and in case she didn’t understand, he grabbed her by the shoulders and half carried her toward the door. “Get out, get out, get out!” he yelled at the old woman and her daughter and the little boy. He yanked up the lids of the washers and tossed the wet clothes at their heads. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

  Shannon had never seen him act like this and even though she wanted to run after the girl and clean her up and tell her everything was going to be fine, accidents happened all the time, she just stood there like she was one of the pinball machines in the corner, nailed down and out of order, her heart pounding hard inside of her and her skin going prickly like it did when Josh got on his kick about how, at thirty-six, she was drying up like a granny apple and how she’d probably never be anyone’s mother at this point, thank Christ for small miracles.

  “Get out,” Mr. Breeder said once more even though the whole family, having grabbed their wet clothes in their arms, was already gone.

  * * *

  Mr. Breeder insisted on making the sign himself, which was why the “an” sound in “Mexican” was spelled with an “en” and not an “an.” Then he hung the placard—fashioned out of the side of an empty Tide container—in the center of the front window and asked Shannon if she thought the message sufficiently clear.

  “I want it so even a monkey can understand it,” Mr. Breeder said.

  “‘No Mexicens,’” Shannon read back to him, having joined him outside. “Not much room for interpretation there.”

  Mr. Breeder smiled for the first time all morning. “Good.”

  “But don’t you think, Mr. Breeder—”

  “Chuck,” he said.

  He was always trying to get her to call him by his first name and she did when explicitly ordered to, but she never thought of him as anything but Mr. Breeder. How strange, she thought, that someone with such a surname didn’t have children. “Don’t you think, Chuck, that this sign is going to seem insensitive?”

  “Insensitive?”

  “Well, I mean since the little girl in my neighborhood, you know, Daisy Gonzalez, has been reported missing. And she’s. Well. She’s Mexican.”

  Mr. Breeder sighed. “Shannon, Shannon, Shannon. You know the Ranasack people are killing me. You of all people should know. They’re cleaning me out. They come here and stay for hours and use all the toilet paper in the restroom and steal my magazines and make a mess and a racket. If something doesn’t change I’ll be forced to go out of business. And you’ll be out of a job. Think about that. Besides, this sign is clearly not about Daisy. I was watching the news last night—I saw the reports. Her dad works at the high school. He went through the proper channels.”

  “The proper channels?”

  “He was born here, so Daisy’s American
. More or less.”

  Shannon remembered Josh’s words from earlier that morning, the thing he said about one Mexican being as good as the next. Bunnies. Girls as rabbits. Problem solved. “I’m just worried a sign like that at a time like this could strike the wrong note. Send the wrong message.”

  “Trust me. This is exactly the message I want to send.”

  While Mr. Breeder secured the sign with duct tape, the pretty woman Larry was seeing on the side walked in, her curvy body stuffed into a tube top, hoodie, and animal-print jeans. Shannon recognized her right away. She’d seen her riding with Larry in his truck around town, cruising all the streets except the one in front of the Hair Barn. The woman had high-heeled patent-leather peekaboo shoes on her feet, a pink phone up to her ear, and a shimmery bag slung over one shoulder. Her hair was long too, not as long as Shannon’s, but wavy and black and thick.

  “No,” Mr. Breeder said, following her in and wrinkling his nose. His voice was quiet and his words came out in a slow sputter. “No. No more of you.”

  She ignored him and threw her bag down on one of the washers the old woman and her daughter had already loaded with quarters. When she saw that the washer was primed for her, she smiled into her phone and opened the lid.

  Mr. Breeder, meanwhile, hovered over her, his breath short. “Can’t you read?” He pointed to the sign, which was facing the street and hanging at a slightly drunken angle.

  The woman turned around and seemed to see Mr. Breeder for the first time. She took him in from the top of his bald head to his tasseled shoes, leaning back so she could get a better view of her attacker. Her graceful neck turned cobra, coiling and then swaying back and forth. She snapped her phone shut. “Yes, I can read,” she said.

  “I said no more of your kind here,” Mr. Breeder shouted. “Read the sign.”