I padded down the stairs and peered out the window beside the front door, which was no longer a window but an open space. The glass had been swept up from the floor, so I had a clear view of the night sky, stars suddenly close enough to touch, like sparks thrown from a fire.

There was also a red ember dancing in the dark. I pushed open the screen door and saw Vietnam Tim sitting on the wicker rocker, smoking a cigarette. “Hey,” he said, seeing me. He waved the cigarette toward me. “Want one?” Then he winced. “That’s probably like the cursing,” he realized.

“Yeah … I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said.

“What a coincidence,” Vietnam Tim replied. “So am I.”

“Where will you go?”

He waved his arm, the bright red tip of the cigarette drawing a loop in the night. “Wherever the winds take me,” he said.

“I’m going back to New York,” I told him. “I may never leave there again.”

His teeth flashed, a lightning smile. “So much for apples not falling far from trees,” Vietnam Tim answered.

•

In the morning, Vietnam Tim had left without saying goodbye, and I realized that my mother was not joining us to go to the airport. Instead, she was going to spend a few more days in Ochelata, photographing the devastation of the EF4 tornado. She would chronicle the absence of homes where they had stood hours before, and the empty arms of mothers who had lost children, piles of debris that had been family businesses and churches. The images would eventually include a Jenga heap of broken beams with the town population sign cracked down the middle; another of a horse rearing as it was being recaptured from the school gymnasium where it had taken frantic refuge; a dog’s paw emerging from a mountain of rubble; and Mrs. Evans, staring at the remains of her broken barn, her arm hooked around the neck of Nitpick. This series, Broken Things, would eventually be featured at the International Center of Photography, and won my mother a World Press Photo award.

Before we left, my mother hugged me. “I’ll be home soon,” she promised, but she looked at my father as she said it. “I can’t leave before I finish the job.”

“I thought you were here for the rain,” I said.

“That was the job,” my mother agreed. “But now it’s something else.”

It was always something else.

I watched my mother tentatively move toward my father, and even more tentatively come close enough for her to brush her lips against his. There was only a second of hesitation, and then he kissed her back.

I fed Nitpick one last apple while my father put our suitcases into the rental car. As we drove to the airport I thought about something Vietnam Tim had said, when I asked him how a tornado ends.