Janine had seen the article, after it was posted to Facebook by several of her Ranch friends. She agreed with Regina, and with her fellow students who posted comments, that the whole business was unfair to their school. It had not included interviews with any of the students or teachers, had brought up allegations of political involvement that Janine wasn’t sure were true (and if true, she wasn’t sure how they were damaging), and included a rather unflattering photograph of the school grounds. In a spirit of solidarity, she’d chosen one of the poems from her Terri Schiavo series and sent it back to Regina with permission to publish, but now Janine wondered if the poem was ready, and she was looking through her collection to see if something else might be better.

Beth sat across from her, staring intently at the television. Janine, who found it difficult to read with the weather people constantly flipping from one set of terrible footage to another—from forest fires in California to a drought in the Southwest to a heat wave in Chicago—worried that it had become an obsession. Janine’s take on weather was that it just was: there were always fires in California, the Southwest always seemed a little drought-stricken (wasn’t that where they had the Dust Bowl?), cities were always too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Worrying about the weather felt a little intemperate and godless to her. God made those mountain ranges; if He wanted to burn them up, that was His business. She was even a little afraid her daughter had aligned herself with those climate change alarmists but Beth said no, it wasn’t that. She was watching for a tropical storm. She was sure, based on a study of ocean temperatures and wind patterns, that one was about to get cooking. Once it did, all she had to do was guess where it might go.

“If I can just get ahead of the storm,” Beth said, consulting one of her thick meteorology textbooks while Janine flipped through her poems. On the small kitchen TV, the seven-day forecast appeared against an ocean-blue background: seven fiery suns, temperatures around a hundred every day. “If I can plan ahead, I’ll be in place to get my breakthrough story.”