so I was worried he hadn’t gotten enough to eat.
Mr. Parker didn’t say another word, but all the other workers got up too and readied themselves to leave, taking along the sandwiches I had already prepared for them for lunch.
Everyone left at once, except for Robbie. Obaachan got on all fours, resting the top of her head on the linoleum. This was something new. Robbie watched her with interest. I started stacking the dirty breakfast plates.
“Obaachan, are you okay?” I asked.
“No, I think I dying. This is it. Don’t forget make more meat next Sunday. If I die, I won’t be here to remind you.”
Robbie was studying my grandmother. “Shouldn’t she go to a doctor?” he asked.
“She’s gone to seventeen different doctors, six chiropractors, and three acupuncturists, and nobody knows exactly what’s causing the pain.”
I turned to place the plates in the sink.
“Don’t you ever stop working?” Robbie asked.
I spun around and was startled by how close he was. He was about a foot away from me, right inside my personal space. “Cooking is supposed to be my grandmother’s job, but she’s got her horrible back pains. She fell on her back when she was a little girl, but she wouldn’t tell me how. Jiichan said, however, that she fell climbing out of a window. He didn’t enlighten me as to why she was climbing out this window, but clearly she had been a troublemaker.” I could feel my face in flames.
He looked at me in a perfectly normal fashion, as if girls always blushed fiercely when they talked to him. I swallowed some saliva. Next he took out a quarter from his pocket, flipped it into the air, and caught it before slapping it on the table. He looked at the coin. “Heads. I guess I’m doing schoolwork.” He lingered a moment. “Are you going to cook Japanese for us one day?”
“We’re doing
“What’s
“It’s thick noodles with thinly sliced beef and vegetables. I mean, the vegetables aren’t thinly sliced. You cook it in a pot in front of you, and after you’re done eating, you drink the broth, and, oh, I forgot to mention there are two sauces you dip everything in, and it’s just so good. We brought the sauces with us from home, and we’re going to cook it all on the stove before serving it. We even brought our special meat slicer. The reason we own a slicer is that my mother works cooking in a hunting lodge in the off-season, and a lot of the customers there like
“I had some cooked sashimi once in Oklahoma. It was pretty good.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. Cooked sashimi didn’t make sense, because sashimi meant “raw fish.” It was like saying cooked raw carrots. But I didn’t want to insult him. “I mean, it’s kind of unusual, but unusual things are really cool because of their unusualness, even if they’re, you know, unusual.” I was sounding dimmer by the moment.
“Do you want me to show you something amazing at the barn?”
I glanced at Obaachan, the top of her head still resting on the floor. “Sure, yes.” I went rushing out the door before Obaachan had a chance to stop me. Thunder, as always, followed me.
Was this a date? That thought made me take off my apron and stuff as much of it as I could into my back pocket. We strolled toward the barn, which was made of some kind of reddish wood. The roof was painted brick red. When we went inside, we stopped in front of a blond bull in a standing stock in the middle of the barn. “They’re going to enter him in the state fair,” Robbie said. “He’s one of those bulls they wash and blow-dry and all that to get them ready. They put a little rose water on him too, but just a small bit. They want him to smell good, but not girly. They even trim some of his hairs.”
I wondered how Robbie knew so much about this bull. “My grandfather worked as a cattle fitter for a while. He’s a nice-looking bull,” I said. “But he’s not standing right.”
“They hired another fitter to help with that,” Robbie said. I nodded. “But that’s not what I wanted to show you,” he continued.
We passed a few stalls until he stopped at an especially big one. And there stood the tallest horse I’d ever seen. Maybe it was an illusion, but he looked like he could be twenty hands. I knew he couldn’t possibly be that tall, because the tallest horse in history was about twenty-one hands. I had read that in my brother’s list of the biggest animals in history. He’d made the list when he was eight years old.
“Cool, huh?” Robbie said. He rested his face on a metal bar. He seemed in awe.
“I saw a huge shire horse at a county fair once, but this one is definitely bigger,” I said. This horse was black with white feet and a skimpy black mane. He eyed us calmly.
“The height’s in his legs,” Robbie said. “They’re so long, he looks kind of gawky. Usually shires are stockier.”
We stood awhile. I felt like time had stopped in here, like we were kind of floating in time. Robbie stepped back from the stall and touched my upper arm, making it tingle. “I better get to studying,” he said. “I have a whole algebra workbook I have to finish over the summer. I love algebra. I think about it all the time.”
Ugh. Algebra. I mean, all I thought about was my family, Thunder, my friends, and mosquitoes that killed maybe a million people a year—a million people!—but struck about three hundred million. Did you ever wonder how many diseases are carried by mosquitoes? I never did, until I got sick, and now I sure as heck know. Besides malaria, dengue, and encephalitis, mosquitoes can spread a couple of disgusting worms: helminth parasitic worms and dog heartworm, like my previous dog, Shika, had had. But not every mosquito carries diseases. Many of them are kind of innocent, for mosquitoes.
Anyway. We stepped back out into the sunshine, a warm breeze blowing into my face. Robbie was closing the barn door when I realized that Thunder wasn’t with us. “Wait, where’s my dog? We must have left him inside.” Robbie pulled open the door. I didn’t see Thunder, and there was nowhere to hide, just the long row of stalls, with the standing stock in the center. Still, I called out, “Thunder! Thunder, come!” I went back outside. “Thunder! C’mere, boy!”
Robbie was scanning the yard. “I don’t see him anywhere.”
“Weird. He’s very good about coming when I call. I trained him really well.” But as I said that, a feeling of dread hit me out of the blue. It was immediately followed by a ruckus that sounded like a bunch of chickens going crazy. I ran like mad toward the sound, but I already knew what I’d find.
On the other side of the barn, chickens were squawking all over the place. And there was Thunder, holding a speckled hen in his mouth, shaking it wildly. He looked ecstatic.
“No!” I shouted. “Down!” He pranced away. “No. Bad boy! Stay!” I stomped toward him and grabbed both sides of the chicken hanging out of his mouth. “No!” I yanked the chicken out and threw it down. Then I turned to assess the damage. It looked like there were three dead birds. “Bad dog! Bad, bad dog!” Thunder cowered and whined.
“Let’s get out of here,” Robbie said urgently.
He ran off, and I followed, holding Thunder firmly by the collar. This wasn’t the first time that he’d killed chickens—it had happened once at a neighbor’s farm back home. The farmer had said that the best way to cure a dog of killing chickens was to tie a dead chicken around its neck for a week and let the chicken rot. My parents had refused to do that, and fortunately, Thunder had not ventured into the neighbor’s farm again.
But this was worse—much, much worse—because for a cook or a combine driver, the farmer was like the king. When we reached the campers, we came to a halt, looking around furtively.
Robbie laid a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault,” he said. “It was all my idea.”
“No, Thunder’s my responsibility. I should have kept my eye on him. I can’t believe I didn’t.” I thought of all the times my mother had said to me, “Summer, what were you thinking?” This time I knew exactly what I had been thinking—how cute Robbie was.
“Okay, listen,” Robbie said, dropping his voice. “I didn’t see anyone else around. Unless someone saw us, it should be okay. Just don’t tell anyone.”
“We have to tell someone! Someone has to pay for the dead chickens.”
