Dakotas. If there was one thing I hated, it was road trips. It wasn’t that I found road trips boring. It was just that I would be trapped with my grandmother and Jaz for hours at a time. I mean, I loved them, but thinking of spending all that time with them made me crazy. My grandfather was different. I could ride with him all day, no problem.
For me, taking off time from school would be sort of wonderful and awful at the same time—wonderful because I hated schoolwork, and awful because my mother had told me that a lot would change for my entire class over the summer between sixth and seventh grades. And whatever these changes were, I wouldn’t be there for them. When we studied the civil rights movement that took place about a hundred thousand years earlier in the 1960s, we heard Sam Cooke singing “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which was my favorite song in the world, or at least my second favorite. I didn’t have a favorite, but I liked to reserve that space just in case a song came along that was the actual best song in the world. Anyhow, I wondered if I would ever understand these mysterious changes that were coming for my class or whether I would get left behind. I didn’t want to become a reject just because of a bunch of wheat.
And I already missed my parents. Obaachan was so much more strict than my mother or my father. She told us what to eat and drink and how to live. In Japan, her family had a plum tree in their backyard. She was convinced of the healing power of
And I had to wear rubber gloves whenever I did the dishes. Even at Obaachan’s age, she had beautiful hands. She often held them in front of herself to admire them. The gloves made my hands sweaty, but if she caught me with no gloves on, she would say, “Even if I ugly fish for face, someone would marry me for my hands.”
“But you had an arranged marriage,” I once pointed out.
“No talk back or I ground you.”
I gathered the schoolwork my present and future teachers had given me into a binder. Binders are a great organizational tool. My finished mosquito drawings and the matching original photographs took up one binder. Then I had a binder for all my schoolwork, and another binder to hold new photographs of mosquitoes. Supposedly, I was going to have to spend three hours a day on my schoolwork. Ha-ha. I had already done some of it so that I would have free days. And teachers weren’t that strict about work they gave you when you went away on harvest. Once, I had returned from harvest and not done any of my homework, and the teachers barely blinked an eye.
One good thing about harvest is that there are always other kids around who belong to drivers, custom harvesters, or farmers. I had made friends that I’d stayed pen pals with, and even Jaz had made a friend one year, a boy as focused and intense as he was. I was surprised that there could be two such boys in the world. There were probably others as well. I wished they could all meet one another and form a club called the Intense Boys Association.
The night before we left, Jaz was really excited as we lay in bed—he had the bunk above mine. He was hoping he would make a friend during harvest.
“Wouldn’t it be great if I make two friends?” he said.
“That would be cool.”
“What if I make three? I’ve never had three friends at the same time before.”
Actually, he had never had two friends at the same time either.
He became quiet then, but I knew he wasn’t asleep. He was thinking about these three imaginary friends. I hoped he did make three, I really did, but thinking about it made me get a small pain in my stomach, because what was most likely to happen is that he would end up by himself a lot, talking to himself, playing with plastic soldiers, building with LEGOs, and watching movies. If you bothered him while he was playing with his soldiers, he might fly into a rage. You had to wait until he was taking a break.
The hall light went on, and Jiichan came into the bedroom. He pulled up the chair from my desk.
“Tonight I tell you the story of a weed,” he said. “One day when I boy, I pulling weeds in orange grove. Day hot, many weed, back hurt. Bad day. Weed came from all over the night before. Suddenly, more weed than I ever see. Weed my special enemy. I hate it more than anything. I have many nightmare about weed. But that day I find special weed I never see before. My mother scold me, but I take weed roots carefully out, and I leave field and put my special weed in jar of water. Then after work I plant it in wet soil. Every day I take care of that weed. It grow as tall as me, and that year we have best-tasting orange crop ever. We raise price because everyone want our oranges. So I want you to remember, always keep eye open for special weed. You both special weed.
“
CHAPTER FOUR
From our home in Littlefield, Kansas, we had to drive across the state to Susanville, Kansas, to meet up with the Parker Harvesting crew. My parents had worked for the Parkers twice, once two years ago and once three years ago. The second time we were short on money, and they paid us for the first month before we’d done any work. That’s the kind of people they are.
It was still dark when we set out in our rattly, old Ford pickup. That thing was older than I was. We’d eaten a quick breakfast of oatmeal and two
Jiichan sort of turned off whenever he drove. He didn’t talk much and kept the radio on low. Once in a while he came to life, as if somebody had flipped an “on” switch. As for Jaz, he was blowing giant bubble-gum bubbles, over and over. “Look,” he said. “I can blow a bubble the exact same size every time.”
On his lap sat a LEGO apartment building he’d been gluing together as he built it. He could have just put it in the truck bed, but he said that it was his most precious possession. End of argument.
Thunder was curled up on the backseat beside me. I opened my window. The air was perfectly lukewarm, but I knew when we got to Texas, that would change. When I checked the Weather Channel before we left, it said it might hit 100 degrees there! Thunder lifted his head and took a big breath, closing his eyes and, I swear, smiling. I stared out the window. The wheat fields were black in the early-morning darkness. I wondered who’d be cutting those. Maybe it would be us as we swung back north.
We drove past mile after mile of wheat, soybean, cattle, and sunflower farms. One of my favorite things was driving through Kansas when both the wild and cultivated sunflowers were in bloom. I liked the wild ones better, the clouds hovering over the tangle of yellow. They would still be in bloom in the fall.
Then I heard Obaachan growling. It was her sign that the pain in her back had become unbearable. Without a word, Jiichan pulled over to the side of the road. He had barely stopped the truck when Obaachan got out and lay flat on her back on the shoulder of the highway. She lay down like that several times a day, sometimes for hours. Jiichan grabbed the flashlight from the glove compartment, and we all stepped outside. Thunder sniffed at Obaachan and then looked at me, as if he knew something about her that he couldn’t communicate to us.
We stood around for twenty minutes or so doing nothing but watching. That kind of standing around occurred sometimes in the country, where you were far from medical care. You had to kind of gather around and evaluate. Obaachan looked bad, but I’d seen her worse. She even wore a slight smile, as if she was thinking of something pleasant like me getting all A’s or Jaz finding a friend. She had just recently stopped dyeing her hair jet-black, so I could see the white roots like a halo around her face.
Then her smile faded and she said, “We suppose to be there before six.”
She reached out her arms without saying anything more, and Jaz and I each took a hand and pulled her up.
