One Day the Wind Changed Read Online Free Page B

your health is the board’s concern too, you know,” Frank tells me. “You’re our front man here, Adam. Got to stay strong. In the breach, eh? Anything you need, you come talk to me, hear?”
    â€œI need more money and a clearer direction, Frank.”
    He sighs and throws up his hands. In the doorway he stops and turns. “By the way, Adam?”
    â€œYes?”
    â€œWe’re not a homeless shelter, okay?”
    So. He’s seen Zero. He’s seen the others. My cheeks burn.
    â€œIt’s up to you to encourage the right kinds of crowds. All right? Think ‘families.’ Think ‘wholesome.’ Have a good weekend. Get out and have some fun.”
    Funny, how running a planetarium-with its self-generated months, years, light-years-compresses my sense of time. After over three decades, my most vivid Saturday remains the one when I was seven, and my mother drove me into Oklahoma City from our home in Holdenville. We were going to see the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night , a rare treat. My mother didn’t like rock ‘n’ roll, but the Beatles, she said, seemed “wholesome.”
    Marty had no interest in music. He went to the oil fields with Daddy that day. Daddy had to check on some rig production.
    I remember sitting in the plush moviehouse—bright lobby chandeliers, silver spigots on the soft drink machines, crushed velvet curtains by the screen. It was nicer than anything I’d ever seen. It smelled like a new car, leathery and polished. I held my mother’s hand. When the Beatles began to sing, every hair on my body (not many back then) leaped to attention. Music and light—from that moment on, their twinned power has stunned me.
    I’d never witnessed four young men happier than the Beatles. In the middle of the film, when they broke free of their cramped rehearsal hall and scampered, like puppies, through an open field—when they ran, as Marty and I never could—I thought I’d faint from pleasure. My breath caught in my chest. Mother looked at me, worried. I reached into my pocket and gripped my inhaler, but I managed to settle down and didn’t have to use it.
    After the show, in the car, I hugged my mother, hard: her belly’s soft heat through her pink cotton dress, the fluff of her breasts against my cheek. She took me to an ice cream parlor for a chocolate sundae with candy sprinkles and nuts. Sunlight shattered off my spoon onto her pretty, lipsticked smile.
    The parlor was near my grandmother’s house, and I asked Mother if we were going to see the old lady. She smiled and said, “No, this is our special trip. Just you and me, okay?” The ice cream tasted sweeter then. Our special trip! I sat up straight in my wrought-iron chair. “Why is Grandmother so unhappy?” I asked.
    â€œShe’s had a hard life,” my mother said. “Life is hard here on the plains.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œAre you kidding? All this dust and heat. Nothing but oil field work or farming.”
    â€œDo we have a hard life?” I asked.
    She laughed. “What do you think?”
    â€œI think it’s all right.”
    â€œMe too.”
    Through the parlor window we watched the sun set. The evening star appeared above a mud-brown line of dark, one-story buildings. “Make a wish,” my mother said.
    With Frank gone, I draw the curtain to the Star Room. The velvet has frayed at the bottom. Mental note: New velvet. Bypass the board. The children are laughing and talking, throwing sharp paper triangles across the room. The kids’ clothes smell like spoiled milk. Ms. Pickett shakes her head at the pudgy boy I’d seen in the hallway, the one with the unlaced shoes. He’s begging to go to the bathroom now. I’ve dawdled and made the teacher’s job harder than it needs to be.
    â€œHey, Adam.”
    Damn, if it isn’t Zero, slouching in the back of the room. Apparently, he