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of Greenland knew she would not be back. When the tornado began to roar outside, April May crouched under her desk as she’d been instructed, and in her cramped position she considered that Mrs. O’Kearsy might be causing the storm because the townspeople had sent her away. When part of the schoolhouse roof was torn off and a patch of green sky became visible, April May thought maybe the storm was caused by her own anger about losing her favorite person in the world. When the winds died, the man who’d been filling in as teacher finally let the students go. April May ran outside to find the schoolhouse chimney toppled, and soon she discovered that nearly every building in Greenland Center was damaged. April May did not go straight home, but ran through the streets, alongside downed power wires and mangled fences and outbuildings torn off their foundations and left slumping in the road. She spun through the chaos as though she were a tornado herself. She couldn’t bear to pick her way carefully around the debris after that monstrous coiled wind had sprung open her whole neighborhood. After hours of running, jumping, and climbing trees to look at the wreckage, April May had stepped on a nail stuck to some cabinet trim. She came onto the finishing nail at precisely the wrong angle, stepping straight down so the nail’s tip went all the way through and protruded near her middle toes. When she yanked it out from the bottom, the amount of blood astounded her. She limped home, then waited four drowsy hours with her footelevated before the doctor arrived to give her the injection. She fell asleep the moment the needle pricked her skin, and didn’t rouse until the following morning.
    This gray morning sixty-five years later, the pain in her foot seemed as fresh as the day of the tornado, and April May thought maybe she was being woken up once and for all. Just then David Retakker reached the driveway leading to the barn, and April May watched him stop and hide himself and his bike behind a clutch of bright red sumac.
    David peered through the branches and tried to catch his breath before approaching the barn. George seemed eight feet tall to him, and though George did not wear cowboy boots—he wore tan steel-toed work boots—David thought he looked the way a cowboy ought to look, tall and straight as a fence post. George did not wear a cowboy hat, but he rested so easily against his truck that he reminded David of the Marlboro man on the poster his dad had hung in the hallway before he left. David had changed bedrooms recently so he could sleep in what had been George’s room growing up.
    David’s dad, Mike, used to work for George, before he moved to Indiana four months ago to live with a woman who had three other kids. The one time David had visited his dad down there, neither of them had known what to do. Mike took him out to a breakfast of pancakes and eggs and bacon, and they stayed there at the restaurant a long time, Mike leaning back into the corner of the booth, sucking at one cigarette after another and blowing out smoke. Mike asked David: How was sixth grade? Was it any different than fifth? and David shrugged and stifled a cough. David waited until after they’d finished eating, then used his breather in the bathroom; otherwise Mike would have said, “You still having to use that old puffer?” or, worse, “I guess I shouldn’t be smoking around you.”
    David glanced across the road at April May’s house and noticedshe was sitting on her steps watching him. He straightened his shoulders and tried to pretend he hadn’t been hiding. When she waved, he waved back, then threw his leg over his bike and rode up the driveway toward George.
    â€œEight o’clock on the dot. Right on time,” George said, without any reference to watch or clock. “You’re the most on-time kid I know.”
    David was so happy at George’s compliment that any