"Let's just order something and I'll take it home," she said.
"We have time," I told her. "We can eat inside. Look at all these other people out here."
I'm relieved to see it's Brandy behind the register when we walk up to order.
"Hi Vickie," she says to Mom.
There's a familiarity because Mom knows Brandy's mother, Jacycee, an assistant manager at the McDonald's. Known her since she was born. Ginger, the matriarch of the family, lived next door to young Vickie McElroy and her family on 15th Street in Jett, Kan. She and her former husband knew Mom as a little girl, long before Jacycee and her older sister was born.
As we stand around the lobby, Jaycee walks in. She comes into Mickey D's a lot. I'm glad to see her because Mom is steadily becoming more high-strung and I'm thinking -- hoping -- Jaycee can bring her down. I figure I'll probably be giving Mom an Ativan when I take her home.
We sit at a two-seat length table, just off from the standing area. Mom babbles on, mostly ignoring her chicken sandwich, as Jaycee listens intently.
"I've been independent all my life," Mom says. "I've lived through floods."
I help myself to one, then another, then two or three of her fries, in between sipping a strawberry shake, the only menu item I ordered for myself. Storm talk travels thick through the room and I get into a conversation with the fellow at the next table. Pretty good guy, says his name is Nate.
He motions to the window and his 2011 GMC Sierra 1500 XFE Crew Cab Pickup parked next to the building. Not a hail dent on that baby. Nate, although he doesn't know me from Adam, talks with me as if we've hung out forever. Young, and a single guy -- I can tell -- Nate talks about barely missing a tornado one dark evening on his way home from a Bible study. Says he has a friend who's a professional storm chaser and how rocking that is. He plans on taking the highway south and bypassing the approaching storm on his way home.
"That wind can get out of here. Let it all go to Oklahoma," I say.
Words I'll later lament, having said.
Reaching the driveway to Mom's house, I see my brother, Jimmy, and his 10-year-old daughter, Tori. No doubt, Tori's softball games have been cancelled. Jimmy communicates some bit of information to me about watching Mom, unable to resist trying to run my life. He's one of the banes of my existence.
Driving home, I see the other one.
"Well look whose fat ass is on my porch," I say to myself as I park the car at the curb.
"Hi Jeff," my father-in-law calls out to me as I walk up to the house. He's sitting there with my daughter Gabby. No doubt, he and my mother-in-law have come over to take shelter at our house if need be. We have a sturdy basement.
My in-laws really are consummate professionals at this grandparent thing. Deep down, good people. I guess I could feel guilty about being standoffish toward the old man if I let myself be. But no, I've been burned too many times.
We get an inch of rain, but by and large, the worst of the storm misses us. My friend Al is in town and I invite him over to see me, the wife and kids before he heads back home to Texas the next day.
The next day I'm communicating with Al's sister-in-law Doxie up in Iowa. She said she texted Al because she was worried. He'd made his skin-of-the-teeth escape. Only 30 minutes earlier he'd driven through Moore, Okla. Now I-35 was littered with cars that had been picked up, hurtled through the air and smashed to the ground.
Doxie wouldn't be letting Al's 91-year-old mother in the nursing home know her son was that close to death and destruction. Just like they don't let on to her about all the fires he has to put out at the refinery where he's operations manager. It's best this way. There are things we do in life that we NEVER want our parents to know about.
'It looked like Hiroshima'
Late Monday afternoon. I sit at the dining room table where I always hang out after work, joking around with my daughter, while my son plays xbox in the living room with the kid from next door. My mother-in-law is there, faithfully watching the kids as she usually does when they get out of school. Her cell phone rings for the third time.
Her husband -- who gets more worked up, the older he gets -- has been watching CNN and MSNBC.
"That old man won't leave you alone, will he?" I say to "Mom."
The tornado is worse than we were expecting. He said there was rubble strewn all over. It looked like Europe and Japan during World War II.
"He said 'it looked like Hiroshima'" "Mom" said. He also said something about kids being trapped in a school. But they have tornado shelters in schools. This is what they have tornado drills for.
That evening, while sitting on the porch, we'd catch our friends Brent and Diane off on their nightly fitness walk.
I say something about the kids trapped inside two destroyed buildings, babies unaccounted for...and Diane, a fifth-grade teacher comes within an inch of crying. We look at my kids' school, Longfellow Elementary, across the street and literally -- not figuratively, literally -- thank God that the bond issue passed.
A debris-carrying wind one-to-two miles wide leveled the town of Moore, a suburb of Oklahoma City. Over 240 people have been hospitalized, 51 people confirmed dead and that number is expected to rise, awaiting the medical examiners final reports.
I sit on the wicker love seat with my daughter Gabby. I'm thinking of those school children.
"I don't know what I'd do..." (long pause, suck it in J. Guy, keep composure)
"If that happened to me," my little girl finishes my sentence.
"Those kids are just like you," I say.
"But they're in a better place."
A few long seconds. I look in my girl's face. Her tongue's stuck out, mouth wound out.
I chuckle a little. "What are you doing, Goofy?" I ask her.
"The best way to stop someone from crying is to make them laugh."
