But one Happy Hills resident, Mr. Clem Cottle, was so alarmed by a white tornado that cut right across his front yard that he did some research on the property and discovered a dirty secret: Happy Hills had been built on the remains of an old trailer park. It was a rotten trick in Clem's opinion, because he would never have knowingly bought a house in a place where a trailer park once stood. It was an invitation to disaster. It was just as bad as building on an Indian graveyard.

Stuck with residences that had been exposed as tornado magnets, the homeowners of Happy Hills made the best of the situation by pooling their resources to build a communal storm shelter. It was a concrete room that had been half-sunk in the ground and banked with soil on all sides, with the result that there was finally a hill in Happy Hills.

Bluebonnet Ranch, however, didn't have anything remotely resembling a storm shelter.

If a tornado cut through the trailer park, we were all goners. The knowledge gave us a more or less fatalistic attitude about natural disasters. As with so many other aspects of our lives, we were never prepared for trouble.

We just tried like hell to get out of the way when it came.

Mama's pains had started in the middle of the night. At about three in the morning. I realized she was up and moving around, and I got up with her. I'd found it nearly impossible to sleep anyway, because it was raining. Until we'd moved to Bluebonnet Ranch, I'd always thought rain was a soothing sound, but when it rains on the tin roof of a single-wide, the noise rivals the decibel level of an airplane hangar.

I used the oven timer to measure Mama's contractions, and when they were eight minutes apart, we called the ob-gyn. Then I called Miss Marva to come take us to the family clinic, a local outreach of a Houston hospital.

I had just gotten my license, and although I thought I was a pretty good driver, Mama had said she would feel more comfortable if Miss Marva drove us. Privately I thought we would have been a lot safer with me behind the wheel, since Miss Marva's driving technique was at best creative, and at worst she was an accident waiting to happen. Miss Marva drifted, turned from the wrong lanes, sped up and slowed down according to the pace of her conversation, and pushed the gas pedal flush to the floor whenever she saw a yellow light. I would have preferred Bobby Ray to drive, but he and Miss Marva had broken up a month earlier on suspicion of infidelity. She said he could come back when he figured out which

shed to put his tools in. Since their separation. Miss Marva and I had gone to church by ourselves, her driving with me praying all the way there and back.

Mama was calm but chatty, wanting to reminisce about the day I was born. "Your daddy was such a nervous wreck when I was having you, he tripped over the suitcase and nearly broke his leg. And then he drove the car so fast, I yelled at him to slow down or I'd drive myself to the hospital. He didn't stay in the delivery room with me—I think he was nervous he'd get in the way. And when he saw you, Liberty, he cried and said you were the love of his life. I'd never seen him cry before...."

"That's real sweet, Mama," I said, pulling out my checklist to make certain we had everything we needed in the duffel bag. I had packed it a month earlier, and I'd checked it a hundred times, but I was still worried I might have forgotten something.

The storm had worsened, thunder vibrating the entire trailer. Although it was seven in the morning, it was black as midnight. "Shit," I said, thinking that getting into a car with Miss Marva in this kind of weather was risking our lives. There would be flash-flooding, and her low-slung Pinto wagon wasn't going to make it to the family clinic.

"Liberty," Mama said in surprised disapproval, "I've never heard you swear before. I hope your friends at school aren't influencing you."

"Sorry," I said, trying to peer through the streaming window.

We both jumped at the sudden roar of hail on the roof, a battering shower of hard white ice. It sounded like someone was dumping coins onto our house. I ran to the door and

opened it. surveying the bouncing balls on the ground. "Marble-sized," I said. "And a few golf balls."

"Shit," Mama said, wrapping her arms around her tightening stomach.

The phone rang, and Mama picked it up. "Yes? Hey, Marva, I—You what? Just now?" She listened for a moment. "All right. Yes, you're probably right. Okay, we'll see you there."

"What?" I asked wildly as she hung up. "What did she say?"

"She says the main road is probably flooded by now, and the Pinto won't make it. So she called Hardy, and he's coming to get us in the pickup. Since there's only room for three of us, he'll drop us off and come back to get Marva."

"Thank God." I said, instantly relieved. Hardy's pickup would plow through anything.

I waited at the door and watched through the crack. The hail had stopped falling but the rain held steady, sometimes coming in cold sideways sheets through the narrow opening of the door. Every now and then I glanced back at Mama, who had subsided in the corner of the sofa. I could tell the pains were getting worse—her chatter had died away and she had drawn inward to focus on the inexorable process that had overtaken her body.

I heard her breathe my father's name softly. A needle of pain went through the back of my throat. My father's name, when she was giving birth to another man's child.

It's a shock the first time you see your parent in a helpless condition, to feel the reverse of your situations. Mama was my responsibility now. Daddy wasn't here to take care of her. But I knew he would have wanted me to. I wouldn't fail either of them.