#8–Weather Forecast
“This weather sucks. No one in this place knows how to drive in snow. Most of the airlines are canceling their flights,” said the young man, shedding his coat. He was about to dump it on a chair but saw me in time to change his direction and hang it on a peg by the door. “Well, hello?”
“This is Lyndi’s aunt,” said Suli, “Dr. Tiffany Deweese, my brother Sharaf.”
“An aunt? I don’t think so. You must be a sister that Lyndi is hiding. America is a great country—if aunts look like this here. In my family, aunts are so high”—he held his hand about four feet from the floor—“they wear black from head to toe. Despite being able to benchpress two hundred pounds of laundry which they carry on their heads down to the river to beat clean on the rocks, they moan they are weak, they are dying, they are brought low by ungrateful, useless children.”
“That’s what I thought.” Suli laughed and moved like a whirlwind to set a meal before her brother.
Sharaf tried to flirt with me. I wasn’t attracted but I could understand Lyndi’s enthusiasm: Sharaf was movie star handsome and sported a Clark Gable mustache. Thinking of Darryl and wondering where he was, I looked out the window.
“It doesn’t seem to be snowing yet,” I commented.
Sharaf bristled. “Not yet, but traffic is already snarled up. People here panic just for a forecast. With the federal government closing early, there wasn’t any point. I got a good fare in this direction and then just came on home.”
I wondered why he was so defensive. “I hadn’t heard the weather forecast. I arrived today from New York and spent most of the day with my brother. It’s kind of a bad time to visit him and I was wondering about getting a flight out.”
“Maybe by Sunday. It’s that same weather system that dumped all that snow on Atlanta this week, supposed to hit here tonight. Suli, where’s the remote?”
Suli walked around the kitchen counter, crossed the room to a low table barely three feet from her brother and handed him the remote. He ate with one hand, channel-surfed with the other and paused every time he found a local news broadcast covering an accident. Then he would repeat the mantra that the weather sucked, people didn’t know how to drive in snow and there was no need to be driving the taxi when the federal government was closing early.
Despite the alarmist tone of the news broadcasts, it seemed to me that the weather was just windy right now and the talk of early closing a contingency plan. Tomorrow the weather was going to suck big time when the cold front sweeping through the South collided with the moist air mass moving up the coast. Flights were being preemptively canceled. So much for my wistful thinking about an easy escape from the airport.
Suli had her own worries. “I hope Father and Natalie will be okay. Do you think we should call Uncle Muhammad?”
“There’s no need, Father knows how to drive in bad weather and he’ll be furious if we call. He’ll scream at me for wasting money on long distance calls. It’s not even snowing.”
“But don’t you want to talk to Natalie again and wish her luck with her studies?”
“Shut up and let me watch TV.” Sharaf resumed his channel-surfing.
I tried to focus on my email. Suli sat down with a work basket and sewed; it looked like she was mending clothes. Once we were quiet and focused on our tasks, Sharaf became bored with the TV.
“What kind of doctor are you?” he asked “Can you give me a prescription for pain?”
“No, I’m a clinical psychologist. I don’t prescribe medications of any kind. I teach my patients to use analysis and meditation to cope with their issues.”
