Clear Skies

Buddy Clark stood at the door with beads of sweat on his forehead and a peeling nose from a nasty sunburn. He was wearing shorts and his ridiculous cowboy boots. They made his knobby legs look even skinnier.
“Hey, Arno.”
“Hey, Buddy.”
“Hey, Comet.”
Comet jumped up on Buddy, who held out his hands for Comet to lick, which Comet vigorously did.
Buddy took Comet’s enthusiasm as an invitation to come in. He rough-housed with Comet for a bit, then galumphed down the hall, not bothering to take off his dopey boots.
Comet scampered after him, his claws making clippity-clip sounds on the polished linoleum floor.
“It’s going to be another scorcher,” Buddy said over his shoulder as he beelined it to Arno’s kitchen. “Is your mom still away?” He yanked the fridge door open and peered inside.
The fridge was chock-a-block full of tinfoil-covered meals that Arno’s mom had prepared before she left.
“Yeah,” Arno said, trailing him into the kitchen after retrieving the transistor radio from his room. He set the radio on the kitchen counter. “Careful you don’t scuff the floors.”
Buddy still needed reminders like that. It drove Arno nuts. If Buddy wasn’t the only other boy on the block who was Arno’s age, Arno probably wouldn’t have to spend so much time with him.
But summers were long and friends were in short supply, so there they were.
“Got any Tang?” Buddy asked.
Buddy brought up Tang whenever he could. His dad worked for an advertising agency that got celebrities so say they used various products to boost sales. NASA planned to send up different foods with astronauts to see how eating was affected in low gravity. His dad was trying to convince NASA that astronauts should include Tang in those experiments.
“No Tang,” Arno said, but he was thirsty, too. “I’ll make lemonade.”
“Lemonade?” Buddy scoffed. “Get with the times, Arno. It’s the Space Age. Once NASA signs up with Tang, it’s going to be everyone’s favorite instant breakfast drink. It has real orange flavor.”
Unlike Arno, Buddy wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up. When he found out that NASA’s new Manned Spacecraft Center – the home of Mission Control Center for the US human spaceflight program – was located in Texas, he begged for a pair of cowboy boots for his eleventh birthday. They lived nowhere near Texas, but he had been parading around in his stupid boots ever since.
Arno didn’t think Buddy would make the grade. After all, astronauts were the créme de la créme of fighter pilots. They were top dogs. Only test pilots could apply for the Project Mercury mission, and just seven of the five hundred who did were selected. From what Arno could tell, they didn’t clomp around in ridiculous cowboy boots that rubbed their bare claves red.
Arno plucked his mom’s handwritten recipe card for lemonade from the fridge door where she had taped it next to Aunt Faye’s phone number written in gigantic orange crayon.