Takeoffs and Landings (13 page)

Lori came over and leaned against the wall behind Mom.

“It's true,” she said matter-of-factly. “People make fun of him a lot. But Chuck's not really
that
stupid. Lots
of kids at school are even dumber. Even a lot of the ones who tease him all the time.”

Chuck couldn't believe his ears. Was
Lori
defending him?

But she wasn't done.

“Chuck's just different,” Lori continued. “You know. Chuck doesn't talk about cars or hunting or girls or tractors. He doesn't know a gasket from a gearshift. He likes art. He's been sneaking out to art museums this whole trip. And drawing. He's really good. Want to see?”

Nobody answered, but Lori walked over to Chuck's suitcase, anyway, and pulled out his secret notebook. Chuck's jaw dropped. How had she known? Lori flipped the notebook open and laid it on the table in front of Mom, like some lawyer on TV, presenting evidence to the judge.

Chuck felt naked. What else did she know?

“May I look?” Mom asked.

At least she asked.

Chuck managed to nod. Mom began flipping pages. There was the copy he'd made of the van Gogh painting, where he hadn't gotten any of the perspective right. There was the Rembrandt portrait, where he'd had to erase the nose fifty times, and still hadn't gotten it right. There was the drawing he'd made of Mom speaking. He'd done a great job drawing the podium, but she was flat and lifeless, with none of the sparkle she carried in real life.

“Stop!” Chuck yelled. He yanked the notebook out of Mom's grasp. Clutching it with both hands, he started to
pull in opposite directions. He'd rip his pictures into shreds. He wasn't an artist. He never would be.

“No!” Lori and Mom shouted together. Chuck was so surprised to hear them agree on anything that he hesitated. Mom slipped the notebook out of his hands and held it shut on her lap.

Chuck couldn't look at Mom or Lori. Everyone was so quiet, the air conditioner's hum sounded like a roar.

“You don't have to show these to me,” Mom said softly. “Or anyone. You have a right to privacy.”

“I—,” Lori started to protest. Chuck lifted his head in time to see Mom silence her with a look.

“But don't destroy them,” Mom said. “They are good.”

“You're just saying that,” Chuck said sulkily. “I can't do anything right.”

It was true. He couldn't divide quadratic equations to save his life. He couldn't dissect a frog without ripping all the vital organs. He couldn't plow a single row without getting distracted and going crooked. He couldn't keep a baby pig from squirming long enough to give it a rhinitis shot. And it was like Lori said: He didn't know a gearshift from a gasket. He didn't care. None of those things mattered to him.

But drawing did. Why couldn't he be good at that?

“Chuck,” Mom said gently. “You haven't had any training. Pickford High School doesn't have any art classes, does it?”

Chuck shook his head.

“Then we'll find someone to give you private lessons,” Mom promised. “Just don't give up on yourself. Ever. About anything. Okay?”

Chuck found himself nodding. And nodding.

Mom handed him back his notebook.

“Lori, you stay out of Chuck's suitcase. You hear?”

Chuck hugged his notebook to his chest, tighter and tighter.

 

It was still dark when Lori awoke the next morning. Mom was up already, tiptoeing around. Lori watched through half-closed eyes as Mom pulled on sweats and tennis shoes and slipped out the door.

She's running away from home,
Lori thought drowsily.
Nah. She already did that.

Lori closed her eyes. It was easier to go back to sleep than to think about Mom or Chuck or anything that had happened in the past week and a half.

The next time Lori woke up, sunlight was streaming in the window, and she could hear the shower running in the bathroom. Chuck's bed was empty. The door opened and it was Mom back again, flushed and sweaty.

Lori propped herself up on her elbows.

“Where were you?” she asked sleepily.

“I went jogging,” Mom said.

“I didn't know you did that,” Lori said.

“I do it a lot, when I'm traveling,” Mom said. “It helps me think.” She sat down on the edge of Lori's bed. Lori was still close enough to dreaming that she could let herself enjoy having Mom nearby. Maybe Mom was getting ready to tell her more. Lori remembered one time at home when they'd all been in the living room together, and some report had come on TV about people jogging.

“Now, that's a waste of time,” Pop had said. “If those folks want to get some exercise, why don't they try doing some honest work for a change?”

And Mom had sat there and not said a word. Lori felt like assuring Mom now,
Don't worry. Your secret's safe with me. I won't tell Pop you jog.
Then maybe she and Mom could laugh about how Pop always made those grand pronouncements that didn't really mean a thing. All bark, no bite, that was Pop.

Mom glanced toward the bathroom, where the spray of the shower was still pounding away. She leaned in toward Lori. Lori braced herself to receive another secret.

“While it's just you and me,” Mom began.

“Yes?” Lori said. Without even thinking about it, she started holding her breath.

“You can tell me. How bad is it for Chuck?” Mom asked.

Chuck. Lori exhaled so hard, she practically snorted.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“The teasing,” Mom said. “Are the other kids really mean?”

“I don't know,” Lori said. “I'm not with him twenty-four hours a day.”

“You're around him more than I am,” Mom said.

It was the perfect opportunity for Lori to spit back,
Whose fault is that?
She managed to keep her mouth shut.

“What do kids say?” Mom asked. “They don't get . . . physically abusive, do they?”

Lori thought about some of the rumors she'd heard. A couple of guys from school had supposedly circled around Chuck at the fair last year, hit him with hog switches, and yelled out, “Piggy! Piggy!” Would Mom call that physically abusive? It was just a harmless prank.

Wasn't it?

“I don't know, Mom,” Lori said again. “They call him dumb and stupid and fatso and retard and, I don't know, stuff like that. But it's not like people are beating him up every day or anything.”

“But why Chuck?” Mom asked.

Either Mom was still sweating, or there were tears in her eyes. Was Mom crying for Chuck?

Why did that make Lori feel jealous?

“Come on, Mom,” Lori said, more harshly than she meant to. “Don't you remember high school at all? Kids make fun of other kids. That's just what they do. Even if you're popular, you've always got to watch out that something doesn't happen to make you seem weird or unpopular or whatever. Like, you know how you want to have
Chuck take art lessons? That's not going to help. Nobody takes art lessons. It'll just make him seem weirder than ever.”

“But Chuck wants art lessons,” Mom said. “I'm sure of it.”

Had Mom ever asked Lori what she wanted?

“Maybe,” Lori said. “But, see, this is how it works. Something like that could even make
me
look bad—”

Lori had said the wrong thing again. She knew it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. Mom drew back, looking horrified.

“Oh, sorry,” she snapped. “I forgot that your image was more important than Chuck.”

“No, Mom, listen—,” Lori scrambled to explain. She couldn't stand to have Mom looking at her that way again. How had this happened? How come Lori knew what to say to everyone except her own mother?” I mean, I don't really care if he takes art lessons or not. I mean, I guess it'd be good for him. And, really, if his being weird was going to hurt my image, that would have happened a long time ago—”

“I think you've said quite enough,” Mom said.

“No, wait,” Lori pleaded. She thought about all the times on this trip that Mom had given her that appalled look. Until now, Lori knew she had deserved every single one of them. She deserved it on that first airplane trip, when Chuck threw up, and Lori was mean, and Mom sliced her into shreds with a single glance. Lori deserved the looks in Chicago, when she kept asking nasty questions,
and Mom's answers got icier and icier and icier, until Lori was sure she finally understood the meaning of “absolute zero.”

But Lori hadn't deserved Mom's glares last night or the cruel way she'd snapped, “You stay out of Chuck's suitcase. You hear?” And she didn't deserve Mom's anger now. Lori had been trying to help Chuck, showing Mom his drawings. She'd been, well, almost proud of him, wanting someone else to see what he could do. It wasn't even like she'd been snooping in his suitcase to begin with. She'd just seen his drawing pad hidden under his bed back in Philadelphia, and she'd picked it up, thinking some other guest had left it behind.

But had Mom given her a chance to explain that?

And this morning, she was just trying to get Mom to understand what it was like for Chuck at school. And for Lori. It wasn't Lori's fault other kids were mean.

Or was it?

Lori thought about all the times she'd heard other kids call to Chuck, “Hey, Lardson,” all the times she'd heard them taunt, “Do you even have a brain?”

Could she have stopped them?

She thought about the postcard she'd almost sent from Atlanta, making fun of Chuck for sneaking out to art museums. Did that count as joining in?

“Mom,” Lori pleaded again, but it was no use. She sounded guilty now. She was guilty.

Chuck came out of the bathroom just then, and Mom
and Lori sprang apart instantly, like they were doing something wrong. Like they had to hide the fact that they'd been talking about him. Chuck looked dazedly from Mom to Lori.

Lori stared back at Chuck like he was some stranger she'd never seen before. Like he was an exhibit in a museum.

He was fat. But he wasn't really any fatter than lots of other kids back home—Robert Hayes, for example, who was some big star on the football team. Nobody teased Robert.

Chuck had his mouth open slightly, and that made him look dumb. But he had to breathe through his mouth sometimes because he had bad allergies. It wasn't his fault.

Chuck was wearing stiff new blue jeans and a polo shirt Mom had gotten him, with vertical red-and-blue stripes. (Had Mom thought that would be slimming?) The shirt was a little too big on him, and maybe too grown-up. It looked like he'd borrowed it from some businessman at a conference Mom had spoken at—like one of them had said,
I brought this because I thought I was going to have time to play golf, but I didn't. Want it for your son?
Chuck just didn't look comfortable wearing that shirt.

Did Chuck
ever
look comfortable?

Chuck still had comb marks in his wet hair, and that made him look younger. For just a second, Lori saw past
the fat and the dumb expression and the ill-fitting shirt. She saw the little boy who had been her best friend and constant companion. The one she would have walked barefoot across a field of burrs and thistles for. The one she worried about when he got carsick. (“Chuckie okay now? Chuckie okay now?” she used to ask, again and again, because her whole world depended on hearing the right answer.)

The one she'd been mad at for the past eight years, without even knowing why.

Lori waited for the familiar fury to hit her again, but it didn't come right away.

“Chuck,” she said weakly. “When we get home and you start taking art lessons, if anyone makes fun of you for it, I'll make them stop.”

At the same time, Mom was saying, “Chuck, we need to figure out how to deal with those kids who are making fun of you. Who are they? I bet I went to school with the parents of pretty much everyone in your class. If you tell me who's teasing you, I could make some calls, talk to their parents—”

Lori had wanted Mom to notice what Lori was saying. She turned on Mom.

“Mom, that's crazy. You can't call people's parents. That will just make everyone tease him more,” she said.

“Well, we've got to do something. What those kids are doing—that's harassment. No one should have to put up with that.” She glared at Lori. “Do you have any better
ideas? Anything you could do that won't hurt your
image
?”

Lori looked back at Chuck. His eyes were darting back and forth—toward Lori, toward Mom, toward Lori, toward Mom. He reminded Lori of a caged animal looking for an escape.