Takeoffs and Landings (18 page)

“Should I start the coffeemaker for you?” Chuck asked Mom. “I can, if you want.”

When they were all ready, Mom beckoned Lori and Chuck over to the small, round table at the back of the hotel room, where she was sitting. The tabletop was strewn with maps and guidebooks and tourist brochures, giving Lori quite a jolt.

Los Angeles? We're in Los Angeles?
She'd practically forgotten. She pulled a drape back from the window, and
a palm tree brushed the other side of the glass. Surreal. It seemed like a mirage.

“Do you want to go to Hollywood or Disneyland today?” Mom asked. “I thought we'd have time to do some planning last night, but . . .” She let the words trail off. Nobody needed to be reminded of what they'd talked about instead.

So that's how it is,
Lori thought.
Daddy dying is a taboo subject again.

“Hollywood's a lot seedier than you would expect,” Mom said. “But it's still one of those places you feel like you have to see. If we don't get to it today, we can always swing by tomorrow before the airport. Disney's a full day, of course. I know you guys are too old for Mickey Mouse, but you'd love Space Mountain, Lori. And, Chuck, you might like—”

“Why didn't you sue?” Lori asked.

Mom froze.

“What?” she said.

“Why didn't you sue?” Lori asked again. “The tractor company or the insurance company or somebody. For Daddy dying.”

Mom straightened a pile of brochures, as if it really mattered that the corners were lined up.

“You can't do this,” she said. “You can't keep ambushing me. That's all over, okay? We can't live in the past. Weren't you listening to my speech last night?” She grinned, as if trying to let Lori know she was half joking.

Lori shook her head stubbornly.
No. I wasn't listening. I had other things on my mind.

“Could you have sued?” Chuck asked.

Mom looked from her daughter to her son and sighed.

“Okay,” she said. She shoved the guidebooks and tourist pamphlets and maps to the floor. Chuck and Lori watched in amazement. Mom didn't seem to care what a mess she'd made. She didn't even look. When the table was clear, Mom folded her hands in front of her. “Let's get this all out now. I talk, you talk, and then we let this go. All right?”

Speechlessly, Chuck and Lori nodded. Mom took a deep breath.

“Suing,” she said, “was never an option. Do you know how old that tractor was? It ran on gasoline, not diesel, you know—I'm not sure anyone was still making gasoline tractors when
I
was born. The tractor company had gone out of business years ago. So there was no tractor company to sue.”

“Why didn't Daddy have a safer tractor?” Lori asked in a small voice.

Mom gave her a long look.

“Come on, Lori, you've grown up on a farm. You know how things are. You make do, you get along, you gamble that the tractor'll make it just one more year and that the crops will be good enough that you can buy a new one. And then if the crops aren't so hot, or the bottom falls out of the prices, you gamble that the tractor'll make it
two more years, if the combine doesn't break down first, in which case that tractor had better make it three more years—”

Mom's just giving a speech again,
Lori thought.

But then Mom stopped herself and looked straight at Lori.

“Nobody thought that tractor was unsafe,” she said, and now she sounded as if every syllable hurt. Lori could tell she wasn't hiding behind glib words anymore. “What happened was a fluke—a freak accident. The odds against it were a million to one.”

In the hall outside their hotel room, a little kid was shouting about beating his daddy to the swimming pool. Lori and Chuck and Mom could hear a man shouting back, “Oh, yeah? Think you're faster than me?” There was the sound of running. Then there was silence.

“Well, the insurance company owed you,” Lori insisted.

“They were bankrupt,” Chuck said. “Weren't you listening last night?”

Lori looked at her brother in surprise. He could sit through an entire 4-H meeting and come home and not have the slightest idea when the next meeting was or where they were supposed to turn in their registration forms or who had been elected to Junior Fair Board. But he'd understood Mom's testimony, and all that had stuck with Lori was Mom's last line: “By the grace of God, we'll get by.”

“I wasn't paying much attention,” Lori admitted.

“The company was running a scam,” Mom said. “Tom and I should have read the fine print. The head honcho ran off with the money and put the company in bankruptcy. And there were enough loopholes in the law that he pretty much got away with it.”

Mom looked over the table edge at the pile of glossy brochures, and Chuck thought,
That's it. She's not going to tell us anything else.
But then Mom sighed and looked back at them.

“Actually,” she said, “I could have sued. I had lawyers calling me, telling me I had a million-dollar case. But . . . there was no guarantee. I could have spent years on a lawsuit and gotten nothing. It all felt like a scam again.”

“But that's no reason—,” Lori started in heatedly.

Mom gave her a wary look, and Lori shut up.

“My husband had died,” Mom said. “I had just given birth. It was all I could do to get out of bed in the morning. The only reason I could get out of bed, I think, was because somebody had to feed Emma, and somebody had to change Joey's diapers, and somebody had to keep Mike from sticking forks in electrical outlets, and somebody had to make sure you two had clean clothes to wear to school. . . . I thought that that somebody had to be me. Because if it wasn't, I had no reason to live, either.” Mom stopped, like she'd forgotten what she was trying to say and needed to get back on track. “You know what Gram and Pop think about lawyers. Gram and Pop told me I
couldn't trust those crooked lawyers any more than I'd been able to trust the insurance salesman. I was glad to let someone else do my thinking for me.”

“But—,” Lori objected.

Mom shrugged.

“Just last year, I read that some court dismissed the last of the suits against the insurance company. Nobody got anything,” Mom said. “So it wouldn't have mattered.”

“It wouldn't have brought Daddy back to life,” Chuck said softly, and Mom nodded.

Why did Chuck like that so much, having Mom agree with him?

“But you testified before Congress,” Lori persisted. “What good did that do?”

“They wanted to change the law, close the loopholes, so no other insurance company could do what ours did,” Mom said.

“I bet Gram and Pop didn't want you to talk to Congress, either,” Chuck said. He'd heard Pop's opinions about Congress: “Bunch of crooks in bed with thieves—they don't care about real people, you know that? They don't even try to do what's good for us. The only people they listen to are those lobbyists. The ones who can give them trips on their fancy jets, expensive meals with the liquor flowing. . . . It makes me sick.”

“No,” Mom said, “they didn't. But I was starting to wake up, starting to think for myself. . . . Even if Congress couldn't force the insurance company to pay us,
I thought I had to make sure nothing like that ever happened to anyone else. Or I could never look any of you kids in the face again.” She got a distant look in her eyes. “I can remember packing to go to Washington. . . . I felt like I was traveling to the moon, you know? I had to take Emma with me, because I was still nursing, and I couldn't be away from her very long. They promised there'd be someone to take care of her while I was testifying. They put me up in some fancy hotel, and I was like Gomer Pyle, gone to the big city. ‘Shazam! People live like this?' But Emma couldn't sleep in the strange crib, so she cried all night, and I didn't get any sleep. I was so tired, I wanted to cry, too. They put me in front of that microphone, with those bright lights on me, and I felt so stupid that I didn't think I could put two words together.”

Lori could remember her mother going off to Washington, D.C. “She's going to talk to the president,” she'd bragged at school, because nobody in first grade had ever heard of Congress. But Washington scared Lori. She was afraid “Joanie's going to Washington” was just the grown-ups' way of saying that Mom was going to die, too.

Lori stared out the window at a palm frond that still didn't seem real. Was that really what she had feared? Why hadn't she remembered that before?

“But, Mom, you were great,” Chuck was saying. “You were . . . awesome.”

“Oh, honey, you weren't there. Videotape lies. I didn't manage to say a single thing I wanted to,” Mom said,
shaking her head ruefully. “And then I got so mad, because that one congressman kept trying to make it seem like a crime that I had five children. He wanted me to say that we were going to have to go on welfare and be a burden to society, and I was determined—even if I made a total fool of myself—that I wasn't going to give him that satisfaction.”

“But then you were famous, and people all over the country wanted to hear you speak,” Lori said.

“It wasn't like that,” Mom said. “I went home like some dog running off with his tail between his legs. I never wanted to leave Pickford County again.”

Lori was so surprised, she jerked back and almost tipped over her chair.
Mom
had felt like that?

“Then the Highland County Farm Bureau asked me to speak to them, and I didn't feel like I could say no. You should have seen me working on my speech. It took me two weeks. Hardest thing I've ever done in my life.”

Chuck realized he had seen his mother working on her speech. He could remember her sitting at the kitchen table beside him, while he sweated over arithmetic homework. He erased holes in his work paper. Mom snapped her pencil in two.

“I
stuttered
giving that speech,” Mom said. “I figured the whole county felt so sorry for me, that had to be the reason the Highland Presbyterian Church Women's Association asked me to speak at their spring luncheon.” Mom had a half smile on her face, remembering. “Afterward,
they gave me an envelope with a check inside, and I thought it was charity, like they'd taken up an offering for me because we were so poor. I tried to give it back, I was so humiliated, but they kept saying, ‘That's your stipend. Your honorarium.' I didn't even know what those words meant. I didn't know people got paid for talking, unless they were preachers.”

“But you liked it,” Lori said fiercely. “You liked talking more than you liked staying home with us.”

Mom looked steadily at her.

“Oh, Lori, I hated it. I felt like such a fool. Every time I got up to speak, I felt like there was a—a brick in the pit of my stomach. And I missed you all so much, it was like being turned inside out every time I had to leave.”

“So why'd you do it?” Lori challenged.

“At first, I felt like I owed people something. Like maybe Tom had died for a reason, and the reason was that I had to warn people not to take their husbands and wives and kids for granted. I never expected to make a career of this. I just took every speech as it came. But they kept coming. And people kept handing me checks. I started doing the math. I realized I could make minimum wage flipping burgers at McDonald's, and you all could be kids who got free lunches at school and bought all your clothes from yard sales; or I could go on the road, and you could have piano lessons and dance lessons and pay 4-H club dues and wear the same clothes as everyone else.”

Mom's eyes begged Lori and Chuck to say,
You made
the right decision. We're glad you did what you did.
But Chuck was wondering,
How could Mom hate something she was so good at? And if she hated it, how could she bear to keep doing it?
Lori kept her lips pressed tightly together. Mom filled the silence.

“After a while, when I realized I was going to be speaking a lot, I stopped hating it so much. I got better at it. It was kind of fun, like being in a play. I knew my lines. But it was still hard, being away from you kids. Every second I was away, I worried about you—even the times when you would have been in school and I wouldn't have seen you anyway. Then—” Mom hesitated, as if she wasn't sure how much she should say. Lori and Chuck kept quiet, waiting. Mom went on. “One night my flight got delayed. I should have been home before supper, but it was past you kids' bedtime before I pulled into the drive. Gram came out apologizing, right and left: ‘They were just so tired. If I'd known when you were getting home, I'd have kept them awake.' I tiptoed into your room, Lori, hoping you were still up and we could talk, and you could tell me about which of your friends wasn't speaking to which of your other friends. But you were already sound asleep. You looked so peaceful, with your hair spread out on your pillow, that I realized you didn't really need me. Gram was giving you everything you needed. After that, I didn't worry so much. It was like you had given me permission to be away.”

Lori was blinking fast, to ward off tears.

“I remember that night,” Lori said. “But I was only
faking. I wasn't really asleep. I was . . . being mean.”

“Really?” Mom said.

“But it's okay,” Lori said. “It was okay.”

It's kind of like I did give her permission, by deciding not to care,
Lori thought.
How strange—that Mom and I let go at the same time. And neither one of us knew it.

Lori reached out her hand, and Mom clasped it in hers. Both of them were crying. Maybe they hadn't let go at all. They were linked together again, tight as a chain fence. They looked across the table, and there was Chuck, sitting alone. The outsider again. Mom reached her other hand out to him, but he didn't see it. After a minute, she pulled it back.