The Art of Crash Landing (12 page)

W
hen I was eleven years old, my mother dated Dewayne, a baseball cap–wearing NASCAR fan who was a welder and a deacon at a small Pentecostal church that met in a rundown strip mall. The name of the church was the Holy Jesus Apostolic Tabernacle of the Solid Rock of Ages, or something like that, and it was no ordinary listen-to-organ-music-and-pray-it's-over-soon church. No, this was an old-school, out-of-tune-piano-with-the-minister-playing-a-tambourine, “Amen!”-shouting, tongues-speaking church. The only thing missing was snake handling and there was talk of starting that up.

Every Sunday that spring and early summer, we sat in the third pew from the front, Dewayne next to the aisle, and then my mother next to him and then me stuck next to an overweight man who wore the same dark gray three-piece suit every week. Sure, there was a lot going on, with old Mrs. Bettencourt's speaking in tongues, the preacher's fist-pounding sermons, and the bad music. But two hours is a long time to sit in a church with inadequate air-conditioning, and mostly I remember sitting there, dazed, focused
on counting the number of sweat droplets that beaded, trembled, and then fell off the nose of the fat man next to me.

Although my mother had a long track record as a serial dater-of-losers, I really think she tried to avoid the dangerous ones. She wasn't always successful. She shielded me from as much of the actual violence as she could, but it was harder to hide the results.
You win some, you lose some
, she'd say as she iced a twisted wrist or blotted blood from a split lip. Love was a game for my mother. Sometimes it was a contact sport.

As June slid into July, things started to get ugly between my mother and Dewayne. Then there was an incident one Saturday night—I never found out exactly what happened—but it marked the end of their relationship. She came home earlier than usual from her night-shift waitressing job, shaken and angry. I remember that she threw her purse on the couch and went straight to the refrigerator for a beer. When I asked her what happened, she told me she'd lost her job and it was Dewayne's fault. She refused to elaborate but I saw something that looked like a cigarette burn on her forearm. When she noticed me looking at it, she crossed her arms and told me to go to bed.

W
e never went back to the Jesus Apostolic Holy Solid Tabernacle of the Rock of Ages, or whatever. No more tambourines or sweaty Mrs. Bettencourt's
hubbadahubbada
. Our Sunday mornings were rededicated to the ancient, yet satisfying rituals of the eating of pancakes and the doing of laundry, just like they'd been before.

My mother stopped answering the phone. But Dewayne didn't stop calling.

We were packing our bags for our annual trip to the beach, half watching a
Gunsmoke
rerun, when there was a loud banging on the front door. It was Dewayne.

He shouted about
punishing whores
and their
bastard children
, his voice echoing in the concrete breezeway. We waited a little while, hoping he'd give up and go away, but his voice and the pounding grew in strength. He started using his foot on the door; the latch shook. It was only a matter of time before he either broke it open, or thought of trying the window. My mother made a decision.

She pulled out the baseball bat she kept under the sofa, then turned to me and said, “Go to your room.”

I shook my head. The only thing more frightening than what was about to happen would be listening to it happen from another room.

She must have understood that, because she nodded and said, “Just stay back.”

Luckily for both of us, Dewayne must have finished off his nightly pint of Jim Beam before coming over, because when my mother whipped open the door, he stumbled in, badly off balance.

I'm sure it all happened quickly, but when I think back on the moment, my memory is in slow motion. My mother brought the bat past her right shoulder and then, with a wide smile on her face, she swung a clean arc, catching Dewayne's elbow with a resounding crack.

He cried out, falling to his knees, his left arm hanging limp. Eyes wild and watering he shouted my mother's name and came to his feet, taking a lurching step toward where we stood. For a second I thought he would keep coming for us, but after that one step he seemed to finally focus on the situation. He froze, staring at my mother. She stood in the center of the room in a loose batter's stance, the bat raised and ready.

“One more step and it'll be your head,” she told him.

Without a word he turned and left.

My mother shut and locked the front door then turned around, laughing. “All-Star Softball team, 1977.”

“You could have killed him,” I said.

She nodded. “If I'd wanted to.” And with that she tucked the bat back under the couch and said, “Now stop crying and get ready for bed.”

Until she said that I hadn't even noticed I was crying. I wiped at my damp cheeks.

“I didn't even know you played softball.”

“There's a lot you don't know about me,” she said.

B
ack at the library, Tawny is sitting at the circulation desk, her head resting on her arms. As good as a nap sounds, it's probably a bad idea for me seeing as how it's my first day on the job. So since I'm not sure what my duties are for this afternoon, I look around for Fritter. I find her in Reference. She's scanning the shelves, shaking her head.

“What's wrong?” I ask.

She points up at a gap in the Book of Knowledge series. “K through L is still missing.”

“Maybe somebody checked them out.”

“It. One volume, two letters.”

“Maybe somebody checked
it
out.”

“It's reference, it doesn't leave.”

“Well, it has to be around here somewhere.”

“Then where is it?” She stares at me as if she expects me to pull the missing book out of my ass.

“I don't know, but who would steal it? Nobody reads encyclopedias.”

“They most certainly do.”

“Name one person you've seen using these in the past year.”

She frowns, but doesn't answer.

“And why K through L?” I ask. “They're boring letters.”

“Boring?”

“Come on, they got both letters into one book, right? Name something interesting that starts with a K or an L.”

She frowns a little harder.

“See?” I ask.

Fritter takes a deep breath, shakes her head and smiles, yielding, obviously, to my superior line of reasoning.

“How was your lunch
date
?” she says.

I hesitate before answering. From the emphasis she just put on the word
date
, I'm pretty sure that when I talked to her about lunch at the church this morning, she knew exactly what it really was.

“Fine,” I reply, hoping she'll get the hint and drop the subject.

There's a
gotcha
twinkle in her eyes, but she plays along. “Now that you've returned, I'd like you to clean all the tables, restock the pencils and papers, and place any unshelved books on the cart next to the circulation desk. And while you're at it, please be on the lookout for poor K through L, even though it does cover an
exceedingly
dull portion of the alphabet.” She pauses to gesture overdramatically at the two-inch break in the row of books. “Its absence leaves such an
unsightly
gap in these
useless
resources . . .”

Sarcasm is not as attractive in the elderly as it is in someone, say, my age, but rather than point that out, I promise to search for the missing book.

She turns away but I stop her before she walks off. “Can I ask you something?”

“I'm certain that you can,” she replies. “Are you asking if you
may
?”

Wow, this woman is tiresome. “
May
I ask you something?”

She nods.

“You knew my mother, right?”

“It's a small town,” she tells me, as if I hadn't noticed.

“I'm staying at my grandmother's house, and my mother's room is totally full of her stuff. Her drawers and closet are full of clothes, her suitcases are still here, her bookshelf is full of books—”

“If you'd like to donate the books to the library we would be happy to oblige. The hardbacks, anyway. We have to be selective with paperbacks—”

“No. I mean, okay. But what I'm asking is—don't you think it's weird that my mom left everything here?”

“Well, she went back to college—”

“Without any of her clothes? Her luggage?”

Fritter blinks a few times and then smiles. “Hmmm. There might have been some nice young man back east.”

“But still, surely she'd pack up—”

“People do impulsive things. I suspect you have some experience with that.”

From her intonation and the look on her face, she's trying to bait me for some reason, but I'm not taking it. “But my mom had a scholarship. It's strange for her to just give that up, right?”

“She must have had a good reason,” Fritter says, taking my hand in a dry bony grasp. “But I have absolutely no idea what it was.” Her voice is breathless, hurried. “Now if you'll excuse me . . .” She gives my hand a squeeze, just hard enough to hurt a little, and then she hurries away.

As I stand here, watching the old woman's retreating back, I realize that I can think of one interesting word that starts with the letter “L.” Liar.

I don't like being lied to—who does? Yet at the same time, a tiny voice deep in my secret heart has started to sing. I think something
did
happen to my mother when she lived here—something
bad. And I think Fritter knows what it was. Beneath every lie, a buried truth is hidden. It's time to start digging.

I
make a show of obedience; I wipe down a few tables and make a perfunctory pass through the main room, collecting loose books and putting them on the cart. I even help an elderly man wearing green Sansabelt pants print out his receipt for the two cases of fiber-bars he'd just purchased online. I'm a disgruntled employee, not a total jerk.

A few minutes before five, I wander back to the Reference section. I like the blocks of uniform colors and shapes, the size of the books, the way that when I'm back here, nobody can tell that I've taken off my shoes because my feet are killing me. On the bottom row, I notice a sequence of yearbooks. I pull out the Gandy High School 1977–78 volume.

At a table I sit down and flip through the book. I find my mother in the senior section, near the end of three pages of young men and women with collars peeking out of identical black robes. Although the photo is black-and-white, I fill in the colors. The upper edge of the collar sticking out of my mom's gown doesn't look white, I'm betting it's blue, her favorite color. She's blond in the picture, of course, and has done her best to tame her wild hair; it's center-parted and hanging in two wavy sections on either side of her face, but you can tell that it's fighting her efforts. I would bet that within an hour after that photo was taken, her hair had lifted and re-formed into a bramble of curls. She's looking at the camera, at me, with an openmouthed smile on her face, as if she'd just been laughing. As if we had just been laughing together.

I find the athletics section and there's the softball team with my mother in the front row. She's got her arm thrown over the shoulder of the dark-haired girl standing beside her. I check
the names under the photo. Karleen Harden is the girl's name.

I turn back to the portraits and find Karleen. She's pretty, with a Mona Lisa smile and a sparkle of mischief in her eyes. I can tell from the upturned nose and the arched brows that this girl is the woman I watched serve meat loaf today. But I can't imagine this girl calling anyone “hon.”

Gordon Penny is in the book, too, with the sophomores. His rounded features are unchanged. I go through the book looking at everybody whose name starts with a J, but there is no one who resembles my surly neighbor, JJ. Of course it's been over thirty years, and I'm not sure I'd recognize him if I saw him. I grab the 1976–77 book and flip through it as well.

The library closes in just a few minutes, so I take the yearbooks up front and give them to Tawny.

“Do I need to fill something out to get a library card?”

Tawny passes back the books shaking her head. “These are reference.”

“Shit. Do you suppose if I ask Fritter she'll—”

“No exceptions.”

I sigh. I don't even know why I wanted to take them home to look at them. It's just . . .

“For God's sake,” Tawny interrupts my reverie, taking the yearbooks from my hands. She rubs them across a metal plate on the desk and then opens the backpack at her feet and slips them in.

“I don't think you should—”

“I didn't have you pegged as a Goody Two-Shoes,” she says.

“That's good, because I'm not.”

“Getting your panties in a wad about lifting some lame books nobody has looked at in a hundred years?”

“My panties are not—”

“Spending your lunch hour, feeding the homeless . . .”

“Hey, I had an ulterior motive for that.”

“Whatever.”

“Have you
seen
Father Barnes?”

She rolls her eyes. “Get your stuff, we need to go.”

“We?”

“Apparently, I'm now your chauffeur.”

“You don't have to—”

“Yes I do. Fritter told me to do it, so I'm doing it. You want a ride or not?”

“Okay, hang on.” I hurry to the back room and get my purse. When I call Luke to tell him I don't need a ride home, he sounds a little disappointed, but that's okay. He doesn't know it yet, but he's better off not having to deal with me.

Tawny and I walk out the back door to the parking lot, but there's no sign that Fritter is leaving. I ask Tawny and she tells me that Fritter often stays late.

“In the summer anyway,” she adds. “Probably not in the winter. She won't drive in the dark.”

“People get that way as they get older,” I say.

Tawny raises an eyebrow, looking at me.

“I'm not there yet,” I tell her.

“Whatever. Anyway, she gets home in time for supper. Except for Wednesdays and Fridays when she goes to see her brother in the nursing home. She stays and eats with him, so those days I don't have to make her dinner.”

“You cook?”

Tawny explains the conditions of her summer employment. She gets a steady job, free room and board, but she has to cook dinner five nights a week and clean the bathrooms.

“Not bad,” I tell her.

She shrugs. “Could be better.”

I follow her out to a mostly primer-colored truck that I think was green in a previous life, except maybe the hood, which might
have been black. It's a piece of shit on the inside, too, trash on the floor, upholstery shredded. There are keys dangling from the ignition and a large book on the driver's-side seat. Before Tawny settles her ass on the book, I'm pretty sure I see
K–L
printed on its spine.

The truck's transmission is a three on the tree, and the girl struggles to keep a foot on the clutch as she muscles the gearshift into reverse. Even perched on the book she's almost too short to see over the steering wheel.

“Are you okay driving this?”

She slams it into gear and gives me a look I recognize. It's a you're-not-worth-the-trouble-it-would-take-to-say-fuck-off look. I think we're bonding.

“Never mind,” I say, trying to settle in. I have to shuffle my feet to find a spot for them in the pile of trash on the floor, and the bench seat is pulled so far forward that my knees bump the glove box. I fish around for a few minutes looking for a seat belt, before I realize there isn't one.

Tawny shifts the truck into first and we lurch over the curb and into the street. My knees ram into the glove box, and I take a moment to give Tawny some constructive criticism of her driving skills. When I'm finished she takes the opportunity to share her opinion of my critique. It's surprising, really, how many four-letter words we know between the two of us.

“Don't get your panties in a wad,” she adds. “I'm an excellent driver.”

“Have you considered . . .” I put one hand on the dash and one on the door, bracing myself as we approach a pothole. “That I might not be wearing any panties?”

She shoots me a dark look. “Gross.”