The Art of Crash Landing (17 page)

Patsy falls to pieces while we're waiting, but I just sit quietly.

T
he aggressively landscaped flowerbeds outside West Florida Oncology did nothing to make the utilitarian building more welcoming. My mother seemed to like the flowers, but I hated them. They smacked of overcompensation. As far as I was concerned, all that show-offy beauty on the outside guaranteed a grim interior, just like how when you see a truck all jacked up with a lift kit and monster tires, you
know
the guy behind the wheel has a tiny dick.

And it
was
grim inside. Sure, they put a few plastic ferns in the corners, but what I remember are sterile, chemical-smelling rooms filled with beige vinyl recliners, the same sickly oatmeal color as my mother's skin. It was always the same nurses and often the same patients, but nobody made friends like you see in the movies. For the most part everyone just sat in their recliners reading or watching one of the two televisions hanging from the ceiling. The woman in the next recliner crocheted skein after skein of yarn, blue, then green, into strips of color that piled on the floor. I never did figure out what she was making.

R
ight next to the cancer center was a combination liquor store and cafe, Pop's Bottle Shop and Pizza. While my mother sat in that chair with a needle in her arm, I'd tell her I was hungry so she'd give me money to have lunch at the pizza place. I'd walk over there and buy myself a pack of cigarettes and a couple Jose Cuervo minis. I wasn't hungry. I was sad. I was thirsty. At first it felt funny being the one sneaking the booze, but I got used to it. What's good for the goose is good for the gosling.

The eight months my mother was in chemo she was sober, believe it or not. It was by far the longest stretch of sobriety that I can ever remember her having. The doctors had insisted that she quit drinking before she started chemotherapy, and so she did—just like that. No problem. Thinking about it still pisses me off, even if I have a hard time understanding why.

I
smoked a lot of cigarettes standing in front of the cancer center, and yes, even at the time I saw the irony. I'd light up and lean against the wall, the bricks warm in August, cool in November when my mother had her final treatment. As I stood outside watching, workers in their pink scrubs would walk through glass doors coming out, going in. Patients and their families climbed out of cars and walked to the building with that heads-down stride you see in old videos of coal miners approaching the shaft.

Seven minutes—that's how long I learned to make a cigarette last. When I could put it off no longer, when my mouth was filled with the bitter taste of the filter, I'd grind the butt with my foot and kick it into the closest flowerbed. I still remember how the blue plumbago was planted so close to the marigolds that just looking at the contrast made my eyes water.

J
ust as I expected, Father Barnes knows nothing at all about my grandmother;
favorite congregant
is apparently his way of saying
quiet old lady who sat near the back
. Other topics he discusses include: that he's from Nebraska and is interested in the Cornhuskers, sudoku, gardening, Jesus, and global warming. Until recently he was engaged to his high school sweetheart, a schoolteacher in Lincoln who hadn't been able to relocate to Gandy until her contract was up. Then, just two weeks ago, she called to inform Father Barnes that she'd renewed her contract for another year—oh and by the way she was dating the basketball coach.

I make a salad while he puts potatoes in the oven, steaks on the grill. We talk, or I should say he talks, about his life, his interests, his recent heartbreak. And as we prepare and eat dinner, he works his way through one bottle of wine and then another with a speed and efficiency that makes my heart sink. Father Barnes is not only good-looking, smart, and lonely, he's a drunk, or at least a drunk-in-training. Perfecto.

Every relationship has a balance of power, and it's usually not hard to predict how things are going to work—who's the hammer and who's the nail. And sitting here with my glass of iced tea, stone-cold sober, I have no doubt that seducing this man is going to be a piece of cake. Shooting fish in a barrel. I don't know if they do the whole confession thing in the Episcopal Church, but if they do, by God, I'm going to give him something to talk about.

A
fter dinner I help clear the table, and I offer to do the dishes, but Father Barnes won't hear of it. He clatters the plates into the sink, pours himself another drink, and sits down on the sofa, patting the seat beside him. I join him there and rest a hand on his knee. There's a vase with a couple of cut flowers sitting on the coffee
table. They're slightly past their prime; a few white petals have fallen on the tabletop. When he sees me looking at them, he says, “Peonies.”

I nod. “So how did you get interested in gardening?”

“All we've done tonight is talk about me,” he says. “Let's talk about you.”

“Let's not.”

“Come on. Tell me about your family. Where'd you grow up? Any brothers or sisters? What's your favorite movie?”

He thinks he wants to get to know me better. He's wrong.

“
The Exorcist
,” I say.

His eyes widen. “Really?”

I laugh and shake my head. God, this man is easy.

He smiles, taking my teasing in stride, and then he finishes his wine in one gulp and sets down the glass. He hesitates just long enough to betray his nervousness, and then he leans over to kiss me.

You reap what you sow,
Queeg likes to say, and it's true. Not that I'm a strict believer in some cosmic bean counting tit-for-tat, but I'm smart enough to understand that what you put into life determines what you get in return. And yet, time after time I sow the seeds of shitty behavior, only to feign surprise when there's nothing to harvest but a bumper crop of poo.

And so it would be nice to attribute what happens next to a moment of clarity, or mercy, but it would be a mistake. I'm sure it's the overripe smell of the peonies, or maybe the taste of wine on his tongue that makes me pull away, swallowing hard against the gorge rising in my throat.

“I should go,” I say.

For a second Father Barnes looks hurt, but then he just looks relieved. I watch him search for his keys, and once I'm sure he won't find them tonight, I tell him I've already arranged a ride
home. He hesitates, and I can see that he's considering asking how that could be possible, but in the end he decides to pretend I'm telling the truth. When he excuses himself and staggers to the restroom, I open the front door and slip outside.

I lean against the house and wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The night is cool, but the bricks still hold the afternoon's warmth. I could walk home if I had to; this house is less than a block from the church, and I could find my way to the park from there and take the trail back to my grandmother's house. But I don't relish the thought of walking that far alone in the dark, and besides, over at Karleen's house the lights are on. In fact I can see her from here, sitting alone at a table, smoking a cigarette. As I watch she turns her head and looks out her kitchen window, but it's dark. She's looking at a reflection of herself, not at me.

The katydids fill the trees with their longing, and the air is heavy with the scent of flowers it's too dark to see. When I finally step out from under the porch and into the night, I find a sky full of stars. I stop, lift my face and take a deep breath.

Star light, star bright . . .

I can't decide which is the first I see tonight, so I close my eyes and wish on them all.

W
ow!” I say when Karleen opens the door. Not the usual greeting, I realize, but her left eye is swollen almost shut with a reddish lump already darkening to purple. “You should put some ice on that.”

“What do you think I was doing when you knocked?”

“Smoking.”

“Well.” She holds the door open. “That too. Come in.”

I look around the corner of the doorjamb cautiously before I step inside.

“He's gone,” she says, correctly interpreting my hesitancy. “Off licking his wounds.”

“
His
wounds?”

“I got in a swing or two.”

She leads me to the kitchen where there is, in fact, a bag of frozen peas on the kitchen table.

“I will say that your wound would be hard to lick,” I tell her.

She grins. “His, too, now that I think about it.”

From her satisfied smile I assume that she's the type to go for
the 'nads. I have no problem with that, except that in my experience a broken nose gets a man's attention just as fast and has the upside of making a mess of his face. But a girl's got to play to her strengths.

Thinking of this, I tell Karleen about my mother's baseball bat adventure with Dewayne the Pentecostal. She laughs at the story, and I notice, on the side of her face not obscured by a bag of vegetables, that her smile takes years off her face.

“Your mother always was a power hitter,” she observes with a sigh. “The ball would fly off her bat.”

“She did a pretty good number on drunk assholes, too.”

“I don't doubt it.”

“How about you?”

“I know a little about batting,” she replies. “And a lot about drunk assholes.” She sets down the frozen peas and knocks a cigarette from the pack. Her hands shake when she picks up the book of matches. I pass her the bag of peas and take the matches from her hand, strike one, and lift it to her cigarette.

“Thanks.” Karleen takes a lungful of smoke, then asks, “So, to what do I owe the honor?”

“I need a ride home,” I tell her.

“How did that happen?”

“It's a long story.”

“Well, it's a short drive, so you'll need to talk fast.” She stands and grabs her purse from the counter. “Let's go.”

In the car I tell her about running into Father Barnes in the store and his subsequent dinner invitation.

“And?” she inquires.

“We had dinner.”

“Only dinner?”

“Yup.”

“It's after nine.”

“He's not a fast cook,” I say and it's the truth. Efficiency is not enhanced when the chef is attempting to cook and consume two bottles of wine simultaneously.

“You know, his fiancée just dumped him.”

“So he mentioned.”

“He's pretty vulnerable.”

“It was only dinner.”

She frowns at me, probably trying to decide if I'm lying. “And why is
he
not driving you home?”

“He couldn't find his keys.”

“That's strange.”

“Sometimes it happens,” I reply. This time it happened because I hid his keys in his coffee canister when he opened the second bottle of wine. Living with my mother taught me a trick or two.

Karleen and I are silent the rest of the way home, each lost in our own thoughts. I don't know what hers are, but mine are about my mother and how much I wish Karleen would talk about her, and yet how hesitant I am to ask. I watch Karleen's profile in the dark, her face softly lit and then shadowed, then lit, and then shadowed as we drive past the streetlights. She pulls out a cigarette and then pushes in the dashboard lighter. It's so quiet in the car that we both jump when it snaps out. She lights her cigarette and rolls her window down an inch.

We pass the park, a large swath of darkness to my right, and then turn up the street and into the driveway of my grandmother's house. There's a light on inside.

My heart picks up speed.

“I didn't leave any lights on,” I say.

Karleen turns to me in the dark car. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure . . .”

We sit and stare at the house for a couple of seconds, and then
she looks over at me with a grin on her face. “Let's go see who paid you a visit.” She's got some fight left in her tonight.

My pulse roars in my ears. I stop at the door. Karleen is right behind me. I reach out and try the knob—it's locked. I dig in my purse for the key.

“Nice! A burglar who locks up after himself . . .”

“Shhhh . . .” I open the door and push it open. I step halfway into the foyer, and Karleen squeezes in behind me.

Now that I'm inside, I can tell that it's the kitchen light that's on, and I think back on the sun streaming in through those windows this morning. If the light had been on then I certainly wouldn't have noticed, but why would I have turned it on?

I take another step inside. There's something wrong, but I can't put my finger on it.

“Do you smell smoke?” I whisper.

Karleen snorts a quiet little laugh. When I turn to look at her she waves her lit cigarette at me.

We stand, listening. The house is silent, empty. I switch on a lamp and look around the living room. Nothing seems to be disturbed, and yet . . .

“Shit! The Winstons!”

I hurry through the kitchen to the back door, which I notice is also locked. I run out to the backyard where I whistle and call and make those kissy noises I hear other people make to dogs. I run over to check the gate; it's standing open.

Karleen is in the kitchen when I come back inside. “If you want a cigarette I have some,” she is saying. “They're Camels, though.”

I grab her arm and pull her to the front door. “Let's go.”

“We just got here.”

“We have to find the dogs.”

“You have dogs?”

“I'll drive,” I say, grabbing the leashes and opening the door.

She digs her keys out of her purse, but when I hold out my hand she hesitates.

“How many dogs are we talking about?”

“Two,” I reply. “Very small.” I don't mention their gastric issues.

W
e make a slow circle around one block and then the next. I shout “Winston!” out the window about every five seconds, but no luck. I pull over at the park trailhead and climb out of the car. The streetlight illuminates the first few feet of trail, but the rest of the park is a void. I walk a little ways into the trees, then whistle and shout, straining to hear a bark or a jingle of dog tags. There's nothing but a distant car alarm and the lonely sound of the wind in the leaves.

When I get back to the road, Karleen has her window rolled down. I can't see her face in the dark, but I can feel her watching me stumble back to the car. “What's the other one's name?” she asks as I climb in.

“They're both named Winston.”

“Why?”

“Beats me.” I immediately wish I'd used a different phrase. With the door open and the interior light on I get a good look at Karleen's eye. It looks worse than it did just a few minutes ago.

She leans her head back against the seat. She seems tired. “There used to be a music store in town named Winston's.”

“It's as good a guess as any,” I reply. “My grandmother played piano.”

“Yes, she did.”

I can think of no place else to search tonight, so we return to my grandmother's house. I turn off the car and glance over at
Karleen. Her eyes are closed, and for a second I think she's fallen asleep, but before I can reach over to wake her, she starts to speak.

“It's where I met Trip, you know.”

I remember Gordon Penny mentioning a boy named Trip. I wait, hoping she'll keep talking, and she does.

“Your mother loved to play the grand piano at Winston's.” Karleen's voice is so soft I have to lean closer to hear. “She said it was because it was a Steinway, but it was really because she loved an audience. When she left for college I was so lonely for her, I used to go to Winston's and just thumb through the sheet music. There's a particular smell in a music store, don't you think? Is it something they use to oil the instruments?”

“I don't know,” I say, even though I don't think she expects an answer.

“It was a Saturday in March,” Karleen continues. “I was back in my usual corner pretending to shop, when a boy came in and sat down at the Steinway. It had only been a couple of old ladies playing that piano since your mother left, nobody my age, not when I was there anyway, but there he was. Young, handsome, and he could play.

She looks at me with a wistful smile. “We left the store together that day, and for the next three months Trip and I were inseparable. He had some issues, I mean, he'd dropped out of high school and gotten in some trouble with the law, which was why he'd come to Gandy in the first place. But he was kind and smart and funny. I really thought that he was
the one
.”

“So what happened?”

“Your mother came home for the summer.” Karleen's voice is matter-of-fact, as if what happened next was inevitable. “In high school, Genie and I thought it was fun to steal other girls' boyfriends. It wasn't as much fun when she did it to me.”

“I'm sorry.”

She sighs. “Genie comes all the way home to break my heart, and then in August she runs off and breaks Trip's heart, too, not to mention her mother's . . . She ruined everything for everybody for no reason at all.”

“I'm sorry,” I say again. I can't seem to help myself; at this point I can't even tell if I'm apologizing or empathizing. “Why don't you come in and have a beer.”

“Nah, it's late—”

“Come in for just a few minutes. Please?”

She frowns, or at least I think she's frowning; it's dark and I can't be sure. “Why?” she says.

“I have questions.”

Karleen shakes her head and turns away, looking out her window. “You don't want my answers.”

“Yes I do.”

I wait for several heartbeats, but she doesn't look at me and she doesn't answer, so I tell her good night and climb out of the car. I'm on my grandmother's porch when I hear a car door slam, and then Karleen's footsteps behind me.