Takeoffs and Landings (15 page)

Didn't Mom have any regrets? Wasn't there even one
Oh no
pealing in her mind?

Didn't she have anything she wanted to say to Lori?

 

This was all he deserved: the queasy stomach, the instant gag reflex, the plane shivering around him.

Then they were on the ground, gliding toward the gate. They weren't going to crash.

Was Chuck disappointed or relieved?

Mom still had her hand on his back. Just that light touch made it impossible for him to decide.

Around them, people were reaching for their carry-on bags, taking off their seat belts, grumbling about the rough landing. They were like statues brought to life. Lori and Chuck and Mom were the only ones not moving.

“We all oughta sue,” someone griped behind Chuck.

“Aw, that was nothing,” someone else countered. “I used to fly military jets. Our motto was, ‘Any landing you survive is a good one.'”

Did I survive?
Chuck wondered. “Survive” was such a
funny word. He'd been listed in the newspaper all those years ago as Daddy's survivor. Chuck could remember Gram explaining it to him: “That just means you lived longer than your daddy did.” Chuck hadn't been able to understand—his father had been twenty-eight, Chuck was only seven. Twenty-eight was a bigger number than seven.
No, Daddy outsurvived me,
Chuck had wanted to tell Gram and all those other grown-ups.

But there were things you couldn't tell grown-ups. Couldn't ask them, either, because then they looked at you with crinkly worry lines around their eyes.

Chuck hadn't survived. Chuck wasn't surviving.

Mom removed her hand from his back.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

Chuck couldn't answer.

 

Another speech.

Lori didn't know how Mom stood it, just about every night, sitting through boring before-dinner introductions, stupid chitchat over rubbery chicken and undercooked broccoli, unfunny jokes about people she didn't even know. And then she had to give the speech itself. Lori wasn't sure what the speech was tonight, but if she had to hear Mom say, “Oh no, I was going to spend more time with my family!” one more time, Lori was going to need an airsickness bag, too.

Of course, hearing Mom say that even once was enough to make Lori puke. But she was trying not to think about anything Mom said. She didn't want Los Angeles to be another Chicago, another Phoenix. She wasn't going to let Mom get to her.

Not after they'd been on that plane, almost crashing,
and Mom hadn't bothered even to say,
I love you
to Lori or Chuck.

The introducer stood up, and Lori braced herself for another maddening burst of praise for Mom, some clump of overblown words that made her sound like someone Lori had never met. This introducer was a tall, thin, Hispanic man (Latino? Chicano? Lori would feel a lot more comfortable about different people if she knew what they wanted to be called.) He seemed supremely confident, waiting calmly at the podium until the banquet room was quiet.

“We have a special speaker for you tonight,” the man said.

Oh no. Here we go again,
Lori thought.

“I could give you a long list of her awards and accomplishments, but I thought I'd do something a little different,” the man continued. “I have a friend at C-SPAN who was able to get me this footage. Watch.”

The lights instantly dimmed. A giant blue screen lowered from the ceiling. In seconds, the blue faded, and there, larger than life, was Mom, sitting at a table, leaning toward a microphone. Lori tried to identify the occasion, but it was hard, because what else had Mom done the past eight years but lean into microphones? This must have been fairly early on, because Mom looked a lot younger. Her hair was long and feathered back from her face, the way Lori remembered her wearing it years ago, when Lori was a little girl.

When Dad was still alive.

A flickering label appeared beneath Mom's face: C
ONGRESSIONAL
T
ESTIMONY
, J
OAN
L
AWSON
—W
IDOW OF
I
NSURED
.

Oh,
Lori thought.
Oh no.

Though she couldn't remember anyone ever telling her so, she knew that Mom's whole speaking career was launched because she testified before Congress about Dad's death. Some people saw her on the evening news and were impressed. They invited her to speak at churches and Farm Bureau meetings in surrounding counties. And the next thing anyone knew, she was jetting across the country talking every night.

Lori had never seen her mother's testimony.

On the screen, Mom was biting her lip.

“Yes,” she answered some unseen questioner. “My husband and I owned a six-hundred-acre farm in Ohio. That is, we owned what we didn't owe the bank for.”

The camera panned back. Some of the congressmen were snickering.

“And then your husband was killed on your farm last fall?” someone asked, his voice dripping with that false sympathy that always made Lori angry.

On screen, Mom didn't even recoil.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “The electrical system on one of our tractors malfunctioned. There was a spark. . . . The fuel tank exploded.”

“And your husband was on the tractor when this happened?”

“Yes,” Mom said.

There was a brief silence. Even congressmen were at a loss for words after that.

Then one of them said, “And your husband went to his grave believing he was well insured?”

Mom hesitated, almost as if she wanted to protest the wording of the question.

“When we had our first child, we bought a life insurance policy that was supposed to provide for our children if anything happened to either of us. We wanted . . . we wanted them to have good lives.”

“You're referring to policy number XG1065387, held with the Rylen Insurance Company?”

“Yes,” Mom said.

“And you had paid all the premiums on this policy?”

“Yes,” Mom said. She took a sip of the water in front of her. “It wasn't cheap. And those were scary times for farmers—two of our neighbors were going through bankruptcies. Several times we talked about taking our chances, canceling the policy and just praying that nothing went wrong. But we knew we could never forgive ourselves if—” She took another drink. Her eyes were misty. Lori thought she looked like one of those people you saw on the evening news all the time, labeled H
URRICANE SURVIVOR
, T
ORNADO SURVIVOR
, M
ASSACRE SURVIVOR
. She looked practically otherworldly, as if she'd witnessed things nobody else would understand.

The congressmen were waiting for her to finish her sentence, but she didn't. Finally one of them spoke.

“So you had every reason to believe that, upon your husband's death, the Rylen Insurance Company would pay in full?”

Mom nodded.

“But they denied your claim?”

Mom nodded again.

Was
that
what Mom's testimony had been about?
Lori wondered. She had never known. Mom had never told her. Gram and Pop had never told her. When she was six years old, her father's death alone seemed like a big enough event that Congress needed to be informed. And after that, nobody talked about it.

Had the insurance company cheated them? Were they poor after Daddy died?

Of course they'd been poor. They'd had to sell their house and farm and move in with Gram and Pop. But Mom had just said, “Won't it be nicer this way? You can see Gram and Pop all the time.”

Lori's mind was reeling. She missed some of what Mom and the congressmen were saying, up on the screen. When she started paying attention again, a congressman was saying, “So you were left with nothing?”

“Just—” Mom seemed to be having trouble speaking. “Social security.”

“Mrs. Lawson,” one of the congressmen asked gently. “You have several children, don't you?”

Mom nodded. But instead of giving a number, she started listing their names.

“There's Chuck,” she began slowly. “He's seven. Then there's Lori, who's six.” She stretched out their names, as if caressing them. “And Mike, who's three. And Joey, who's two. And Emma, the baby.”

It was agony listening to that slow litany of names. Even Lori, who certainly knew how many brothers and sisters she had, felt like the list was endless. Twice, a congressman started to interrupt, as if expecting Mom to be done.

“That's five, right?” a congressman asked when she finally stopped.

“Yes,” Mom said. “I have five children.”

“And now you have to raise them alone, without the insurance money you had every reason to believe was yours,” another congressman said. “Mrs. Lawson, how do you intend to survive?”

Mom's cheeks were flushed. She sat up very straight.

“By the grace of God,” she said, “we'll get by.”

She sounded almost noble, saying that. All of the congressmen were silenced. Lori got chills, and the banquet hall was so quiet that Lori could hear Chuck breathing behind her. It was that line. Lori felt like she had been watching the scene in
Gone with the Wind
where Scarlett O'Hara raises a fistful of dirt to the sky and proclaims, “I'll never be hungry again.” But that was just an actress, pretending, and this was Mom, Lori's mom, for real. Lori had never seen anything so real before in her entire life.

The screen went blank. Beneath it, the flesh-and-blood Mom was walking toward the podium. She seemed to have an incredible distance to go. Lori had a sudden flash of pity for her mother, having to speak now, with the banquet hall still hushed with awe, the image from eight years ago still burning in everyone's minds.

Mom reached the podium and stepped up on a stool. She expertly bent the microphone down to her level.

“Well,” she said briskly. “I wish someone had told me then how out-of-date that hairstyle would look now.”

Everyone burst out laughing. Lori could almost feel the tension being released. It reminded her of a time last year when she'd gotten a ride home from school with some neighbor kids, and the driver had decided to race the train at the railroad crossing on Ford's Pike Road. The train missed the back bumper of the car by inches—Lori could see the engineer's outraged, worried face close-up. Speeding on down the road, the whole carload had broken out into the same kind of laughter that rolled through the banquet hall now. It wasn't so much that people were amused; it was more that they desperately needed to do something with the air in their lungs.

Everyone seemed so relieved to be laughing that they went on for several minutes. Mom had to hold up her hand for silence.

“That film clip was from a very long time ago,” she said. “What I wanted to speak about tonight was the time we can still do something about. The present.”

And then Mom rolled into a speech Lori had heard before, in Philadelphia, maybe, or Atlanta. Lori studied her mother without hearing a single one of her words. Mom said something funny and grinned proudly as the crowd laughed again, this time with true mirth.

How can she?
Lori wondered.
How can she go on like usual after they showed that film? How can she smile at all?

Lori herself wanted to cry. No—she wanted to scream. No—she didn't know what she wanted. It was so unfair, the way everything had happened. Daddy shouldn't have died. Mom and Gram and Pop shouldn't have pretended everything was okay. And—maybe—they shouldn't have had to sell their house and farm. Was that true?

Lori felt like there was a blender going full speed inside her, mixing up all her thoughts and emotions. She forced herself to sit up very straight and pretend she was listening to her mother. But she didn't want to sit still, not now. And there was no way she could have heard a single word her mother said over the roaring in her ears.