Takeoffs and Landings(16)

She really must not care, Lori thought.

Chuck looked from Mom to Lori and back again. He squinted, looking as confused as if they’d both been speaking foreign languages. Lori had seen hogs make up their minds faster than Chuck did.

Finally he shrugged.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I, um, thought your speech was real good.”

Then he looked back at the TV, as though it were dangerous to look at Mom or Lori for very long.

“Well,” Mom said. “That’s settled.”

There was nothing left for Lori to do except stomp back into the bathroom and do her best to slam the door.





The televised images danced in front of Chuck’s eyes, but he wasn’t seeing them.

Lori asked me for something, he thought again and again. Lori hasn’t asked me for anything in eight years.

If only he were smarter, he could understand what was going on. Mom and Lori were mad at each other. He knew that. Lori didn’t want Mom talking about her. He knew that, too, but didn’t understand. Lori wanted Chuck to tell Mom not to talk about him, either.

Why? Why did Lori care?

What Chuck saw now, instead of the TV, was huge tangles. The whole conversation he’d just had was like Pop’s piles of old baling twine, knotted and snarled and impossible to sort out. He could picture very clearly the twisted loops of twine lying on the barn floor.

He’d just stepped in one of those loops, and gotten caught.

Now Lori will never forgive me, he thought.





Lori couldn’t believe that, after everything that had happened the night before, Mom still wanted to get up and take them sight-seeing the next morning.

“Come on, sleepyheads,” she urged when the alarm went off at seven. “You don’t want to miss anything, do you? We have to be back at the airport by three this afternoon—this may be your last chance to see Chicago for the rest of your life.”

Lori wanted to say, So what? but she just groaned and rolled over.

When she did get up, she had that unsteady, fragile feeling she always had the morning after she’d cried herself to sleep. She didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that her eyes were swollen and ugly, her entire face puffy from all those tears. Neither Mom nor Chuck seemed to notice. While Mom was in the shower, Lori got the ice bucket and sneaked down the hall to fill it. Then, back in the room, she wrapped several cubes in a washcloth and pressed it on her eyelids. That was the only method she’d ever found that worked.

Lori couldn’t remember when she’d started crying herself to sleep back home. It wasn’t really that often—maybe once every couple of months. Sometimes it was because of something specific that happened—John McArthur totally ignored her at a Junior Leadership meeting, or she got a B– on her English essay, or Courtney Snyder told Mickey James that Brandi Wyland had said that Lori was the biggest flirt in the freshman class and that everyone hated her for it. Sometimes there wasn’t any reason at all—Lori just felt like crying. And so she did, sobbing silently in her bed for hours, until her eyes ached, and her head ached, and she miserably fell asleep. She wondered if other girls did this. Maybe it was connected to puberty. Lori had been the last one of her friends to get her period; maybe they had all been crying themselves to sleep once a month for years and they’d just never told her.

Lori didn’t want to ask.

Regardless, she’d gotten very good at treating and camouflaging swollen eyelids. Ten minutes of the ice treatment, a little extra mascara—even if she didn’t feel normal, she looked okay.

Half an hour later, the huge mirror in the elevator assured her that she’d erased all signs of crying; the long brass panel at the checkout desk reflected back a face devoid of emotion.

That was just the look Lori wanted.

“Yes, yes, we’ll be back for our luggage this afternoon,” Mom was assuring a man in an official-looking suit. She turned back to Lori and Chuck. “Let’s have breakfast here at the hotel, all right?”

She led them through a maze of halls. Lori was sure they’d walked an entire city block before they even got to the door of the restaurant.

How could anyone keep a place like this straight in her head? Lori felt a pang of homesickness for small buildings, square street grids, restaurants surrounded by only parking lots.

Mom seemed entirely at home.

“We can go out to the science museum when it opens at nine thirty, and then come back downtown for lunch. If there’s time, we can shop a little at Water Tower Place—it’s this huge, ritzy mall with all these incredibly expensive stores. I can’t promise that we could afford anything, but it’s kind of fun to look,” Mom said while they waited to be seated.