Takeoffs and Landings(18)

She was fumbling with her purse.

“Why don’t we skip the museum and just go shopping?” Lori said.

“All right,” Mom said evenly. “Is that okay with you, Chuck?”

Chuck nodded like one of those toy dogs with a spring for a neck.

“Fine,” Mom said grimly. “I’m sure we’ll have fun.”

At least Mom can still lie, Lori thought.





Chuck didn’t get Lori.

Back home, she was Ms. Everything: honor roll student, high scorer on the freshman girls’ basketball team, secretary of the church youth group, president of their 4-H club, even though that title usually went to a junior or senior. And most of all, she always seemed to know the right thing to say. Or, at least, the most popular thing to say.

Chuck knew how she and her friends talked, when it was just them and they didn’t think anyone else was listening: “Did you see Suzanne’s hair? I think she stuck her finger in an electric socket!” “Doesn’t Brad Knisley stink?” “Can you believe it? They changed the seating assignments in algebra, and I’m stuck with dogbreath right behind me!”

But even then, Lori was usually the one saying, “Stop! That’s really nasty!” And in public—well, she might as well have a halo. Chuck remembered one time at school when he’d seen a girl crying at the back of the auditorium during an all-school assembly. He’d just stood there, wondering what to do. Did she need help? Or did she just want to be left alone? Chuck had decided to pretend not to see her, mainly because he didn’t know what else to do. But five minutes later, he’d looked back, and there was Lori with her arm around the girl’s shoulder, talking to her. The girl was nodding and even smiling a little through her tears.

Later, walking down the lane from where the school bus dropped them off, Chuck had gotten up the nerve to ask what the girl had been crying about. Lori had just given him a look.

“Chuck, that was Janice Seaver,” Lori said.

The name didn’t mean anything to Chuck.

“You know,” Lori said impatiently. “It was her brother who was killed in that crash yesterday. The one we were having the assembly for.”

“Oh,” Chuck said, feeling dumb as dirt. “I didn’t know.”

And then Lori had run on ahead, because she had a lot of homework, and Chuck didn’t have a chance to ask any of the other questions he wondered about: What did you say to her? How did you know she wanted you to talk to her? And most of all, Would you cry if I was the dead one?

Back home, the worst thing Lori ever did was ignore Chuck. And nobody noticed that—or maybe nobody expected teenaged brothers and sisters to get along, anyway.

So everyone in Pickford County thought Lori was the greatest. The old ladies at church always nodded approvingly while they watched Lori scrub down tables at the annual ice-cream social. “What a good kid,” they murmured. “What a hard worker.”

And the parents who dropped her off from babysitting always came in and told Gram and Pop, “She is such a nice girl.”

So why was she being so mean to Mom?

It had started last night, after Mom’s speech. Or during it. It was really rude of Lori to get up and leave right in the middle.

Then she and Mom had that fight afterward. . . .

Chuck didn’t want to think about his part in it.

Breakfast was hard, because there was still that strange tension in the air. Lori would say something, or Mom would say something, and they’d just smirk at each other.

It was like watching a war.

Chuck watched the chandeliers instead. The millions of tiny prisms were so graceful, dangling from the lights like glass waterfalls. He wondered about the people who got to make things like that—surely there were people involved? Surely something that beautiful wasn’t stamped out by some assembly-line machine, the same way as tractor parts or silo frames?

A crazy idea sprouted in Chuck’s head, but he stomped it down, squashed it dead. He was fat, stupid Chuck Lawson. People like him weren’t entitled to dreams.

Now they were at Water Tower Place, Chuck trailing along behind Mom and Lori as they moved from store to store. Chuck studied the pattern in the tiles on the floor, paying only enough attention to Mom and Lori to make sure he didn’t lose them.

They were still fighting.

“Well, why do you have to talk like that during your speeches?” Lori said on the threshold of Marshall Field’s. “‘Now, listen up, all you honey chiles, and ah’m a’gonna tell you a ni-ice story,’” she mocked in a southern accent as thick as oil.

“I don’t talk like that,” Mom snapped.

“Maybe not quite that bad,” Lori conceded. “But you get this accent when you’re making speeches, like you’re some hick from the sticks. It sounds bad.”