Takeoffs and Landings(23)

She didn’t really intend to follow him, but when her elevator arrived in the lobby, she saw him just going out the front door. She ducked behind a flower arrangement bigger than the outhouse Pop still kept out by the barn. And then, when she felt sure Chuck hadn’t seen her, she inched across the gleaming marble floor and went through the revolving door herself.

Chuck was tall as well as big—at fifteen, he’d already topped six feet—so it was easy keeping his dark head in sight. She bumped into people once or twice and almost stepped out into traffic at a busy intersection when Chuck crossed on a yellow light. But he never looked back, so she stopped worrying about being spotted.

All the way, she kept playing guessing games with herself about where he was actually going. The Olympic Park? One of the sports stadiums? Chuck had never cared about sports. He wouldn’t even play in the softball games they always had before 4-H meetings in the summer.

But maybe that was just because the other kids laughed at him running the bases. Mike and Joey imitated him: “Look at me! I’m the Michelin tire man!” “Oh no, I’m shaking the ground!”

Lori thought back—what about when Chuck was younger? When he wasn’t fat? For a second, she caught a fleeting memory of her and Chuck and their dad playing catch in the backyard of their old house. Hadn’t Chuck been whining, “I don’t want it to hit me! It’ll hurt!”? And their dad had insisted, “Look, it’s a softball. You won’t get hurt. Just catch it.”

She wasn’t sure if that was something she truly remembered or something she’d dreamed. Or just plain made up.

Regardless, Chuck didn’t like sports now.

The zoo? Chuck didn’t like animals. Pop had to remind him a million times a day to feed the hogs.

The CNN tour? Chuck hated watching the news.

Really, Lori couldn’t think of anything Chuck liked.

He turned a corner and went into a glitzy, glass building. The sign said, HIGH MUSEUM OF ART.

Art? Art?

Lori looked again, almost certain she’d misread the sign. But, no. That’s what it said. Maybe the sign went with a different building. She actually went over and peered in a window. A sculpture of a little boy looked back at her, and a painting hung over his head.

Chuck had gone into an art museum.

He didn’t come back out, so Lori knew it wasn’t a matter of just using the bathroom.

Was it possible that Chuck liked art?

Lori didn’t know anybody who liked art. Plenty of her friends’ mothers did crafts—decoupaging picnic baskets, stenciling Christmas cards, needlepointing little signs with sayings like “A moment on the lips, an eternity on the hips.” But crafts weren’t art.

Back when they were in elementary school, they’d had an art teacher come in once a week. She was old and smelled bad, and she’d yelled at Lori once for taking two sheets of green construction paper instead of one. (Lori hadn’t even known she’d taken two—they stuck together.) She mostly had them cut out things—construction-paper leaves in the fall, construction-paper wreaths at Christmas, construction-paper flowers for Mother’s Day. (Lori gave hers to Gram, because what was Mom going to do with them?) But there wasn’t even an art teacher in high school, not since the last school levy failed.

So if Chuck had liked art all along, there was no way anyone would have known.

Lori started laughing. Chuck likes art! Chuck likes art!

Other people on the sidewalk were giving her strange looks and dodging around her. She sat down on a concrete ledge and kept laughing. Chuck liked art! She didn’t usually make fun of Chuck back home, preferring the “Ignore him and maybe he’ll go away” approach. But this was too funny not to share. She got up and went into the art museum; as she suspected, she could get to the museum gift shop without paying the admission fee. She bought a postcard with some armless sculpture on the front and wrote on it before she even left the shop:

Dear Angie,

Guess what? My big brother ( and I do mean big ) has a secret obsession. He’s been sneaking out to visit . . . art museums. Weird, huh?

I’m fine. Miss you. Can’t wait to catch up on all the gossip when I get home.

Love,

Lori

Lori didn’t have a stamp, so she tucked the postcard in her purse to mail later. She started walking out of the museum, but she looked back at the last minute, suddenly curious about what Chuck might possibly see in an art museum, anyway. Through the entryway to the main part of the museum, she could see half of a strange painting of someone with three eyes and two noses and a bluish face. It didn’t even look as good as the amateur paintings at the fine arts exhibit at the county fair.