“But have you ever heard me say, When my husband died . . .? Have you ever heard me share a single memory of your dad?” Mom interrupted. “Little things, yes, a stray comment here and there, but nothing important. It’s like when you wanted the anecdotes about you out of my speeches, Lori. Those memories of Tom are mine. They’re not for sale.”
Mom sounded so fierce, it silenced Lori. Chuck was surprised that it was his mouth that opened, his vocal chords that moved, his voice that spoke.
“But they should be ours, too,” he said. “We’re not just some convention people who never knew him. He was our daddy.”
The word “daddy” came out like he’d said it as a seven-year-old boy. He remembered his dream again, searching and searching for his lost father in the maze of cars and jeering people. Suddenly he wanted to tell Mom about that dream, but it would sound silly. Mom wouldn’t see what it really meant.
Chuck looked over at Lori instead and braced himself for her next attack. But she was staring at Chuck in astonishment.
How could I have ever thought Chuck was dumb? she wondered. He’s a genius. In a whisper, Chuck had done what Lori hadn’t been able to do with any of her shouting. He’d explained exactly what was wrong with Mom.
Lori could suddenly see how it was, how Mom had kept everything that mattered about Daddy locked up to keep from turning him into just another dreary line in just another dreary speech. She’d held on to him so tightly, she couldn’t even unlock her memories for her own children.
Did Mom know she’d done that?
Lori looked over at Mom, who was recoiling from Chuck’s words. Mom’s arm slipped down from his back, but Mom didn’t seem to notice.
“Oh,” she said. And then again, “Oh.”
Even Lori managed to keep quiet, waiting for Mom to recover. Lori felt like everything depended on this moment. She couldn’t force Mom to tell her anything. But maybe, if she kept still, if she let the seconds tick by, if she held herself together . . .
Finally Mom spoke.
“There is something about your father’s death I’ve never told anyone,” Mom said softly. “I will tell the two of you. If you want.”
Lori inhaled sharply. Chuck pulled back and stared into his mother’s face.
“What?” Lori challenged.
“I saw the whole thing,” Mom said.
That isn’t the “real” I wanted, Lori wanted to protest.
No! Chuck wanted to scream. I can’t hear this!
Neither of them said anything.
Mom was staring toward a worn patch on the carpet.
“You two had already gotten on the school bus,” she began in a hypnotic voice. “It was October. You know October on the farm—if you spend five seconds admiring the leaves, you feel guilty because you’ve wasted time you could have spent on harvest. Pop and Tom were working together, helping each other out. Pop was driving the combine, and Tom was supposed to be driving wagons back and forth, between the field and the bins.”
Chuck gulped. He and Pop had had that same arrangement the last three harvests, ever since he turned twelve and Pop trusted him to drive the tractor. He could picture Pop’s bright green John Deere combine circling the field, knocking down the brown stalks of corn, gobbling them up and shelling the cobs. Then Pop would pull over to the side of the field and unload a waterfall of corn into a wagon. And Dad would pull up, unhitch an empty wagon, and hitch the full one onto his tractor. Were Dad’s wagons red or green or dull, rusted brown? Chuck didn’t know why it mattered, but it did. He hoped Dad had had a shiny new wagon behind his tractor, ready to haul corn.
How could he think that, when he knew Dad never made it to the field that day?
“I was standing at the kitchen sink washing up breakfast dishes,” Mom continued. “We didn’t have a dishwasher then. I had to practically double over, because my stomach was so big with Emma. Mike and Joey were playing on the floor behind me. I looked out the kitchen window.”
Stop! Lori wanted to scream. The dread she felt was like something physical, pressing down on her. She didn’t want to know what was going to happen next. What had happened next.
“Looking out that window, you could practically see the whole farm, remember?” Mom asked wistfully. And Chuck remembered. He could picture it now: a tangled garden, an almost-turned bean field, a red barn with open doors. And Daddy climbing onto a tractor.
“Tom turned the key,” Mom said slowly. “And I saw something. A spark.”
“You saw the spark?” Lori asked.
“I think,” Mom said. “But how could I have? Maybe it was just a glint of sunlight. Maybe I just had a premonition. I felt like something was wrong. I opened the window, and I was going to yell to Tom, Get off the tractor!”