Takeoffs and Landings(48)

“So was ‘Frère Jacques’ the only song you played, or did you do that other one, too? What’s it called?” Mom was asking Emma.

“‘Country Gardens,’ Mom,” Emma said, looking up trustingly.

“She just did the one,” Gram interrupted. “They had twenty kids playing—one song per kid was plenty.”

Out of habit, Lori started to glare at her mother, thinking, If you’d been there, you’d know. What kind of mother misses her own daughter’s piano recital? But as Mom turned to straighten the straps on Emma’s jumper, Lori caught sight of the glitter of pain in her mother’s eyes. She remembered what Mom had said, only the day before: “You all could be kids who got free lunches at school and bought all your clothes from yard sales; or I could go on the road, and you could have piano lessons and dance lessons and pay 4-H club dues and wear the same clothes as everyone else.” Did Mom think it was worth it? Did Lori?

For once, Lori didn’t know. She was just glad she hadn’t had to make the decision Mom had faced.

Everyone began walking toward the baggage claim area. Lori’s family was a rowdy group, with Joey and Mike playfully punching each other and Emma skipping on the colored squares of the floor. Gram pulled Lori and Chuck close and began quizzing them.

“You just didn’t send enough postcards!” she scolded. “What was the weather like? What was your favorite city?”

Lori and Chuck exchanged glances. It was like what they’d done as little kids, conferring without words: Do you suppose they know we pulled all the green apples off the tree? I won’t say anything if you don’t say anything. . . . Will they get madder that we left the gate open if we don’t tell them the pigs are out in the garden, eating all the peas? Lori had missed that camaraderie, that sense of conspiracy, more than she’d even realized. It was like having an arm or leg amputated, years before, and suddenly getting it back.

She thought back to the Los Angeles art museum the day before. It’d been boring. That was what she wanted to think. But every now and then, standing with Chuck before some painting, she’d squinted hard and almost understood.

He was going to be a great artist. She just knew it. And she was going to make sure everyone else knew it, too.

But for now, she said only what Chuck’s eyes told her to say.

“Everyplace was nice,” Lori said politely. “And the weather was great.”

Lori liked Gram. There was a part of her that wanted to tell Gram at least some of what had really happened on the trip. But it was too hard.

This is what it’s like to be Mom, Lori thought. To carry around secrets you can’t speak of.

In Lori’s mind’s eye, she saw a ball of fire, a tractor burning, and Mom watching in horror, a stupid argument still echoing in her ears. It should be worse for Lori to have that image in her head, that secret in her care. But it wasn’t.

She knew her mother now.

Gram began chattering about the fair queen nominees being announced and the tomato bugs infesting the other end of the county. Lori glanced at the posters on the walls they were passing. She was surprised that they looked so familiar: A beautiful woman and a gorgeous man lay in sand under the words CLUB MED. Above them, a jet took off into an incredible sunrise. Suddenly Lori realized why she recognized them. She’d passed the same posters two weeks ago, on her way to Chicago. In fact, she and Mom and Chuck had sat in the waiting area right on the other side of the hall.

Lori had a sudden, strange feeling that all she had to do was turn her head and she’d see a girl in a homemade sundress in the second seat from the right, squirming in embarrassment, waiting for her first plane trip. How long ago that seemed, when Lori actually thought that what she wore mattered most. Lori didn’t even know where the sundress was now—wadded up in the bottom of her suitcase, probably. Or left behind, forgotten, in some hotel room. You lost things, traveling.

And found things.

“. . . the new extension agent—Bud Pike, you know, that really nice guy?—he had a whole column in the paper yesterday on tips for getting rid of the tomato bugs. I sent the kids out, looking for them, but they couldn’t find a single one in our garden,” Gram was saying.

Lori threw her arms around her grandmother and said, “I love you, Gram.”

Gram gave her a startled look and straightened her dress.

“Well, you, too, I’m sure,” she said, and went on talking about tomato bugs.

They took the escalator down to the baggage claim, pulled their luggage off the conveyor belts.

“Don’t you wish there was a bellhop or a taxi driver nearby?” Lori teased Chuck as he heaved yet another stuffed suitcase to the ground.