“But you’re happier now,” Lori said coldly. “Why shouldn’t you be? You get to stay in fancy hotels, and people fawn over you, and you don’t have to do any real work, and you eat in restaurants. . . . You just jumped at the chance to get out of changing dirty diapers and washing manure out of coveralls. Let Gram do that. You don’t care. The day Daddy died was the happiest day of your life.”
Oh no. She’d said it. She’d said what she’d been afraid even to think this whole, long trip.
Mom’s face went white. So did Chuck’s. Lori forged on. The dam was broken.
“And having a dead husband is just like—something you can talk about, to make people feel sorry for you. You’re like those people who sell their stories to the tabloids. What you say isn’t worth anything anymore, because you’ve spent it all. You’re just a—a shell. And it’s our story you sold out. You made it not real anymore. It’s like, on that tape, you were real, I could tell you meant what you said. Or at least I thought I could. Maybe you didn’t even mean it then. Maybe you were just acting, like you’re always acting now. You get in front of an audience, you’re like a robot. Someone pushes your button and you talk.” Lori didn’t even know what she was saying. “And it’s not fair! How do I know if you’re ever real with me?”
Suddenly Lori was crying so hard, Chuck could barely understand what she said.
Is this how other families act? he wondered.
Mom buried her face in her hands, like she deserved the onslaught of words. When Lori’s last sentence blurred into sobs, Mom looked up.
“You’re right,” she murmured. “A lot of what you say is right. Not about me being glad when Tom died. Oh no. But the rest—I do give speeches like a robot. I probably even use a fakey accent, like you said back in Chicago.” She grinned, but it was a pained grin. Chuck forgot himself for a minute and wondered, How would someone draw that—a smile that looks like tears?
“I’ve always had rules for myself, though,” Mom said. “There were things I would never talk about. Tom dying was one of them.”
Mom’s arm on Chuck’s shoulder was becoming a burden. He wanted to shake it off, go watch TV, listen to this conversation from the other side of the room. Because he could tell Lori was going to fly right back into Mom’s face with another accusation.
“You talk about death all the time,” Lori complained, sniffling. “Oh, sorry—the final signature on the contract, the twenty-ninth minute of the half-hour speech, the closing out of the time-bank account, the—”
“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!”
“Did you?” Chuck asked.
Mom shook her head silently, tears collecting in her eyes.
“I heard Mike behind me, screaming, ‘Mommy, look! Mommy, look!’ And when I turned around, Joey had climbed up on top of the high chair and was standing on the tray. He was about to fall. I grabbed him as quick as I could. It didn’t even take a minute. But when I looked back out the window—”
Mom stopped. Silence pooled around the three of them, like something they could drown in.
“Dad’s tractor was on fire,” Lori finally said, because nobody else would.
Mom nodded.
“I saw it explode,” she said. “I didn’t hear it, but I saw it—isn’t that weird? I saw the flames, all over
. It didn’t seem real. Or I couldn’t make myself understand what I was seeing. I threw Joey down in the playpen, and I went running out the door. All the way there, I kept praying, ‘Oh, please, let Tom be alive. Please, God. Please.’” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And then at a certain point, you realize what you’re praying for isn’t possible anymore.”
Chuck was seeing his father inside a fireball. Orange and red were such awful colors together. Had Daddy known what was happening? Did he know he was going to die?
“Pop was the one who called 911,” Lori said accusingly.
“It didn’t even occur to me,” Mom said. It sounded like she was apologizing. “I was in shock. I went back inside, and Mike and Joey were both crying because I’d left them. I pulled them both onto my lap, and I hugged them, and I said, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ over and over again.”
“But it wasn’t,” Lori said. “You were lying.”
Mom gave her a long look.
“They were not-quite-two and three. What was I supposed to say?”
Chuck was working everything out in his head.
“You wouldn’t have had time to warn Dad,” he said. “Even if it hadn’t been for Joey on the high chair.”
Mom looked at him gratefully. But, “Wouldn’t I?” she asked. “I don’t know. I’ve replayed it in my mind a million times, and I can see Tom jumping down, flattening himself against the ground when the fire came. Like in a war movie. Then getting up safe. Unharmed.”
“Why didn’t Pop know?” Lori asked. “That you saw everything, I mean.”
“Because when he came inside to call 911, I was sitting on the couch reading Good Night, Moon to Joey and Mike. The tractor was still burning, but I didn’t care about that. Everything that mattered was already gone.”
“Pop thinks tractors matter a lot, too,” Chuck said. He didn’t mean it to be funny, but it was.
Nobody laughed.
“I couldn’t have explained,” Mom said. “And then, everyone kept treating me like I was made of glass. They tiptoed around me and whispered and whisked you kids away from me every chance they got. And all I wanted to do was grab ahold of all of you, and never let go.”
She reached for Lori, and this time Lori didn’t protest being pulled into a hug. But after just a second, she shrugged Mom’s arm off her shoulder and leaned away.
“You act like telling us all this is some big gift,” Lori complained. She’d been expecting something like a fairy godmother’s special blessing. No—a mother’s blessing. That should be even better. Lori had wanted some secret that would protect her forever. What she’d gotten was just more to mix her up. “I don’t know what to do with what you’ve told us.”
“Neither do I,” Mom said.
All three of them stared at the same patch of carpet, swirls upon swirls upon swirls. It was like a maze. Lori tried to follow the pattern with her eyes, but she kept getting lost and having to start over.
That’s this whole trip, Lori thought. We fly all over the country, but just about every conversation we have leads back to the farm, eight years ago, and Daddy dying. And Mommy leaving us, too.
“Are you going to tell Joey and Mike?” Chuck asked. “About Joey almost falling off the high chair, and Mike yelling, right when you were going to warn Dad?”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “Should I? What do you think?”
It made Chuck feel good, the way Mom said that. She wasn’t asking, “What do you think?” like teachers did, when they knew the right answer and were just waiting for you to say something wrong. This was more like she didn’t have an answer, and she thought maybe Lori and Chuck did.
“You don’t want them to feel guilty,” Lori said. “Because it wasn’t their fault.”
“No,” Mom agreed. “I wouldn’t tell them now, anyway. Maybe when they’re older. Like you two.”
Lori felt a little glow—Mom trusts us! She thought about her rough-and-tumble younger brothers and felt sorry for them. If she were either of them, she would feel responsible, as if she’d caused her father’s death. But she didn’t blame them. Probably they wouldn’t blame themselves, either. They wouldn’t even take the blame for leaving the toilet seat up.
Chuck was thinking, Now Joey and Mike will have something to deal with, too. He wasn’t sure what he meant by that. He could just see his younger brothers, hitting home runs like it was as natural as breathing, easily guiding their 4-H hogs around the ring, begging Pop to drive the tractor instead of running from the chore. They always fit in so well. Everything was so simple for them. But this bombshell was waiting for them somewhere in the future.
For the first time in years, Chuck felt like the big brother, wanting to protect his younger siblings. Maybe Mom should never tell. Maybe she shouldn’t have told him and Lori.
“I’ve always wondered—was God offering me a choice?” Mom mused aloud. “My husband or my child?”
“Mo-om!” Lori was shocked. “God doesn’t work that way. Besides, falling off the high chair wouldn’t have killed Joey.”
Mom didn’t seem to hear her.
“It felt like I made a choice,” she said. She looked straight at Lori. “You accused me of being happy that Tom died. You have to know I wasn’t. I would have given anything I had—anything I have—to have him back, alive again. Anything except one of you kids.”
Lori gulped.
In the morning, they were all extrapolite with one another, like people tiptoeing around an invalid.
“If you’d rather take the first shower, you can,” Lori offered Chuck, even though she’d practically trampled his toes to get ahead of him in every other city.
“Will the noise bother you if I turn on Good Morning, America to check the weather?” Mom asked Lori.
“Should I start the coffeemaker for you?” Chuck asked Mom. “I can, if you want.”
When they were all ready, Mom beckoned Lori and Chuck over to the small, round table at the back of the hotel room, where she was sitting. The tabletop was strewn with maps and guidebooks and tourist brochures, giving Lori quite a jolt.
Los Angeles? We’re in Los Angeles? She’d practically forgotten. She pulled a drape back from the window, and a palm tree brushed the other side of the glass. Surreal. It seemed like a mirage.
“Do you want to go to Hollywood or Disneyland today?” Mom asked. “I thought we’d have time to do some planning last night, but . . .” She let the words trail off. Nobody needed to be reminded of what they’d talked about instead.
So that’s how it is, Lori thought. Daddy dying is a taboo subject again.
“Hollywood’s a lot seedier than you would expect,” Mom said. “But it’s still one of those places you feel like you have to see. If we don’t get to it today, we can always swing by tomorrow before the airport. Disney’s a full day, of course. I know you guys are too old for Mickey Mouse, but you’d love Space Mountain, Lori. And, Chuck, you might like—”
“Why didn’t you sue?” Lori asked.
Mom froze.
“What?” she said.
“Why didn’t you sue?” Lori asked again. “The tractor company or the insurance company or somebody. For Daddy dying.”
Mom straightened a pile of brochures, as if it really mattered that the corners were lined up.
“You can’t do this,” she said. “You can’t keep ambushing me. That’s all over, okay? We can’t live in the past. Weren’t you listening to my speech last night?” She grinned, as if trying to let Lori know she was half joking.
Lori shook her head stubbornly. No. I wasn’t listening. I had other things on my mind.
“Could you have sued?” Chuck asked.
Mom looked from her daughter to her son and sighed.
“Okay,” she said. She shoved the guidebooks and tourist pamphlets and maps to the floor. Chuck and Lori watched in amazement. Mom didn’t seem to care what a mess she’d made. She didn’t even look. When the table was clear, Mom folded her hands in front of her. “Let’s get
this all out now. I talk, you talk, and then we let this go. All right?”
Speechlessly, Chuck and Lori nodded. Mom took a deep breath.
“Suing,” she said, “was never an option. Do you know how old that tractor was? It ran on gasoline, not diesel, you know—I’m not sure anyone was still making gasoline tractors when I was born. The tractor company had gone out of business years ago. So there was no tractor company to sue.”
“Why didn’t Daddy have a safer tractor?” Lori asked in a small voice.
Mom gave her a long look.
“Come on, Lori, you’ve grown up on a farm. You know how things are. You make do, you get along, you gamble that the tractor’ll make it just one more year and that the crops will be good enough that you can buy a new one. And then if the crops aren’t so hot, or the bottom falls out of the prices, you gamble that the tractor’ll make it two more years, if the combine doesn’t break down first, in which case that tractor had better make it three more years—”
Mom’s just giving a speech again, Lori thought.
But then Mom stopped herself and looked straight at Lori.
“Nobody thought that tractor was unsafe,” she said, and now she sounded as if every syllable hurt. Lori could tell she wasn’t hiding behind glib words anymore. “What happened was a fluke—a freak accident. The odds against it were a million to one.”
In the hall outside their hotel room, a little kid was shouting about beating his daddy to the swimming pool. Lori and Chuck and Mom could hear a man shouting back, “Oh, yeah? Think you’re faster than me?” There was the sound of running. Then there was silence.
“Well, the insurance company owed you,” Lori insisted.
“They were bankrupt,” Chuck said. “Weren’t you listening last night?”
Lori looked at her brother in surprise. He could sit through an entire 4-H meeting and come home and not have the slightest idea when the next meeting was or where they were supposed to turn in their registration forms or who had been elected to Junior Fair Board. But he’d understood Mom’s testimony, and all that had stuck with Lori was Mom’s last line: “By the grace of God, we’ll get by.”
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