The Art of Crash Landing

by Melissa DeCarlo

  “You betcha,” I reply.

  He fishes a business card out of a little brass tray on his desk, and then makes a show of writing a phone number on the back. “I’m truly sorry about the loan, but I might be interested in buying your grandmother’s house once it’s on the market. If you’d like to get in touch, here’s my personal number . . .”

  I can’t say for sure that he’s hitting on me, maybe he really just wants to buy a house, but I find myself fighting to keep revulsion off of my face as I lift the card from his fingers and tuck it in my pocket. I turn to leave, but before I can make my escape Gordon Penny clears his throat, saying, “And, Ms. Wallace, just so you’ll know . . .”

  I look back. “Yes?”

  “Your mother and I were never friends.”

  CHAPTER 13

  There’s a nice shady spot on the sidewalk outside the bank. When I sit on the curb, the Tootsie Pop stick gives me a little jab in the ribs. I pull it out of my pocket, but it seems I didn’t wrap it thoroughly enough; it sticks to the inside of my jean’s pocket, pulling it out as well. I pick off the worst of the lint and then, because I’m starting to feel sick again, I put the still-fuzzy sucker in my mouth. Speaking of suck, man oh man, this day sucks. I mean, things usually suck, but today takes the suck-cake. It wins a gold medal at the Suck Olympics.

  I pull out my phone to check the time; Queeg will be home from his doctor’s appointment, finished with lunch, and probably watching a game show, or rereading one of his Louis L’Amour books. I don’t want to call, but it’s time.

  Queeg got on the subject of quantum mechanics once, and told me about Schrödinger—the guy who said that if you poisoned a cat while it was in a box, the cat wasn’t alive or dead until you opened the box and looked inside. At the time, I thought that was funny as hell. I mean, even if the cat was very quiet—which it wouldn’t be, by the way—within a couple days you’d know for sure if it were dead, especially if the box was outside and it was summer. Queeg tried to explain that Schrödinger’s whole point was to prove that some other dude’s theory was flawed, but I was laughing too hard to listen.

  But, the thing is, I get it now. While I hold my undialed phone in my hand, Queeg is still just fine. But once I call him, he’s going to tell me what the doctor said, or more likely he’ll lie to me about what the doctor said and that’s going to be even worse.

  I dial his number. When he picks up, his voice sounds hoarse, as if he’s been asleep.

  “Were you taking a nap?” I ask. Queeg never naps.

  He coughs. “Of course not.” I think he’s lying and that scares me.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Nothing interesting.”

  “I don’t care if it’s interesting. I want to hear it anyway.”

  He sighs. “They scheduled a biopsy.”

  “Another one? When is it?” Last year Queeg had a prostate biopsy, and I thought I’d never hear the end of it.

  “Thursday. And it’s a different body part, thank God.”

  “Which part?” I ask.

  “Mattie, it’s no big deal.”

  He’s not exactly lying, but he’s getting close. “It’s your lungs, right? You’re getting a lung biopsy.”

  He sighs a nonanswer that is answer enough.

  “Oh, Queeg . . .” I lean forward and rest my head on my knees. Just saying the words lung biopsy made me feel sick.

  “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  As if.

  “Getting old stinks,” he tells me. “But I guess it’s better than the alternative.”

  “You guess?” The thought of Queeg with a needle in his lung is terrible. The thought of him dying is unbearable.

  Queeg is quiet for a second, and I think I hear a metal chink. Like the sound of a cigarette lighter.

  I swipe at a tear that’s poised on my lashes. “You’re not smoking, are you?”

  “Nope,” he says, pausing long enough that I’m certain he’s taking a drag. “So, how are things going out there?”

  And here it is. The empty slot in this scene just big enough for me to tuck in all my problems, and then ask him to send me some money.

  “I met a Lawrence Welk fan,” I say.

  “I like Lawrence Welk.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  I hear him chuckle, and that makes me smile.

  “And I’ve been talking with some people about Mom,” I tell him.

  “Really?” He sounds surprised and pleased. He always wants to talk about my mother. I always refuse.

  “Not on purpose.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “She was different when she was younger.”

  “Sure she was. People change.”

  “No, this seems like more than that.”

  “In what way?”

  “Nothing. Never mind,” I say, adding, “We’ll talk about her later,” which isn’t true and we both know it. I understand that my mother is always there, her heart beating beneath all of our conversations. But understanding something isn’t the same thing as accepting it.

  “And when will later be?” Queeg has long since caught on to this dodge.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “But don’t hold your breath.”

  There’s an awkward pause. I’m wishing I hadn’t told a man who might have lung cancer, don’t hold your breath, and I think Queeg is wondering if he needs to remind me that later will someday be too late. As usual, neither one of us says what we’re thinking. Instead Queeg asks me how the visit with Tilda’s attorney went.

  I gloss over everything, telling him that I signed papers and should know more in a few days. I don’t mention the list of creditors waiting for the first bite, and I don’t mention the dogs, and I don’t mention the three months. Instead, I tell him that it’s so nice here that I’m going to hang around a few days and that everything is just great. As I’m concocting this fairy tale, I can picture him exactly. He’s sitting on the edge of his sofa, his hair standing up in tufts, his shirt twisted from his nap, probably a goddamn cigarette between his fingers. Happily ever after is what he needs to hear.

  Queeg laughs softly, pleased by the story. “Now I’ll be the one hitting you up for money,” he says. “I have a feeling my visit today cost a pretty penny, and they haven’t even punched a hole in me yet.”

  He’s playing this off as a joke, but it’s not. And he’s not really talking about money. Unlike me, he’s got health insurance. No, Queeg is giving me a heads-up, reminding me that the time is coming when we’ll switch places, he and I. He’ll be the one calling me, depending on me for help. Sadly, he’s spinning a yarn equally as far-fetched as the one I just told him. I’m pretty sure we both know that he’s never going to be able to depend on me.

  “We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it,” I say. I keep it light, where it needs to stay.

  He shifts the conversation to Min He’s hemorrhoids, and I’m grateful for the subject change even if disgusted by the topic. When my phone beeps a call waiting, I don’t even look to see who it is. I just tell Queeg I have another call and to put out his damn cigarette, and then I click over to the other call before he has time to argue or say good-bye.

  It’s Father Barnes on the phone, and I immediately launch into an exhaustive recounting of my troubles, sparing no painful details except the part about me being pregnant, and the part about me trying to sell things that don’t belong to me. I don’t even know what I’m hoping to accomplish. Am I looking for a date, or just trying to shake him down for some cash? At this point, it just seems like I should be able to get something from somebody even if it’s only sympathy.

  Father Barnes “Hmmm”s and “Oh, dear”s at the appropriate moments, and I’m sure I’m golden right up until he ends the call with, “Well, Mattie, the good news is the Lord must have something very special planned for you, or he wouldn’t have given you all these difficulties.” Then he invites me to lunch tomorrow, see you at the church at noon, take care, etc.,
etc. . . . click. Terrific. I guess I got my date, but it doesn’t save me from tonight’s meal out of my grandmother’s pantry.

  I shift around and lean back against a parking meter. The sidewalk is warm beneath me; the wind is shuffling the leaves in the trees. I close my eyes and turn my face to the sun. Maybe Father Barnes is on to something. If there really is a God, he does indeed seem to have something special planned for me, and so far it’s an extended ass-kicking. For some people God may be a shepherd leadething them beside still waters, but lately he seems a lot more like Mr. Nester, tauntething me with a mound of fake doggy-doo.

  At the sound of a car slowing to a stop next to where I’m sitting, I open my eyes and turn my head to see who has come to gawk at my misfortune. It’s Luke, the paraplegic paralegal behind the wheel of a silver Accord. I wave, half hoping that he’ll drive on so I can get back to my comfortable pity wallow. Yet the other half—the one that includes my tired legs—hopes that he’ll offer me a ride.

  Luke lowers his window, and I stand and walk over.

  “What’s that?” He’s looking at the pillowcase in my hand.

  “Worthless crap,” I reply.

  From his puzzled yet worried expression, I can tell that he’s curious as to why I would be carrying around a pink pillowcase full of worthless crap, but can’t quite decide if asking would be rude.

  I decide to help us both out by changing the subject.

  “How did you do that?” I point at what must be Luke’s wheelchair, but is now a pile of aluminum rods and wheels in the backseat.

  “Years of practice. Need a lift?”

  His tie is off and his shirtsleeves are rolled up on his forearms, showing some of the muscles I thought were hiding under his clothes. I smile. I am a sucker for the white-collar type even if I only seem to date the asshole-musician type.

  “Got room somewhere for a bike?”

  He nods. “The trunk. There’s a bungee for the lid.”

  “Perfect. Hey, can you open it and let me toss this inside, too?”

  He pops the trunk, but not before glancing again at the bulging pillowcase in my hand. But he doesn’t ask so I don’t have to lie. Excellent.

  When we pull up outside the pawnshop, I see an ample, middle-aged woman in regrettably snug spandex shorts closely inspecting my bike, as in searching-for-a-price-tag inspecting. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have left the crappy bike parked in the middle of all the pawnshop’s crappy sale items.

  I walk over to the woman. “Excuse me,” I say, taking the bike by the handlebars.

  “Hey!” She straightens up and puts her hands on her generous hips. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m taking this home,” I tell her.

  “I saw it first!” She follows me, shouting “Stop!” as I wheel the bike to the back of Luke’s car. She’s taking little tiny steps, each one causing her spandex-covered thighs to make a zip zip zip sound. I’m glad the car is close by; I’m a little afraid she’s about to start a fire.

  “It’s not for sale,” I tell her.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Is English not your native language?”

  Luke has popped the trunk and is watching this little brouhaha with an enormous grin on his face. How lucky for him that I am around to provide him with quality entertainment.

  “You can’t take that without paying for it.”

  “Back off, lady,” I say.

  The woman grabs the handlebars, forcing me to pry it from her grasp in order to lift the rear wheel and angle the bike into the trunk. The woman is ineffectively pushing at me while I’m struggling to slide the rubber tire over the trunk carpet. Either the drive here, or the ongoing tussle over the bike has caused the jewelry box to slide partially out of its pillowcase. The woman notices this and reaches in to push the pillowcase away from the initialed lid.

  “Hey . . .” the woman says, reaching for the box. “This isn’t yours . . .”

  “The hell it isn’t.” I bump her aside, give the bike a final shove, and strap on the bungee cord. “All this shit is mine.”

  “Bullhonky,” she says. This woman must be the type of person who, no matter how angry, is not willing to use profanity.

  “Fuck off, pork chop,” I reply. I am not that type of person.

  I hop in the car, and Luke pulls away. When I look back, she’s still standing in the street, shaking her fist in the air and shouting, “Thief!”

  When we’re a block away he turns to me, laughing. “What was that all about?”

  “I left that bike parked there less than an hour ago. I don’t know what in the hell was wrong with that lady.”

  “Pork chop?” He’s laughing again. “Oh my God.”

  “What?”

  Instead of answering he shakes his head, still grinning. “So what’d you find out about your car?” he asks me.

  “It’s the transmission.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yup.” I slump down in the seat and prop my feet on the dash. “Unless you’d like to loan me a couple grand, it looks like I’ll be here awhile, Howdy.”

  It’s not that I actually expect him to give me any money, but I figure I’d be a fool not to drop the hint. I wait for him to refuse or laugh it off or tell me to get my feet off his dashboard, but he does none of those things.

  He just frowns and says, “What’s with calling me Howdy?”

  “Howdy Doody . . . you know . . . red hair . . . freckles . . . cute smile . . .”

  “I guess it’s better than calling me a random cut of meat,” he says. “But calling me by my actual name would be even better.”

  The smart thing to do here is to apologize and then shut my damn mouth. But when do I ever do the smart thing?

  “That’s true. You have a good name,” I say. “Luke Lambert is an awesome name, in fact.”

  He gives me a quick look and then asks, cautiously, “Awesome because . . .”

  “It sounds like a Superman villain.”

  He laughs. “Good Lord. What is wrong with you?”

  I laugh, too, mostly because I’m relieved that he’s laughing. “It’s a long list. Right now, I think it’s low blood sugar. I’m so hungry . . .”

  He offers to feed me, of course. When we get to the order-window of the fast-food deli, Luke looks a little disconcerted when I ask for a foot-long meatball sub, but he repeats my request into the speaker-station without comment. And when we drive up to the next window, he pulls out his wallet and pays the total, and I don’t argue. Tacky? Absolutely. But standard operating procedure for someone with a wallet as thin as mine.

  I notice a “help wanted” sign, and so on a whim I lean past Luke to ask the teenager at the window for an application.

  The girl hands it to Luke who passes it to me along with the enormous sack holding my sandwich. “I think I can find you a job you’d like better than this one.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure.” He doesn’t look at me; he busies himself putting his Coke in the cup holder, pressing on the plastic lid to make sure it’s snapped into place.

  “Why would you do that for me?”

  Still concentrating on his hands, he unwraps a straw and pops it through the lid. “It’s not a problem.” I see his ears growing a little pink. “Really,” he adds, still not looking at me. “I like helping out.”

  “It’s your daily good turn. What a nice Boy Scout.” I reach over to ruffle his hair.

  He ducks away from my hand, grinning, his face now such a remarkable shade of raspberry, that I can’t help but laugh again.

  “What’s so funny?” he says.

  “It’s nothing. Just . . . thank you. Really.” I sit back in my seat and smile. God, there’s nothing like embarrassing a ginger to improve my mood.

  Luke pulls back onto the street, using the hand controls as effortlessly as I do the pedals of my car. I’m curious about how long he’s been in a wheelchair and why, but I don’t ask. A little teasing is one thing, but digg
ing into someone’s past is different. In my experience, the past is rarely as harmless, or as far away, as we’d like it to be.

  CHAPTER 14

  Like most kids, I wanted a pet. At first this longing was vague, species-wise. Dogs, big ones at least, frightened me with their red toothy mouths and sharp eyes. Cats seemed calm enough, but I had a tendency to get itchy if I spent too long petting one. Fish . . . boring. Snakes . . . ick. But I knew that out there somewhere was the pet for me. It wasn’t until my stint in Mrs. Baxter’s fourth-grade class that my ambiguous pet-ownership urge found its focus—on a fat ginger and white guinea pig named Buttercup.

  Buttercup had the dubious, possibly hazardous, honor of being Mrs. Baxter’s classroom pet. Daily, she suffered pokes and prods by dozens of tiny fingers pushed between the metal bars of her cage. She made the best of the situation, nibbling on her pellets and greens, shuffling around in slow circles, and—most telling of her innate intelligence—spending much of her time watching us from the far corner of her cage, tucked inside the empty twenty-two-ounce can that had once held crushed tomatoes and now served as her refuge. Buttercup made lovely little chortles and ooooweek sounds throughout the day. The whole room smelled faintly of cedar shavings.

  Buttercup was to Mrs. Baxter’s class the proverbial carrot to a donkey. Unlike the girls in Mrs. Wilson’s class, the girls in our class did not spend their time during math lessons writing notes and drawing pictures of Strawberry Shortcake on our notebooks. No, the girls in Mrs. Baxter’s class worked every bit as hard in arithmetic as the boys, because whoever made the highest grade on the Friday math quiz got to feed Buttercup the following week.

  When Christmas approached, Mrs. Baxter began discussing a class “Maptastic Geography Bee.” To make the contest even more exciting, the winner would be allowed to take Buttercup home to care for over the Christmas break.

  Oh how I studied state capitals, rivers, mountains, estuaries. I was determined to win. I was certain that if my mother had the chance to get to know the sweet little guinea pig and see how responsible I could be, she would allow me to have a Buttercup of my very own.