The Art of Crash Landing

by Melissa DeCarlo

  He agrees and then offers to cook me dinner, which I accept. We make a few minutes of general small talk—he asks how it’s going at the library. I give him the highlights without mentioning any of the really important stuff, such as Fritter’s stonewalling or Tawny’s burgling.

  I haven’t eaten since breakfast and my stomach is dangerously empty, however I’m enjoying the banter, so I ignore my mounting queasiness and launch into the story of the Unidentified Fecal Objects. We’re both laughing as I explain how, based on the size variation and the cigarette butt, I figured out that they’re actually dog turds that Tawny is bringing in to torment Fritter. I don’t mention the fact that I’m pretty sure the turd du jour was from my grandmother’s backyard. If I did, Luke might ask why Tawny would be at the house, or ask how the Winstons were doing, and then I’d have to lie. Instead I just skim the surface of the mystery, keeping the dog shit generic and telling him that I’m going to put a stop to it, which is true enough.

  When he asks if my job description includes “other related doodies,” I laugh like I’m supposed to, but my heart’s not in it. I’m feeling sick enough now that I’ve started to sweat.

  “So, I was right about Tawny,” he says.

  “In what way?”

  “She’s too much for Fritter to handle.”

  “Nah. She’s not that bad. Sometimes it’s just easier to act like a badass than admit you’re unhappy.”

  With a concerned expression, Luke reaches over to where I’m perched on the edge of his desk, and puts his hand on top of mine. He’s acting as if I’ve said something overtly personal. Or maybe I look as terrible as I feel.

  “Are you okay?” he asks gently.

  “Where’s your bathroom?” I reply.

  By the time I leave Luke’s office it’s two thirty. The church parking lot across the street is empty, save a handful of cars and a couple of disheveled men crouched near the Dumpster. I walk across the street, keeping a careful eye on the Dumpster divers as I grow closer. I needn’t have bothered. When they see me heading their way, they stand, pocketing handfuls of cigarette butts, and they walk away. Following a few steps behind them is a gray cat—Colonel Parker, I’m guessing, since I recognize one of the men as the feral-looking Elvis I met Tuesday. As he walks past, Colonel Parker studies me with one green eye, the other matted shut with pus.

  I step up to the window by the door and peer through the cloudy glass. I can see Karleen cleaning out the food service area in the far end of the room. A teenager, probably some poor community service volunteer, listlessly smears a mop across the floor, and at a table in the corner sits Father Barnes staring into a coffee cup. He looks a little hungover. I’m not surprised.

  The day is bright, so the glass presents me with two scenes superimposed one on the other—a double exposure: the people inside the dining room and a reflection of me standing outside in the parking lot. Everyone in there looks like a ghost. Or maybe I’m the ghost.

  I could go inside. I could pick up a rag or a mop. I could apologize to my mother’s friend for not showing up when I said I would. I could be a friend to Father Barnes, a man who has been nothing but kind to me. Or I could walk away.

  At this very moment, as if my thoughts were words able to penetrate glass, the teenager mopping the floor looks up and sees me through the window. I step back, but not fast enough. When her eyes meet mine, she raises a hand.

  Walking back to the library, I replay the girl’s gesture and parse it for meaning—arm lifted, palm out. Was it a greeting? Had she been inviting me in? Probably not. I think she was just making sure I understood that I was much, much too late.

  CHAPTER 37

  Monday, December eleventh dawned cold—for Florida anyway—with a hint of rain to come. I had the whole day off and my mother’s appointment with her oncologist wasn’t until the afternoon, so I decided to do some Christmas shopping. I can remember as I hurried through my errands wondering when my mother would be able to drive herself again. I was ready, more than ready, to get my life back.

  First, I made a quick stop at the liquor store to pick up a few bottles of Maker’s Mark as gifts for my hardcore party friends. Then I swung by the mall, where I burrowed through the crowds and bought a few odds and ends for my mother, a video game for my then boyfriend, and some soap and lotion baskets for the coworkers who I feared would buy me something. I was especially proud of the cigars I scored from a dark, wiry man skulking around the parking lot behind Sears. He pulled the box out of his trunk, took my twenty-dollar bill, and promised me they were genuine Cubans. The man was Cuban, I could tell that the minute he opened his mouth. The cigars? Who knows? They might have been from Cuba. I hoped for my boss’s sake that they weren’t laced with anything too poisonous.

  Then I went to the bookstore for the pricey, hardback edition of The Caine Mutiny I’d special ordered for Queeg. He’d recently admitted to me that although he’d seen the movie, he’d never actually read the novel. All those years he’d been answering to the name of a character from a book he’d never even read. The novel’s Captain Queeg was even crazier than Humphrey Bogart’s, and I could hardly wait to see how much reading this book would annoy my Queeg. I remember laughing as I ran out to my car, my arms clutching the book while trying to hold my jacket closed against the cold.

  It was sprinkling by the time I reached my mother’s house. When she got in the car, with only that fine halo of postchemo stubble on her head, I remember thinking that she needed the soft wool hat I had just bought her. But it was in the back of the jeep, jumbled up with all the other gifts; it would have been a hassle to get out and pop the hatch and dig around for it. Looking back, I wish I’d bothered. I wish I’d climbed out of the car to find that damn hat. She would have liked it; it was almost the same color green as her eyes.

  At the clinic they took blood, did a couple scans, and then the doctor came in and poked around on her stomach a little. It would be a few days, he said, before all the results would be in and our next step—those were his words, our next step—could be discussed.

  I remember thinking at the time that my mother didn’t have many next steps left. Whatever the tests would reveal, it was pretty clear that she was finished with chemotherapy. The chemicals they’d pumped in to poison the tumor had poisoned everything else as well, giving her vicious sores in her mouth, weakening her kidneys, and even attacking her heart. Swelling it, the doctor told us, “from the size of a fist to the size of a softball.”

  When he said that to her, she asked, “Mush ball or fast pitch?”

  The doctor frowned, scribbled on her chart for a few seconds, and then said “I’ll see you next week” as he left the room.

  I lifted her clothes off the hook behind the door. She sighed and slipped the hospital gown off of her shoulders as I handed over her bra.

  “It was a valid question,” she said to me. “A fast pitch ball is only eleven inches around. A mush ball is sixteen.”

  Once she fastened the hooks on her bra, I pulled her shirt over her head. The fuzz covering her scalp was velvety soft against my palm.

  My mother was always cold, so I was hot and sweating in the car on the way home, wishing I’d taken my coat off. It felt like I’d spent all afternoon at the doctor’s office, and next Monday we’d be back there to get her results, to find out if the chemo had worked. My mother clutched the appointment card in her hand and stared out the window. The cancer may or may not have receded, but either way she looked tired and pale. Her illness was all around us in that stuffy car.

  So I was surprised when, as we pulled into her driveway, she turned to me and said, “I think I could drive if I had an automatic.”

  Sitting there in my jeep with its automatic transmission, we both looked at her Malibu parked right next to us in the driveway. I knew her next words before they came.

  “We could trade cars,” she offered. “Just until I feel better.”

  Her Malibu was certainly more fun to drive than my jeep, and from
the tone of her voice I could tell she thought she was doing me a favor. But she was wrong. For me, her Malibu was a painful reminder of the happy family that Queeg, my mom, and I had once been, but were no longer. I took a second before I replied, to measure that pain against my desperate need to gain some distance from my mother.

  Finally I said, “Okay.”

  She took her keys out of her purse, pried one off the ring, and handed it to me. “I still need your help at a shoot Friday morning.”

  “No problem.”

  The windshield wipers moved back and forth bringing her house into and out of focus. I remember wishing she would just hurry up. It felt like we’d spent a lifetime sitting in that hot stuffy car.

  “It’s a funeral.”

  I sighed, annoyed. It was just like her to not tell me that little detail until after I’d agreed to help. My mother had recently come up with some harebrained idea that funeral photography was some new unexploited market she could take advantage of. I laughed the first time she mentioned it, but amazingly a few people actually answered the advertisements she’d placed in the paper. So far I’d been lucky enough to avoid assisting her on those jobs, but now it seemed that my luck had run out.

  She wrote down the address for the funeral home and handed it to me. “Don’t be late,” she said.

  “You know me.”

  “Yes, I do.” She frowned a warning. In the past year, since she’d stopped drinking, my mother had for the most part gotten her shit together. My shit, on the other hand, was still all over the place.

  I asked if she needed anything out of the Malibu and she told me no, that her tripod and lights were in it, but since I would be meeting her at the funeral home anyway, that wouldn’t be a problem.

  She glanced back at all the packages piled in the back of the jeep. “You want some help moving all this stuff?” she asked.

  The rain beat steadily on the roof. I took the Malibu’s key from her and then turned off the jeep and laid its key in her open palm.

  “I don’t need any of it this week. Let’s wait and swap everything out Friday after the funeral.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. Everything will be fine,” I said.

  CHAPTER 38

  Richard Hambly’s overdecorated, overheated home is filled with dusty antiques and uncomfortable-looking chairs. Mr. Hambly points me to a wingback chair, and I pick my way around the coffee table, step over a metal magazine rack overflowing with issues of Arizona Highways, and settle myself gingerly on the chair’s faded, sagging seat.

  “That upholstery is genuine horsehair,” Mr. Hambly tells me.

  “Super,” I reply, grateful that I’m wearing jeans today; it’s nice to have something between my legs and the itchy seat. I’m in no mood to ride bareback.

  Luke sits on the perimeter of the furniture grouping, grinning at me from his clean, nonhairy wheelchair.

  “Can I get you some tea? It will have to be instant iced, I’m afraid. There’s a problem with my gas line.” He frowns and adds, “I wonder if I should put out the pilot lights on my stove and hot water heater . . .”

  “I’m sure everything’s fine,” I say. “You know how those people at the gas company are . . .”

  Hambly frowns, wondering, I suppose, about my insider knowledge about gas company employees, but he doesn’t ask me to explain further. He just excuses himself and goes into the kitchen.

  Luke gives me a questioning look. He’s smart enough to have picked up on both Mr. Hambly’s surprise at our arrival and the strangeness of that last exchange about the gas company. I give Luke a wide-eyed beats me shrug, grab an issue of Arizona Highways and settle back in my prickly chair to thumb through the magazine’s pages. Acting casual is the key to deception.

  The dish-clattering noises from the kitchen stop, and the old man reappears carrying what looks to be a heavy tray. I hurry over and take the tray from him, against his protests, and then set it on the coffee table. Hambly crosses to a settee and leans hard on its carved wooden arms to lower himself into the seat. He waves his hand at the plate of cookies and three iced-tea glasses on the tray, so I hand Luke a glass and take one myself. My stomach is empty and I’m grateful for the Lorna Doones, no matter how stale they may be, which is very. The tea is sweet enough to remove the enamel from my teeth but I take a couple of polite sips anyway.

  Mr. Hambly clears his throat. “Latter Day Saints? Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

  Luke and I both laugh. I think he’s laughing out of surprise, but I’m laughing because Luke, in his white dress shirt and dark tie, really does look like a religious door-knocker, which is probably what gained us entrance into the Hambly home in the first place.

  Luke introduces himself and me. As soon as he mentions that I work at the library, the old man scowls.

  “Library?” he says, but in a tone that’s suggestive of something more along the lines of an organized crime syndicate.

  “What I’m here to discuss has nothing to do with the library.” I try to move us back to more neutral territory. “I’m looking for some information.”

  His frown deepens. “Young lady, I’m getting so old and forgetful, I could probably hide my own Easter eggs. I can’t imagine what sort of information you think I possess.”

  “About my grandparents.”

  “Your grandparents? Do I . . .” He stops, his eyes slowly widening in recognition. “You’re related to Tilda Thayer.”

  I nod. “She’s my grandmother. I’d like to know more about her and my grandfather.”

  “I wouldn’t have much to say about that.” He crosses his legs and looks around the room. He’s giving me the impression of someone trying a little too hard to act casual. “Tilda looked like you, fair, curly hair. Your grandfather Eugene was the opposite. Dark, straight hair. Dark eyes. They were betrothed.” He reaches over and fiddles with his tea glass, centering it on its little coaster. “I really don’t know what sort of information you’re looking for.”

  I decide to ask him straight out. “I want to know how my grandfather died.”

  He exhales as if he’d been holding his breath. “No.” He shakes his head. “No, no . . . I’m sorry, but no.”

  “Please?”

  “No.”

  “Pretty please?”

  “That was a lifetime ago,” he says.

  “I want to know what happened.”

  He shakes his head. “Water under the bridge.”

  “What water? What bridge?” It comes out more irritated than I’d intended. I pause for a moment and then try again. “It’s my family, but no one will tell me anything.”

  Instead of replying, the old man looks down at his lap and smooths the crease in his trousers with an unsteady hand.

  I try a smile. “Pretty please with a cherry on top?”

  He hesitates, seeming to consider something, which is a step up from no.

  Finally, he says, “You work at the library?”

  I nod.

  “Then I have a proposition for you.”

  I have a feeling this ancient man’s proposition isn’t the type I’m used to getting. I say “Let’s have it . . .” and then sit back, curious as to what he has in mind.

  “There used to be a used bookstore not too far from here,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  “It closed last year.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” I have no idea where this is going, but since Mr. Hambly seems to, I play along.

  “So I’d like to start utilizing the public library.”

  “Good idea.”

  “There’s only one problem,” he says.

  Here it comes.

  “I don’t have a library card.” He’s smiling when he says this, and I smile in return, relieved that his problem can be solved so easily.

  “Well, just come in and fill out the form. All you’ll need is—”

  “No, no, no.” He’s shaking his head. “That will never work.”

  Hmm . . .
I wonder if maybe it’s not just his house that’s dusty and jumbled, but also the space between Mr. Hambly’s ears. I keep my tone gentle when I say, “It works for everyone else.”

  “That may well be,” he says with a look on his face that tells me he noticed my patronizing tone. “But everyone else isn’t banned from the library.”

  “Banned?”

  He nods.

  “You got banned from a library?”

  “That is correct.”

  I search the old man’s face to see if there’s any indication that he’s joking, but he seems sincere. I ask the obvious question, “How do you get banned from a library?” Oh, fingers crossed that this story is as funny as it promises to be. Surely poop won’t be involved, right? I glance over at Luke and see him grinning at me. He’s thinking the same thing.

  “It’s a long story from a long time ago,” Hambly replies. “Which, interestingly enough, involves your grandfather.”

  “Come on, you have to tell me.” I’m wheedling now.

  He lifts his shoulders in a little noncommittal shrug. Suddenly, I understand what’s going on.

  “You want your library privileges back,” I say.

  Now there’s a little twinkle in his eyes.

  “Tell me what you know about my grandfather, and I promise I’ll get you unbanned.”

  “Are you certain that you—”

  “No problem at all,” I assure him. I’m lying, of course, but it’s for a good cause so I plunge ahead. “Trust me. A few minutes of your time now, and you’ll be able to use the library whenever you want.”

  “Well . . .” He does that shrug thing again.

  “And I’ll increase your maximum checkout. You can have six books at a time instead of five.”

  “Ten.”

  “Seven.”

  “Eight.”

  “Deal!” Generosity is easy when you have no intention of ponying up.

  Hambly grins, triumphant. I’m pretty sure he would have settled for seven. He takes a sip of his iced tea, and then settles further back into his chair.