Takeoffs and Landings (10 page)

Mom had gotten Chuck those airsickness bracelets, and he had them on, but it didn't matter: there was no way he could be sick now. He wasn't even scared, and here he was, staring straight down at the ground, thousands of feet below him.

If I die now, I wouldn't care. I would die happy,
he thought. But he would care. There was a whole world he'd discovered today, and he intended to see more of it.

Come on, plane, don't go down,
he thought, as if he could help the pilots. But the plane was in no danger of going down. It climbed up and up and up, until all he could see was clouds.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Mom said beside him.

Chuck nodded. Suddenly he wanted to tell Mom where he'd gone today. But he couldn't. When she'd asked, when they met back at the water fountain in the mall,
he'd just said, “Oh, I just wandered around. Saw the city.” And then Lori had said something nasty, and Mom got distracted, so he didn't say anything else. Which was fine. He didn't want anyone ruining the day for him. He could just hear Lori:
You went to the art museum? Why?

Never in a million years could he have explained to Lori what it had been like to stand in front of those paintings and
feel
what the artist had been trying to show him. He'd seen paintings before, of course—copies of them, anyway. One of the kids in their 4-H club had that lady with the strange smile—Mona something . . . Mona Lisa?—hanging up in their bathroom. In their bathroom! But that whole family was kind of weird. The dad was a professor at some college an hour away. Everybody knew professors and people who commuted that far weren't normal.

What Chuck had seen in the art museum was different from looking at some lady's picture hanging over a toilet. At the art museum, the paintings were treated reverently—framed just so, hung just so, lighted just so. And people practically tiptoed around.

At first, Chuck had been afraid that someone would tell him he didn't belong, maybe even kick him out. He'd practically trembled when he paid his money at the front desk. He waited for the thin, dry-looking man to push his sweaty twenty-dollar bill back and sniff,
No hicks allowed.
But the man only made change and handed him a brochure, and Chuck was free to look at whatever he wanted.

He didn't see any other farm boys in jeans and John Deere T-shirts walking around, but nobody seemed to care. One of the security guards even gave him an encouraging nod as he walked from room to room.

Chuck had stood in front of a big red painting for a long time. It was the kind of thing that Gram and Pop would have mocked as “modern art.” They'd seen something like it on TV once, and Pop had scoffed, “Did some kindergartener make that?” But Chuck felt like he was falling into the color, it was so intense. And he, Chuck Lawson, who never understood anything at school, understood that painting.

“Like it?” a voice said.

For the first time, Chuck noticed a man standing beside him. He had a goatee and a ponytail. Pop would have scoffed at him, too. Chuck was afraid the man was making fun of him—as if someone with a ponytail could never see someone like Chuck liking a painting like that. But the man looked serious.

“Yes,” Chuck said simply.

“Good,” the man said.

And that was all, but it was the best conversation Chuck had had in years.

Mom had more to do in Atlanta than she had in Chicago.

“I'm busy until four o'clock today, and then there's the banquet this evening,” she said over breakfast. (They were eating at McDonald's. Did that mean something?) “Will you two be okay on your own?”

“Sure,” Lori said.

“Oh, yeah,” Chuck said.

Was it just Lori's imagination, or did he sound enthusiastic? Chuck never sounded enthusiastic about anything.

“Well, try to stick together,” Mom said, almost nervously, wiping the remains of an Egg McMuffin from her lips with a napkin. “This is a big city, you know.”

“We
know,
” Lori said, too sharply. Mom gave her a look but didn't say anything. Lori instantly wanted to apologize. That was silly, though—why should she apologize for saying, “We know”?

Lori wondered if Mom didn't really have that much more to do in Atlanta. Maybe she was just tired of hanging out with Lori and Chuck.

Lori wouldn't blame her.

But Mom had explained that this was a convention of people who gave speeches; Mom was here to talk about how to speak in public. Lori had seen the brochure herself—Mom was leading seminars called “Why Should Anyone Listen to
Me
? Figuring Out Your Message” and “It's Mine, All Mine: Capturing an Audience's Attention.” And she was giving the keynote address at the banquet that night. So Mom wasn't lying when she said she'd be busy.

Lori should probably be impressed that all these people who gave speeches would want to listen to Mom. But she couldn't help wondering,
Why did Mom bring us along if she's just going to work?

They went back to the hotel room and Mom left for the conference. Lori brushed her teeth. The whole day stretched ahead of her like an empty calendar page.

“Want to go to the Coke museum with me?” she asked Chuck through a mouthful of bubbles. She spit in the sink. “The hotel guidebook says Coke was invented here, and they have a museum showing the entire history. At the end, they let you drink all the Coke you want.”

She felt so virtuous asking Chuck to go somewhere with her. Maybe that was how she could make up for being so nasty to Mom. She'd be nice to Chuck all day long—no matter how hard that was. She wouldn't even
think about the possibility that someone might mistake them for girlfriend and boyfriend. (Okay, she'd already thought of it. But she wouldn't think about it again.) It'd be like . . . paying back God. By the end of the day, her conscience would feel as clean as her teeth.

But, “No,” Chuck said slowly. “I've got other plans.”

Plans? Chuck had plans? In a city he'd never stepped foot in before in his entire life?

“Oh,” Lori said. “Um. Okay.” She hesitated. Her conscience was at stake here, after all. “But didn't Mom want us to stay together? Can I—?” She was out on a limb now. But she kept going. “Can I go with you?”

She was almost pleading. Chuck looked panicked.

“No, no. You'd be bored. Or something.” He gulped. “And Mom didn't say we
had
to stay together.”

Lori's pride prevented her from truly begging. She was practically speechless, anyway. What could Chuck be up to?

“Well,” Chuck said. “Guess I'll be going. See you later.”

“Yeah,” Lori said.

He tucked his plastic credit card-like hotel key in his pocket and went out the door. Lori stared after him. The door shut in her face.

“Okay. Fine,” Lori said.

She grabbed her own key and went out the door behind him.

She didn't really intend to follow him, but when her elevator arrived in the lobby, she saw him just going out the front door. She ducked behind a flower arrangement
bigger than the outhouse Pop still kept out by the barn. And then, when she felt sure Chuck hadn't seen her, she inched across the gleaming marble floor and went through the revolving door herself.

Chuck was tall as well as big—at fifteen, he'd already topped six feet—so it was easy keeping his dark head in sight. She bumped into people once or twice and almost stepped out into traffic at a busy intersection when Chuck crossed on a yellow light. But he never looked back, so she stopped worrying about being spotted.

All the way, she kept playing guessing games with herself about where he was actually going. The Olympic Park? One of the sports stadiums? Chuck had never cared about sports. He wouldn't even play in the softball games they always had before 4-H meetings in the summer.

But maybe that was just because the other kids laughed at him running the bases. Mike and Joey imitated him: “Look at me! I'm the Michelin tire man!” “Oh no, I'm shaking the ground!”

Lori thought back—what about when Chuck was younger? When he wasn't fat? For a second, she caught a fleeting memory of her and Chuck and their dad playing catch in the backyard of their old house. Hadn't Chuck been whining, “I don't want it to hit me! It'll hurt!”? And their dad had insisted, “Look, it's a
soft
ball. You won't get hurt. Just catch it.”

She wasn't sure if that was something she truly remembered or something she'd dreamed. Or just plain made up.

Regardless, Chuck didn't like sports now.

The zoo? Chuck didn't like animals. Pop had to remind him a million times a day to feed the hogs.

The CNN tour? Chuck hated watching the news.

Really, Lori couldn't think of anything Chuck liked.

He turned a corner and went into a glitzy, glass building. The sign said, H
IGH
M
USEUM
OF
A
RT
.

Art?
Art?

Lori looked again, almost certain she'd misread the sign. But, no. That's what it said. Maybe the sign went with a different building. She actually went over and peered in a window. A sculpture of a little boy looked back at her, and a painting hung over his head.

Chuck had gone into an art museum.

He didn't come back out, so Lori knew it wasn't a matter of just using the bathroom.

Was it possible that Chuck
liked
art?

Lori didn't know anybody who liked art. Plenty of her friends' mothers did crafts—decoupaging picnic baskets, stenciling Christmas cards, needlepointing little signs with sayings like “A moment on the lips, an eternity on the hips.” But crafts weren't art.

Back when they were in elementary school, they'd had an art teacher come in once a week. She was old and smelled bad, and she'd yelled at Lori once for taking two sheets of green construction paper instead of one. (Lori hadn't even known she'd taken two—they stuck together.) She mostly had them cut out things—
construction-paper leaves in the fall, construction-paper wreaths at Christmas, construction-paper flowers for Mother's Day. (Lori gave hers to Gram, because what was Mom going to do with them?) But there wasn't even an art teacher in high school, not since the last school levy failed.

So if Chuck had liked art all along, there was no way anyone would have known.

Lori started laughing.
Chuck likes art! Chuck likes
art
!

Other people on the sidewalk were giving her strange looks and dodging around her. She sat down on a concrete ledge and kept laughing. Chuck liked art! She didn't usually make fun of Chuck back home, preferring the “Ignore him and maybe he'll go away” approach. But this was too funny not to share. She got up and went into the art museum; as she suspected, she could get to the museum gift shop without paying the admission fee. She bought a postcard with some armless sculpture on the front and wrote on it before she even left the shop:

Dear Angie,

Guess what? My big brother ( and I do mean big ) has a secret obsession. He's been sneaking out to visit . . . art museums. Weird, huh?

I'm fine. Miss you. Can't wait to catch up on all the gossip when I get home.

Love,

Lori

Lori didn't have a stamp, so she tucked the postcard
in her purse to mail later. She started walking out of the museum, but she looked back at the last minute, suddenly curious about what Chuck might possibly see in an art museum, anyway. Through the entryway to the main part of the museum, she could see half of a strange painting of someone with three eyes and two noses and a bluish face. It didn't even look as good as the amateur paintings at the fine arts exhibit at the county fair.

But Chuck was standing in front of it. His back was to Lori, so she watched him watching the picture. He was absolutely still; he didn't so much as scratch his nose. He had the same posture the minister had before the altar at church, breaking Communion bread: straight, erect, reverent. And Chuck
never
stood up straight. He always slumped, his shoulders hunched over as if that would pull his T-shirt forward to hide his fat belly.

Lori started giggling again, so she rushed out the museum door. But, out on the sidewalk again, she stopped laughing. This was weird. Maybe she didn't want to send the postcard to Angie after all. Having Chuck be that weird might make Lori seem weird, too.

Lori started walking down the street, suddenly wanting to get away from the art museum. But she didn't know where else to go. The thought of going to the Coke museum all by herself wasn't appealing at all. She knew how it would be: all these other families and clusters of friends and then Lori, by herself, with no one to mutter back and forth with:
They make how much Coke a day?
Did you ever think it looked like that being mixed up?

Lori wandered down another street, aimlessly, hoping she'd see something else to catch her interest. She had money for shopping, after all; she had the whole day to do with as she wished. Lori tried to convince herself that that was a luxury, but she just felt forlorn. She had nothing to do and nobody to do it with.