Hickey laughed and tousled the hair on Huey’s great unkempt head. “Home free for another year, Buckethead.”
A smile slowly appeared on the giant’s rubbery face. “Yeah.” He put the truck into gear, eased forward, and joined the flow of traffic leaving the mall.
Peter McDill stood in the McDonald’s Playland like a statue in a hurricane. Toddlers and teenagers tore around him with abandon, leaping on and off the foam-padded playground equipment in their sock feet. The screeches and laughter were deafening. Peter searched among them for his mother, his eyes wet. In his right hand he clutched the carved locomotive Huey had given him, utterly unaware that he was holding it.
The glass door of the restaurant opened, and a woman with frosted hair and wild eyes appeared in it. She looked like his mother, but not exactly. This woman was different somehow. She looked too old, and her clothes were torn. She pushed two children out of the doorway, which his mother would never do, and began looking frantically around the playground. Her gaze jumped from child to child, lighted on Peter, swept on, then returned.
“Mom?” he said uncertainly.
The woman’s face seemed to collapse inward upon itself. She rushed to Peter and crushed him against her, then lifted him into her arms. His mother hadn’t done that in a long, long time. A terrible wail burst from her throat, freezing the storm of children into a still life.
“Oh, dear Jesus,” Margaret keened. “My baby, my baby, my sweet baby …”
Peter felt hot tears rolling down his cheeks. As his mother squeezed him, the little wooden train dropped from his hand onto the pebbled concrete. A toddler wandered over, picked it up, smiled, and walked away with it.
One Year Later
Will Jennings swung his Ford Expedition around a dawdling tanker truck and swerved back into the right lane of the airport road. The field was less than a mile away, and he couldn’t keep from watching the planes lifting over the trees as they took off. It had been nearly a month since he’d been up, and he was anxious to fly.
“Keep your eyes on the road,” said his wife from the seat beside him.
Karen Jennings was thirty-nine, a year younger than her husband, but much older in some ways.
“Daddy’s watching the airplanes!” Abby chimed from her safety seat in the back. Though only five-and-a-half years old, their daughter never hesitated to interject her comments into any conversation. Will looked at his rearview mirror and smiled at Abby. Facially, she was a miniature version of Karen, with strawberry-blonde curls, piercing green eyes, and a light dusting of freckles across her nose. As he watched, she pointed at the back of her mother’s head.
Will laid his right hand on Karen’s knee. “I sure wish my girls would come along with old Dad.” With Abby present, he often referred to himself as “Dad” and Karen as “Mom”, the way his father had done. “Just jump in the plane and forget about everything for three days.”
“Can we, Mom?” cried Abby. “Can we?”
“And what do we wear for clothes?” Karen asked in a taut voice.
“I’ll buy you both new wardrobes on the coast.”
“Yaaayy!” Abby cheered. “Look, there’s the airport!”
The white control tower of the terminal had come into sight.
“We don’t have any insulin,” Karen pointed out.
“Daddy can write me a subscription!”
“Prescription, honey,” Will corrected.
“She knows the right word.”
“I want to go to the beach!”
“I can’t believe you started this again,” Karen said under her breath. “Daddy won’t be spending any time at the beach, honey. He’ll be nervous as a cat until he gives his lecture to all those other doctors. Then they’ll spend hours talking about their days in medical school. And then he’ll tear up his joints trying to play golf for three days straight.”
“If you come,” Will said, “we can beat the bushes around Ocean Springs for some undiscovered Walter Anderson stuff.”
“Noooo,” Abby said in a plaintive voice. She hated their art-buying explorations, which usually entailed hours of searching small-town back streets, and sometimes waiting in the car. “You won’t be playing golf, Mom. You can take me to the beach.”
“Yeah, Mom,” Will echoed.
Karen cut her eyes at him. Full of repressed anger, they flashed like green warning beacons. “I agreed to chair this flower show two years ago. It’s the sixtieth anniversary of the Junior League, and I don’t know whose brilliant idea it was to have a flower show, but it’s officially my problem. I’ve put off everything until the last minute, and there are over four hundred exhibitors.”
“You got everything nailed down day before yesterday,” Will told her. There wasn’t much use in pressing the issue, but he felt he should try. Things had been tense for the past six months, and this would be the first trip he had made without Karen in a long time. It seemed symbolic, somehow. “You’re just going to agonize until the whole circus starts on Monday. Four nights of hell. Why not blow it off until then?”
“I can’t do it,” she said with a note of finality. “Drop it.”
Will sighed and watched a 727 lift over the treeline to his left.
Karen leaned forward and switched on the CD player, which began to thump out the teen dance groove of Britney Spears. Abby immediately began to sing along. “Hit me baby one more time …”
“Now, if you want to take Abby by yourself,” Karen said, “you can certainly do that.”
“What did you say, Mom?”
“You know I can’t,” Will said with exasperation.
“You mean you can’t do that and play golf with your med school buddies. Right?”
Will felt the old weight tighten across his chest. “This is once a year, Karen. I’m giving the keynote speech, and the whole thing is very political. You know that. With the new drug venture, I’ll have to spend hours with the Searle people—”
“You don’t have to explain,” she said with satisfaction. “Just don’t try to make me blow off my obligations when you won’t do the same.”
Will swung the Expedition into the general aviation area. Lines of single- and twin-engine planes waited on the concrete apron, tethered to rings set in the cement, their wheels chocked against the wind. Just seeing them lightened his heart.
“You’re the one who encouraged me to be more social,” Karen said in the strained voice she’d used earlier.
“I’m not joining the Junior League when I grow up,” Abby said from the backseat. “I’m going to be a pilot.”
“I thought you were going to be a doctor,” said Will.
“A flying doctor, silly!”
“Flying doctor sure beats housewife,” Karen said sotto voce.
Will took his wife’s hand as he braked beside his Beechcraft Baron 58. “She’s only five, babe. One day she’ll understand what you sacrificed.”
“She’s almost six. And sometimes I don’t understand it myself.”
He squeezed Karen’s hand and gave her an understanding look. Then he got out, unstrapped