Of course, hearing Mom say that even once was enough to make Lori puke. But she was trying not to think about anything Mom said. She didn’t want Los Angeles to be another Chicago, another Phoenix. She wasn’t going to let Mom get to her.
Not after they’d been on that plane, almost crashing, and Mom hadn’t bothered even to say, I love you to Lori or Chuck.
The introducer stood up, and Lori braced herself for another maddening burst of praise for Mom, some clump of overblown words that made her sound like someone Lori had never met. This introducer was a tall, thin, Hispanic man (Latino? Chicano? Lori would feel a lot more comfortable about different people if she knew what they wanted to be called.) He seemed supremely confident, waiting calmly at the podium until the banquet room was quiet.
“We have a special speaker for you tonight,” the man said.
Oh no. Here we go again, Lori thought.
“I could give you a long list of her awards and accomplishments, but I thought I’d do something a little different,” the man continued. “I have a friend at C-SPAN who was able to get me this footage. Watch.”
The lights instantly dimmed. A giant blue screen lowered from the ceiling. In seconds, the blue faded, and there, larger than life, was Mom, sitting at a table, leaning toward a microphone. Lori tried to identify the occasion, but it was hard, because what else had Mom done the past eight years but lean into microphones? This must have been fairly early on, because Mom looked a lot younger. Her hair was long and feathered back from her face, the way Lori remembered her wearing it years ago, when Lori was a little girl.
When Dad was still alive.
A flickering label appeared beneath Mom’s face: CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY, JOAN LAWSON—WIDOW OF INSURED.
Oh, Lori thought. Oh no.
Though she couldn’t remember anyone ever telling her so, she knew that Mom’s whole speaking career was launched because she testified before Congress about Dad’s death. Some people saw her on the evening news and were impressed. They invited her to speak at churches and Farm Bureau meetings in surrounding counties. And the next thing anyone knew, she was jetting across the country talking every night.
Lori had never seen her mother’s testimony.
On the screen, Mom was biting her lip.
“Yes,” she answered some unseen questioner. “My husband and I owned a six-hundred-acre farm in Ohio. That is, we owned what we didn’t owe the bank for.”
The camera panned back. Some of the congressmen were snickering.
“And then your husband was killed on your farm last fall?” someone asked, his voice dripping with that false sympathy that always made Lori angry.
On screen, Mom didn’t even recoil.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “The electrical system on one of our tractors malfunctioned. There was a spark. . . . The fuel tank exploded.”
“And your husband was on the tractor when this happened?”
“Yes,” Mom said.
There was a brief silence. Even congressmen were at a loss for words after that.
Then one of them said, “And your husband went to his grave believing he was well insured?”
Mom hesitated, almost as if she wanted to protest the wording of the question.
“When we had our first child, we bought a life insurance policy that was supposed to provide for our children if anything happened to either of us. We wanted . . . we wanted them to have good lives.”
“You’re referring to policy number XG1065387, held with the Rylen Insurance Company?”
“Yes,” Mom said.
“And you had paid all the premiums on this policy?”
“Yes,” Mom said. She took a sip of the water in front of her. “It wasn’t cheap. And those were scary times for farmers—two of our neighbors were going through bankruptcies. Several times we talked about taking our chances, canceling the policy and just praying that nothing went wrong. But we knew we could never forgive ourselves if—” She took another drink. Her eyes were misty. Lori thought she looked like one of those people you saw on the evening news all the time, labeled HURRICANE SURVIVOR, TORNADO SURVIVOR, MASSACRE SURVIVOR. She looked practically otherworldly, as if she’d witnessed things nobody else would understand.
The congressmen were waiting for her to finish her sentence, but she didn’t. Finally one of them spoke.
“So you had every reason to believe that, upon your husband’s death, the Rylen Insurance Company would pay in full?”
Mom nodded.
“But they denied your claim?”
Mom nodded again.
Was that what Mom’s testimony had been about? Lori wondered. She had never known. Mom had never told her. Gram and Pop had never told her. When she was six years old, her father’s death alone seemed like a big enough event that Congress needed to be informed. And after that, nobody talked about it.
Had the insurance company cheated them? Were they poor after Daddy died?
Of course they’d been poor. They’d had to sell their house and farm and move in with Gram and Pop. But Mom had just said, “Won’t it be nicer this way? You can see Gram and Pop all the time.”
Lori’s mind was reeling. She missed some of what Mom and the congressmen were saying, up on the screen. When she started paying attention again, a congressman was saying, “So you were left with nothing?”
“Just—” Mom seemed to be having trouble speaking. “Social security.”
“Mrs. Lawson,” one of the congressmen asked gently. “You have several children, don’t you?”
Mom nodded. But instead of giving a number, she started listing their names.
“There’s Chuck,” she began slowly. “He’s seven. Then there’s Lori, who’s six.” She stretched out their names, as if caressing them. “And Mike, who’s three. And Joey, who’s two. And Emma, the baby.”
It was agony listening to that slow litany of names. Even Lori, who certainly knew how many brothers and sisters she had, felt like the list was endless. Twice, a congressman started to interrupt, as if expecting Mom to be done.
“That’s five, right?” a congressman asked when she finally stopped.
“Yes,” Mom said. “I have five children.”
“And now you have to raise them alone, without the insurance money you had every reason to believe was yours,” another congressman said. “Mrs. Lawson, how do you intend to survive?”
Mom’s cheeks were flushed. She sat up very straight.
“By the grace of God,” she said, “we’ll get by.”
She sounded almost noble, saying that. All of the congressmen were silenced. Lori got chills, and the banquet hall was so quiet that Lori could hear Chuck breathing behind her. It was that line. Lori felt like she had been watching the scene in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett O’Hara raises a fistful of dirt to the sky and proclaims, “I’ll never be hungry again.” But that was just an actress, pretending, and this was Mom, Lori’s mom, for real. Lori had never seen anything so real before in her entire life.
The screen went blank. Beneath it, the flesh-and-blood Mom was walking toward the podium. She seemed to have an incredible distance to go. Lori had a sudden flash of pity for her mother, having to speak now, with the banquet hall still hushed with awe, the image from eight years ago still burning in everyone’s minds.
Mom reached the podium and stepped up on a stool. She expertly bent the microphone down to her level.
“Well,” she said briskly. “I wish someone had told me then how out-of-date that hairstyle would look now.”
Everyone burst out laughing. Lori could almost feel the tension being released. It reminded her of a time last year when she’d gotten a ride home from school with some neighbor kids, and the driver had decided to race the train at the railroad crossing on Ford’s Pike Road. The train missed the back bumper of the car by inches—Lori could see the engineer’s outraged, worried face close-up. Speeding on down the road, the whole carload had broken out into the same kind of laughter that rolled thr
ough the banquet hall now. It wasn’t so much that people were amused; it was more that they desperately needed to do something with the air in their lungs.
Everyone seemed so relieved to be laughing that they went on for several minutes. Mom had to hold up her hand for silence.
“That film clip was from a very long time ago,” she said. “What I wanted to speak about tonight was the time we can still do something about. The present.”
And then Mom rolled into a speech Lori had heard before, in Philadelphia, maybe, or Atlanta. Lori studied her mother without hearing a single one of her words. Mom said something funny and grinned proudly as the crowd laughed again, this time with true mirth.
How can she? Lori wondered. How can she go on like usual after they showed that film? How can she smile at all?
Lori herself wanted to cry. No—she wanted to scream. No—she didn’t know what she wanted. It was so unfair, the way everything had happened. Daddy shouldn’t have died. Mom and Gram and Pop shouldn’t have pretended everything was okay. And—maybe—they shouldn’t have had to sell their house and farm. Was that true?
Lori felt like there was a blender going full speed inside her, mixing up all her thoughts and emotions. She forced herself to sit up very straight and pretend she was listening to her mother. But she didn’t want to sit still, not now. And there was no way she could have heard a single word her mother said over the roaring in her ears.
Chuck listened to the entire videotape of his mother’s congressional testimony with his mouth hanging open, in awe.
Mom has really suffered, he thought. She knows about pain. She understands.
It was strange how happy that thought made him.
WHAT JOAN LAWSON WANTED TO SAY DURING HER SPEECH IN LOS ANGELES:
How dare you. Did you all enjoy that, watching my grief? Was I entertaining enough?
You’re all too close to Hollywood. Everything’s entertainment here. Did any of you think about the fact that I wasn’t acting up there? That my husband really died and I was fighting real tears? That I’ve got two kids out in the audience who might not be ready to see that yet?
I don’t know when I thought Lori and Chuck would be ready to see that particular videotape. Maybe never. I’ve never watched it myself. I’ve never wanted to.
Living it was hard enough.
And now you think I’m going to smile and walk to the podium and act like everything’s fine—you paid me enough, you deserve to get your jollies from my grief?
I’m smiling. I’m walking to the podium. I’m making a joke. I’m doing what I’m supposed to. I learned a long time ago that you can’t crumble to the floor in agony just because you want to.
But don’t think you could ever pay me enough for my grief.
WHAT JOAN LAWSON ACTUALLY SAID DURING HER SPEECH IN LOS ANGELES:
But when the time comes that you’re signing that final contract, that’s not the moment to think, Oh no, what am I agreeing to here? Did I read all the fine print? In life, too, as in law, you’ve got to pay attention as you go along. You can’t rush through, eager to get to the next page, because you might miss a cogent point. You might miss the scent of roses, your two-year-old’s best smile, the sound of the high school band marching in the Fourth of July parade. . . . And when you get to the last line of this contract called life—a contract between you and God, if you will—you can’t hesitate. You have to grasp the pen firmly and write your last signature with a flourish. Because at the end, there are no more appeals courts, no more addenda, no more codicils. When you’ve signed your last, you have to put away the documents and go out into the sunshine, knowing you’ve done your best.
It was all Lori could do not to slam the hotel door.
Mom and Chuck had walked into the room ahead of her. Chuck was sitting on the bed already, untying his shoes. Mom was hanging up the jacket from her suit.
Lori stood with her back against the door, stunned.
Mom started washing off her makeup at the sink.
“That’s it?” Lori finally burst out. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
Mom turned her head, her mascara smeared across her face as though she’d been crying.
“What do you want me to say?” she asked.
“I don’t know!” Lori exclaimed. “Something! Anything! How about, ‘Well, now at least you know what I told Congress. Too bad you had to find out in front of five hundred strangers.’ How about, ‘Gee, I really meant to tell you about that insurance policy before now.’ How about—”
“I’m sorry,” Mom said.
Chuck kept his head down, accepting his mother’s words. Lori wasn’t satisfied.
“‘I’m sorry’?” she repeated. “That’s all you have to say?”
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Mom said. “It was totally unnecessary for them to show that.”
Her tone was calm, refined. It infuriated Lori.
“‘Unnecessary,’” she echoed again. “‘Unnecessary.’ Sifting flour is unnecessary. Double-stitching hems is unnecessary. Algebra is unnecessary. That film clip was—is—”
“Essential,” Chuck finished quietly for her.
Lori stared at her brother in surprise. She wouldn’t have guessed he even knew the word “essential.” But it was exactly right, exactly the word she’d been searching for.
Mom didn’t reply. She went back to scrubbing makeup from her face.
“Why did you bring us on this trip?” Lori whispered.
Her ears were ringing again. Her heart beat in panicky thuds. It was like being back on the plane again, convinced she was seconds away from crashing.
Mom wouldn’t look directly at Lori and Chuck. She stared at their reflections in the mirror.
“I wanted you to see—,” she began. “I wanted you to know—”
Lori couldn’t wait for another deliberate answer. It would just be a half answer, anyway. A mask.
“Oh, I know why you brought us,” Lori accused. “You wanted to get us to hate Pickford County. Just like you do.”
She could have gone on, said, You wanted us to hate ourselves, too. But those words didn’t tumble out so easily.
“What do you mean? I don’t hate Pickford County!” Mom protested. “It’s my home!”
“Oh, yeah? Then why aren’t you ever there? Why have you spent this whole trip telling Chuck and me how much better the rest of the world is?” This was safe terrain—safer, anyway, than talking about the videotape. Lori started mimicking her mother, “‘Chicago has such great shopping—not like Pickford County. Can’t get good shopping like this back home.’ ‘Let’s eat out at this fancy restaurant, because you can’t get anything but McDonald’s back home.’ ‘Pickford High School doesn’t have an art program, does it? Not like a real school.’ ‘If Lori weren’t such a Pickford County hick, she’d know better than to wear that stupid 4-H dress outside of her own house.’” Mom hadn’t actually ever said that, but Lori felt as though she had.
“Stop it!” Mom commanded.
But Lori was on a roll.
“You don’t have to lie to us. You hate Pickford County so much, why didn’t you just move us all out of there with you after”—Lori forced herself to say the words—“after Daddy died?”
Mom was blinking rapidly. She swiped one of the stiff, white hotel washcloths against her eyelids. For a minute, Lori wondered if she was wiping away mascara or tears. Then Lori decided she didn’t care.
Mom finally turned around to face Lori.
“I don’t hate Pickford County,” Mom said slowly. “I’d never leave it. When your daddy died, everyone we knew brought us casseroles, for weeks. A bunch of our neighbors got together and finished harvesting all our corn, without even being asked. The auctioneer who sold our farm wouldn’t let me pay him. Thirty people offered to baby-sit Mike and Joey during the funeral. For a long time, I got hugs every time I walked into church. And then—when I stopped needing them—the hugs stopped. People knew. It isn’t like that, other pla
ces. That’s why I could never leave Pickford County.”
“But you did!” Lori insisted. Tears were gathering in her eyes, but she tried to ignore them. “You do. You leave it all the time. You leave us. And you want us to leave, too.”
“Oh, Lori, don’t be so melodramatic,” Mom said. “I’m not leaving on purpose. It’s just my job. And this trip—I just wanted you to understand there’s a whole big world out here, beyond the county line. I don’t want you to get married at eighteen, like I did, never knowing there are other choices out there.”
“But what if that’s what I want?” Lori asked.
“Is it?” Mom asked. Her eyes were dry now. She took a step toward Lori. “Got your future husband all picked out already? Who’s it going to be? One of those perfect gentlemen who’ve been picking on Chuck? Poor guy probably doesn’t stand a chance. You get your claws in him, he won’t know what hit him. Next thing he knows, he’ll have a mortgage and a passel of kids to support, and he’ll never be able to come up for air.”
Lori gasped.
“Is that how it was with you and Dad?” she almost whimpered.
“No,” Mom said, shaking her head violently. “No. It wasn’t.”
Chuck recognized the look on Mom’s face. Shame. Abject, heartbreaking, regret-filled shame. Mom backed away from Lori and slumped onto the bed beside Chuck. She looked at him in surprise, like she’d forgotten he was there, witnessing this. Then she put her arm around his shoulder.
Chuck stiffened at first, thinking, Fifteen-year-old boys are not supposed to let their mothers hug them. But it felt so good, he decided he didn’t care. He leaned into the hug.
“Your father and I were in love,” Mom said. “We wanted to get married. We wanted kids. We were happy.” Mom squeezed Chuck’s shoulder. She patted the bed on the other side. “Come on, Lori. Sit down and we can talk about all of this. Without screaming. Without either one of us screaming.”
Mom held her arm out stiffly, like she was just waiting for Lori to slide into position, into her mother’s embrace.
Lori wondered how her mother could possibly think she wanted a hug now—from her.