The Airport Road
The first Thursday in May my father and I missed our dinner at El Puerto because he wasn’t feeling well, so I suggested Sunday brunch at a new place, his choice. He picked Cracker Barrel.
“When did we get one of those?” I asked, unable to conceal my disdain.
“It’s good,” my father said. “I’ve been a couple of times.”
“When?”
“With Janine’s family. She invited me.”
We took the airport road. The pear trees (Pyrus calleryana) in the median, to which I have a mild allergy, were in bloom. When I was little, I called them popcorn trees because of all the small white flowers. Now every year my father points at them, I nod, and we both smile. I wondered if he’d told Janine that story when she drove him on the airport road. In conflicts around the world, it’s very important who controls the road to the airport. Sometimes the road is shut down and that’s always a sign the conflict is escalating.
At the restaurant the wait was ninety minutes. My father said he wasn’t hungry anyway, so we drove home. I made us eggs and toast and we took sections of the newspaper out to the backyard to enjoy the mild weather.
Before I took my first bite, I heard a thud. I lowered the paper and saw a starling on the grass about ten feet away. It moved its head once and then was still.
My father looked up from his paper. “The little guy snapped his neck on that cable wire.”
We stared at the bird. A warm breeze ruffled a wing feather.
“Does this kind of thing happen often?” I asked.
“Well, Janine and I buried another one behind the mock orange last week.”
My father turned back to his breakfast, but I’d lost my appetite. When he was finished, we buried the bird behind the mock orange (Philadelphus coronaris), right next to the other fresh little mound.
A FEW DAYS LATER Janine and I pulled out of our driveways at the same time. Janine drives a Honda minivan. She has two children under five, one dog, two cats, and a husband whose shifts at the hospital are incompatible with all of that. And yet she has time to spend with my father. Leo told me he remembers American tourists coming to his town when he was a boy. They worried excessively about the roaming, homeless cats. They wanted to feed them, name them. What a luxury, his mother would say, to have time to worry about cats.
At the stop sign at the end of the street, Janine turned right over the railroad bridge and I followed. As we approached the light at Founders Avenue, she turned right again. She was headed toward the university. I guessed she was going to Barracks Mall, a frequent destination of young mothers as it has both a twenty-four-hour pharmacy and one of the most popular cafés in town. I held the wheel at ten and two and looked straight ahead. Janine was wearing sunglasses and I couldn’t tell from the angle of her head if she was glancing in her rearview mirror or not. I turned a couple of times to admire the dogwoods (Cornus florida) in the median. They were just starting to bloom, and while I never would have planted them in a pink-and-white alternating pattern, they were lovely.
We drove the length of Founders Avenue. She was going ten miles over the speed limit, but I kept pace. At the end of the road I prepared to keep straight, anticipating her upcoming left to Barracks, but she took the right fork toward the hospital and merged fast.
I was surprised. The children weren’t in the car with her. Had something happened to one of them? Or her husband? It also seemed at least possible she was pregnant again. Maybe something was wrong?
She pulled into the visitor’s lot and I took the spot next to her. She was not in a rush to get out of the car. In fact, she was finishing her breakfast. She stopped chewing and did a cinematic double take when she saw me. We held each other’s gaze while simultaneously lowering the car windows between us. I watched as the reflection of the sky in her driver’s side window disappeared, revealing Janine’s young and shiny face. She had very good skin. She must have seen a reflection of the hospital building in my passenger-side window give way to my face, which had a spring sunburn.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
At first Janine looked surprised and almost happy to see me, then confused. She finished chewing and swallowed. “Why? What happened?”
“You’re at the hospital.”
“I volunteer here.”
“Oh, that’s great.”
“I read to the kids in the Ambulatory Care unit. Sometimes I do a shift in the gift shop.”
“That’s so great,” I said. “That’s . . . really helpful.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I just wanted to thank you for helping my father bury the bird.”
“That was so sad,” she said.
“And taking him to lunch?” I’d meant to suppress the question mark, but it forced its way out.
Janine frowned a little. “We really enjoy spending time with him.”
“That’s great,” I said, painfully aware of how many times I’d used that word.
“He’s great,” she said. “He gave me some of your mock orange branches and told me how to force them.”
I nodded.
She glanced at the clock in her car. “I should go. So, um, May, you followed me to thank me?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m visiting a friend. A friend who’s in the hospital.” I looked past her car to the rows of hospital windows.
“I hope everything’s okay.”
“Me, too,” I said, and started preparing to get out of the car. “Anyway, thanks for spending time with my father.”
I could see in my peripheral vision that she was staring at me. “You know, sometimes they just need to feel useful.”
“They?”
She sighed. “You know what I mean.”
“My father’s name is Earl.”
THAT NIGHT I ASKED MY FATHER if he’d like to try Cracker Barrel again the following Sunday. We could leave earlier and beat the rush. Confusing it with Crate & Barrel, however, I called it Cracker & Barrel. My father either didn’t notice or didn’t mind. He accepted happily.