Free Some Things About Flying by Joan Barfoot Page A

driving back to the town where she grew up, where her stomach knotted and her head developed unaccountable aches when she visited, to which she’d driven eight years earlier for her father’s funeral—several times Lila had to pull to the side of the road to weep. Tears broke down roughly half for her mother, half for herself.
    Later she thought, tuning out the minister’s rambling, beaming eulogy at the funeral, by which time she’d become much calmer, more removed, that probably her mother had finally burst from compressing too strenuously her true thoughts and emotions. “Dead of repression” crossed Lila’s mind as an epitaph. She heard herself laugh, quickly covered the sound with a cough. Even a sob; she wasn’t proud at that point.
    Sheila the flight attendant rushes past, fighting her way to the front past harsh frightened voices and flailing limbs, not stopping for anyone. Her blouse is untucked at one side, her dark hair is no longer quite smooth. Seeing her eyes might tell them something: whether she is scared and doomed, or only determined to get someplace.
    She is past before Lila can get a glimpse of her eyes. Anyway, people both show and conceal feelings in different ways, and unless Sheila is actually panicking, it would be hard to define her emotions on such flimsy acquaintance.
    If there is a good time for either repressing or concealing rampant emotion, this must be it.
    Still, Lila can’t believe that things like this happen. People like her don’t die; not this way. They die the way her mother did: plainly and privately.
    Lila and Don and his recent second wife, Anne, saw the family lawyer, chose and sorted possessions, arranged to put the house up for sale. Don took the television set and the dining-room furniture. Lila took the pink-and-gold-flower-rimmed china her grandmother had passed on to her mother. “That’s all you want?” Don asked.
    â€œI think so.” Certainly not the embroidery hoops with which her mother stitched pillowcases for the poor or newly married, or the wicker baskets she packed with soups, breads and casseroles for the sick, bereaved or hungry.
    An astonishing number of people turned up for the funeral. “She was always so kind,” people said, touching Don’s black elbow, embracing Lila’s black shoulders. “She was a very good woman, your mother.”
    And so she was. Lila, who has not followed her example, will have many fewer people, with many fewer benevolent memories, at her own funeral. Which may be dreadfully, surprisingly soon. Oh please, she thinks again. I’ll do better. I’ll be better.
    Back home, when Geoff asked about the funeral and its attendant events and characters, she found herself looking at his hands resting with apparent concern on hers. “It’s too late and too little, just to describe it,” she said. “Too many feelings in a short time. I think it’s like a bad joke—you had to be there.”
    She thought, Those stumpy, porky fingers, I’ve had them on my body, how could I? And think where else they’ve been.
    There are moments when the eye, or something, is caught, turns over, and everything changes.
    â€œGeoff,” she began carefully, “I know you save lives, and have a lot of demands and a lot of people wanting your attention.” She wondered what the word was for his expression—preening, she thought finally. He found this flattering, and looked like a plumpish, proud—oh, she didn’t know quite what, but some creature that preened. Not a parrot, exactly; a parrot’s features were sharp.
    â€œAnd that’s very nice for you, and well deserved, but it’s not, as it turns out, very compatible with love. Or with care, for that matter.”
    She thought that was clear, but apparently not.
    â€œWhat are you saying? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
    â€œI’m saying