Free Every Happy Family by Dede Crane Page B

said that if I wanted an answer to my relationship question, I had to ask my birth mother about it.”
    â€œSo, I’m sorry, was she in prison for the –”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    â€œOr was this murder figurative?”
    â€œHmm. Like he died of a broken heart? I guess I don’t exactly know.”
    â€œContinue please.”
    â€œSo, we’re at this restaurant and Faye is yabbering on about her husband, Nickel – What sort of name is Nickel? – and their apartment on Central Park West. On and on about the cost of slipcovers and new drapes. Les and I politely let her talk about herself for an hour straight.” Annie turns to look squarely at Jonathan’s warm, brown, tolerant eyes. “She didn’t ask one question about our lives, our upbringing, what we did for a living, if we had any children. It was unbelievable.”
    â€œPerhaps it was her way of protecting herself from the pain of having abandoned her children?”
    â€œWell, like Les said, she didn’t do it once, she did it twice, so how painful could it have been?”
    â€œBut perhaps it wasn’t...how to put it delicately, the same father?”
    â€œWell, after enough warm sake shooters I finally cut right in and asked just that – did Les and I have the same father? She looked like I’d just punched her in the stomach. The hoods lifted on her eyes and I could see her making an enormous effort to continue to sit there, and I thought, with sudden hope, that she was going to crack and we were going to meet our real mom.”
    â€œIt sounds heartbreaking.”
    At that, Annie can’t help but give his big hand a stroke. “In a rather cold voice, Faye told us, ‘Yes. You had the same father.’ It was very satisfying to have that confirmed.”
    â€œHow odd to give you both up then.”
    â€œNo kidding. So then, despite Les nudging me under the table, I had to ask the next question: Why did you give us up?”
    â€œShe must have expected that.”
    â€œâ€˜If you want to blame someone,’ she said, eyes wide open now as anger crept into her voice, and, I thought those were good signs, ‘blame your father. He was the one who was married with his own -’”
    Without warning the plane has tipped its nose into a dive. What happens next happens all at once. A forward thunk of luggage overhead, Annie’s ears pop and fill with cottony silence. The flight attendant hits the deck and a hundred yellow fez-shaped masks attached to opaque plastic bags drop from overhead compartments with the click-shuffle of jack-in-the-boxes. In the near distance the plane screams obscenely at the ground and the little vodka bottles topple soundless over the edge of Annie’s tray.
    She flashes on the instructional-video parent placing a mask over her own face first but believes there is all the time in the world to fit Les’s bendy rubber mask over his sleeping nose and mouth, slip the elastic behind his head onto the remarkably handy slots behind his ears. He blinks at her, groggy eyed, and she loves him completely. Her own mask smells like the inside of a Canadian Tire store, and when she breathes in, the oxygen bag collapses in on itself. She breathes out and still no movement of air. One more time and it’s clear to her that it’s not working. Slipping off the yellow cup, she places it on her head, the strap under her chin, and turns to Les. His face is sweetly confused as she hunches her shoulders and grunts like a monkey. She turns her monkey routine on Jonathan, who’s pushed back against his seat, hyperventilating into his own deflated bag. And as she laughs at him, herself, at the whole insane situation, the plane levels off and its sharp whinny fades and settles back to its quiet roar. Less than a minute has passed.
    A man’s southern accent oozes from the walls. “This is Captain Kyle Hue speaking. Very sorry about