Grounded (12 page)

In October, just before the first anniversary of the crash, Mother asked if I wanted to go to the cemetery with her and make a flower bed around the family gravestone.

“I think we should plant a lilac bush and some roses,” she said.

“You said you’d vomit if you ever smelled another rose,” I reminded her.

“I’m getting past that,” Mother replied.

I was, too. So we borrowed Old Mary from Aunt Josie, who also loaned us a rake, a shovel, and a pair of gardening gloves for Mother.

It was my idea to clear a spot to plant Big Boy tomatoes every summer in memory of Wayne Junior.
Mother liked that idea. But once we made a place for the roses, the lilac bush, and the tomato garden, there wasn’t room left around the granite gravestone to plant anything for Daddy.

I told Mother that Daddy didn’t like flowers much, anyway. “He liked casseroles tons better,” I said. “I’ll learn to cook some of his favorite dishes. We can remember him that way.”

“Are you suggesting we branch out from our Schwan’s diet?” Mother asked, smiling slyly. “Don’t worry. I’m ready to resume cooking duties.”

“I can help,” I said. Because I really did want to learn how to cook. But I also wanted to think of a good way to remember my dad.

I thought twice before asking my next question, but I couldn’t resist.

“Was I really his favorite?” I said, kneeling in the grass and smoothing the dirt in the future tomato bed.

“Your father and I didn’t have favorites,” Mother said. She had taken off the gardening gloves and was gathering up Aunt Josie’s tools.

“But you
said
at your living funeral—” I started. Then I stopped. Maybe I’d misheard her. Maybe I was just wishing she’d delivered that postcard from Daddy.

“Lilac Rose was more like me, that’s all,” Mother said, almost like she was apologizing.

“So I
was
Daddy’s favorite!” I concluded, smacking the dirt with my hands.

Mother set the tools down and came over to where I was sitting. She pulled me up so I was standing in front of her. Then she took my grimy hands in hers and stared me in the eye.

“If Daddy’d had a living funeral, do you know what he would’ve told you?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said. “No idea.”

Mother looked like she might start crying. But instead, she smiled and squeezed my hands hard. “That from the moment you were born, you were the apple of his eye.”

“Really?”

“Really. Do you know what he wanted to name you?”

“What?”

“Waynette,” she said, closing her eyes as if the word hurt her brain. “You are indebted to me for sparing you from that.”

Waynette? Waynette?!
We laughed for five minutes about that. Then I decided I needed to swap Mother something really good for that other thing she’d told
me. I pretended to fiddle with the handle on Aunt Josie’s rake.

“You were an awful good mother to Lilac Rose,” I said. “That’s what she would’ve told you if she’d had a living funeral. And you kept Wayne Junior from being a complete derelict.”

She laughed. “I did my best.”

The sun was warm that day. Crisp autumn leaves covered the ground. I couldn’t resist kicking them around for a bit. I remembered that’s what I’d been doing when Jimmy Chuck Walters came to our house to tell us the news about the plane. How it’d fallen from the sky. How they’d fallen, just like leaves from a tree, in the fall. And here it was again, fall.

“Do you miss them?” I asked Mother in a quiet voice.

“Every day,” she said. “Every single day.”

“Me too. I’m just afraid—” I stopped.

“What?” she asked. “What are you afraid of?”

And that’s when I started crying. Big, fat messy tears rolled out of my eyes and down my face.

“Honey, what?” Mother said. “What are you afraid of?”

It was hard to talk because of how hard I was crying. I didn’t know where all the tears were coming
from. Once they started pouring out, I wasn’t sure they’d ever stop. My emotions had snuck up on me, right there in the cemetery.

“What?” Mother asked.

I couldn’t say it. It was too scary. As scary as Mr. Clem was, this was ten times scarier. Twenty times. A hundred times scarier.

“Tell me what you’re afraid of,” Mother said, wrapping her arms around me. “Tell me.”

“That I’m going to forget them,” I said.

She hugged me harder. “You never will. Never. I can promise you that. You can’t forget them because they’re all around you. Everywhere you look, everything you do, you’ll feel them. You’ll see them.”

It came to me in a flash of inspiration while we were still at the cemetery. I asked Mother if I could return Old Mary to Aunt Josie’s when we got home. There was something I needed to talk to her about: a way to remember Daddy.

When Aunt Josie heard what I wanted, she opened her metal address book and wrote down the name of a business in Kankakee, Illinois, along with a street address. I sent a letter to the company that very day.

Three weeks later I had what I wanted: five little
brass plaques with the words:
WE ARE INDEBTED TO WAYNE T. OAKLAND, SR. FOR MAKING THIS POSSIBLE.

I glued one of the plaques on Daddy’s tackle box. He would’ve liked that. Then I glued the second plaque on the wall of the breezeway to Mamaw’s house. I attached the third one in the breezeway to Uncle Waldo’s house. I used rubber cement to glue the fourth plaque to the dashboard of Old Mary.

And the fifth plaque? I keep it on my writing desk. Because I wouldn’t have been possible if it hadn’t been for Daddy. And odd as it might sound, writing every day with that little plaque on my desk keeps me grounded, just like all those dolls keep Mamaw grounded. Like tinkering with the breezeway keeps Uncle Waldo grounded. Like caring for her gentlemen keeps Aunt Josie grounded.

And like I keep Mother grounded.

All that time she thought she was the one who grounded me as a punishment. And she surely did in the B.C. era.

But in that first year A.D., I was the one who grounded Mother. And I intend to keep her grounded for the rest of her life.

I would never have written this book if I hadn’t wandered into Debi Gasperson Baird’s hair salon in Mountain Grove, Missouri, almost twenty years ago. There I met a woman who can tell a better story while shampooing hair than I could ever hope to write. I wish I could attach a little brass plaque to the front cover of every copy of this book with the words: “I am indebted to Debi Gasperson Baird for all the stories she’s told over the years about how she learned to style hair with her mother at their family funeral home after the death of her father and brother.” Thank you, Debi, for letting me borrow your breezeway, your Salisbury steak TV dinners, and especially your aunt Peg, who became Aunt Josie. And I’m sorry I still haven’t learned how to blow-dry my hair correctly.

I am also grateful to my nieces, Flora Klise and Eliza von Zerneck, as well as my nephews, Lorenzo and Sebastian von Zerneck. The character of Clem was born one winter night
several years ago when the five of us were trying to make up a scary story together in the dark. Clem wasn’t a cremator then, but he was certainly creepy. I don’t think any of us slept very well that night.

Thanks to my wonderful editor, Liz Szabla, for always asking the right questions and for trusting me to find the story I’m trying to tell. Thanks to my first reader and brother, James Klise, for his wise suggestions written in pencil in the margins of my early drafts. And to my dear friends Joyce McMurtrey, Sherry Huff man, all my pals at Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration in Mountain Grove, Missouri, whose names I couldn’t help borrowing for the denizens of Digginsville, and to Tim Bryant, who now trusts me to cut his hair: Thank you all for keeping me grounded.