Lost Read Free

Kelly’s age. Guilt, guilt, guilt. The mortgage happened when Mom needed money for a hospice. I told her—promised her—I wouldn’t put a mortgage on the house, that was her gift to me and Kelly, but what can you do?
    My dad, a New York state trooper, he used to have a saying when he was about to deal with something important:
I’m loaded for bear.
Well, I thought I was loaded for bear, or at least loaded for Kelly. But when she finally did come home what did her mother do?
    Mom burst into tears.
    Because Kelly is smiling that impish smile, the one she first learned moments after being born. That smile I hadn’tseen for a while, not directed at me. A smile that breaks my heart because I miss it so.
    “Mom? Why are you crying? Did something happen?”
    I’m shaking my head. Can’t get the words out so I point to my lips, and then to her.
    “You want to talk,” Kelly says. “Sure, yeah. You saw me on the bike. It was really dumb, me not wearing a helmet. I know that and I’m sorry. Seth was wearing his helmet, did you notice? He gave me a hard time, said it was so retarded, not wearing protection for your brainpan. Isn’t it weird he’d say ‘brainpan’? But that’s Seth. And the tattoo, Mom?”
    Kelly swings around, lifts her little midi-blouse.
    “It’s a fake. Body art. Got it at this place in Long Beach, on the boardwalk.”
    I wipe my eyes, blow my nose, very nearly speechless. “Oh, Kelly.”
    My daughter plunks herself on the stool next to me. With her amazing eyes and her amazing smile, she looks five going on twenty. “You’ve got to get over this worry thing, Mom. I’m okay. Really. The helmet? Won’t happen again.”
    “People get killed on motorcycles,” I respond, my voice husky.
    “Yeah, they do. They get killed by lightning, too. And by worrying themselves to death.”
    “Who’s Seth?”
    Kelly looks at her fingernails. “You’re going to ground me, right?”
    “Absolutely.”
    “Then I better go to my room,” she says, and flounces away, as if it’s fun to be grounded. As if being grounded was her idea.
    She stops on the stairway, looking back at me in the kitchen.
    “Don’t worry, okay?” she says. “There’s just totally no reason to worry about me.”
    But there is. Big-time. And, as it turns out, for a much bigger reason than I ever imagined.
    3. Man Of Steel
    The thing about a turkey buzzard is that it looks really ugly perched on a branch or hopping around next to roadkill. Looks less like a bird, more like feathered hyena with hunched shoulders and a hooked nose. But let the ungainly critter soar and it becomes unspeakably beautiful, rising on big and glorious wings. What an amazing transformation, from a hideous bag of cackling bones to an elegant dark angel, circling in the noonday sun.
    Ricky Lang envies the buzzard. He’s sprawled on the trunk lid of his BMW 760i, the twelve-cylinder sedan, staring up into the blinding blue sky. What he wants, what he really and truly wants at this very moment is to be that buzzard. Riding the updraft without effort, just the slightest wind-ripple of white feathers marking the edge of his great black wings. White feathers like daubs of ceremonial paint. Not as valuable or potent as eagle feathers, he’ll grant you that, but Ricky prefers the buzzard to the eagle because buzzards love to fly for the sake of flying.
    Oh, baby, how they love to soar on the blurry heat rising from the vast casino parking lot. They soar over the malls and highways, anywhere there’s an updraft. Of course buzzards keep their eyes peeled for food, for something newly dead, that’s what they do, how they survive. But it isn’t just hunger that motivates the birds. Ricky has seen scores of turkey buzzards far out into the Florida Bay, circling miles from shore.Soaring like that, over water, a buzzard takes its chances. If it has to rest in the water it will be unable to launch itself back into the air. Feathers soaked, it will drown. Yet still it