Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [170]
Mom and Nicole seemed to soak in this idleness as a much-needed break from their graduate work, and I couldn’t remember ever being this happy before. There was the light-shouldered feeling that a kind of darkness was behind us for good, that we’d gotten through it and that from here on out things would be better. But there was this, too: I was finally taking care of my family the way I’d felt called to from the beginning, since I was a boy and Pop had left the five of us in that cottage in the woods.
And how sweet to be able to give my mother a Mystery Ride, to sit with her and Nicole at a linen-covered table overlooking the sea, the sun going down like some gloriously kept promise, to tell her to order whatever she wanted, to eat and drink her fill, how she looked at me once and shook her head, her eyes shining.
On Sunday we drove straight from Key West to the airport in Miami. The sun was brighter than ever, and I sat in the backseat squinting out at marine supply stores and beach shacks and stretches of blue-green salt water. A cormorant swooped off a rotting post and disappeared into a thick stand of mangroves, and my face and arms were sunburned. With my new bolo tie and its digital screen, I felt like some aristocratic bohemian.
I was inside the airport only twenty minutes when I saw a woman crying near one of the shops. She was thirty-five or forty years old. She had curly black hair, and she was short and round, and three young women were comforting her. They wore the same waitressing uniform of a restaurant along the airport’s corridor, a cotton dress the color of peaches, a white apron cinched in at their hips, these pretty Cubana girls asking the woman if she was all right. Did she call the police? Are those men still down there?
I stopped walking. People passed me by. A businessman’s briefcase bumped the backpack over my shoulder, and he turned and apologized, a man in a blue button-down shirt and yellow tie, his cologne lingering in the air. The woman was saying, “No, they’re still there, and I’m afraid to walk to my gate.”
I was stepping toward the women. I said, “What happened? Do you need some help?” All four of them looked me over, a sunburned tourist in jeans and a short-sleeve shirt and electronic bolo tie, a leather book bag over his shoulder. The woman sniffled and told me her story. She’d just hurried here from another gate, and she’d been pulling her suitcase on wheels behind her. Two men were sitting on the floor against the wall, and one of them called out to her, “Hey, lady, quit dragging your ass.” He pointed to her suitcase and the two men laughed, and the woman stopped and told them off.
“What’d you say to them?”
“I said they had no business talking to me like that and then one of them stood up and bent my arm behind my back and kicked me—” Her voice broke. She put her hand over her mouth and looked down at the crowded gates and shook her head.
Two of the other women had drifted back to work. One remained, her hand on the woman’s shoulder. “Wait for security. They should be here soon.”
But they weren’t here, and I was saying to the woman, “Let’s go. I’ll walk you to your gate.”
She thanked me, her accent New York City. She sniffled once more and grabbed the handle of her suitcase and pulled it as I walked beside her. Up ahead of us were hundreds of people heading home after sharing Thanksgiving with their families, and most of them seemed to be families, mothers and fathers and grandmothers, little kids dozing in their laps or sitting two to a chair sharing a book or a bag of chips. Most of the kids were in a T-shirt and shorts like their parents, others were dressed up. In the center of the terminal was a decorative dividing wall ten or twelve feet high and built out of glass block. Across from it four young black girls in pink dresses laughed