Unremarried Widow Read Online Free PDF Page A

something feels too good, you’re sure something bad’s going to happen.”
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    Beside our house in Georgia, my father kept a runway where the hills sloped into flat land. He parked a single-engine Piper Cub in a hangar by our house. The plane had seats upholstered in red leather, cracked in places, and windows that slid open in the back. A layer of dust coated the instruments in the console. My father took my mother and me flying the way some families go for a drive, and a week after my fifth birthday he pushed the plane out of the hangar for an afternoon flight. It was mid-June and warm and the backs of my thighs stuck to the seat as my mother belted me in. She stood in the open door of the airplane and pulled the seat belt tight across the tops of my legs until the fabric pinched my skin.
    â€œIt’s too tight,” I said.
    â€œLeave it.”
    â€œYou sure you don’t want to come?” my father asked her.
    She shook her head. “No, Lamar.”
    â€œCome on,” he said. “Get in.”
    â€œI’ve got too much to do.”
    She stepped across the wheel of the plane and moved to shut the door but she stopped, turned back to me, and pulled the seat belt tighter.
    â€œIt hurts,” I said.
    â€œLeave it,” she said again.
    She stepped away from the plane and closed the door, and my father cranked the engine. The propeller swung in an arc and the blades disappeared in a blur of whirling metal. The grass whipped the tires as we motored down the runway, and the frame of the plane vibrated so that my bones buzzed like hornets beneath my skin. My father pulled back on the throttle and the plane surged forward, picking up speed until we lifted into the air. He pulled higher into the summer sky and then he banked, circling the farm from above. I pressed my face to the window and looked down at the trees that parted for the creek that ran beside the house.
    â€œHow you doing back there, A.J.?” my father asked.
    He turned his head slightly so I could see the side of his face, the metal frame of his sunglasses, his radio headset. I smiled at him and he turned back to the controls. Not long after, the engine fell silent. The buzzing stilled. My father must have said something— Oh, shit— he must have jerked the yoke, because I leaned close to him.
    â€œDaddy, are we going to crash?”
    â€œNo, baby,” he said. “Sit back down.”
    My father almost brought the plane in. He angled for the open space of the runway and we nearly made the clearing, but the tail caught on a tree at the last second. The body pitched forward and the nose slammed into the ground. I have no memory of the impact, no recollection of the jolt that crushed my spine or the strike to the head that left a shallow indent on my skull. My father was thrown against his seat belt and the force separated his veins from his organs. They call this bleeding out. He was dead before anyone reached the plane.
    My mother’s parents were staying at the guesthouse on the farm for the summer and they had come out to watch us take off. They followed the plane with their eyes as it cruised across the sky. They watched as we fell. They were the first ones at the crash site and my grandfather pulled me free.
    â€œI know I shouldn’t have moved her,” he told my mother later, “but I smelled gasoline. I thought it was going to blow.”
    My grandfather stayed beside the plane and looked to my father while my grandmother carried me to the ambulance that was already turning down the dirt road. The freshness of morning had given over to thick afternoon heat, and as I looked back at the plane I saw everything through a film of stirred yellow dust.
    At our house my mother was in the kitchen when her mother-in-law, who lived up the mountain, called.
    â€œThere’s been an accident,” she said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œAn accident.”
    â€œIs it the plane?” my mother