Read Once Upon a Time, There Was You for Free Online

meant pain but had learned did not. Those were the days when Irene laughed loudly and clasped her hands under her chin at the funny things Sadie’s father said; when she hummed folding laundry and licked cake batter from her fingers with outsize relish. It was when she made homemade birthday cards for both Sadie and John, and decorated every single room of the house for Christmas—even the dog wore a little ornament on his collar. In those days, Irene used to answer the phone every afternoon around four-thirty and tell John what they needed, and sometimes she said, “Just you.”
    The plane starts to taxi, and Sadie watches the runway move past faster and faster. She always likes to watch the takeoff and the landing, not only likes to but feels she must. It’s as though she’s in charge, as though it’s her powers of concentration that will let them become safely airborne and then earthbound again at the end of the flight. It seems to her that a lot of people on planes feel the same way: she sees people attend to takeoffs and landings as gravely as she, and is often tempted to ask if they’re doing what she is. But she never does. You don’t ask some things. People hide.
    “Headed home?” the man next to her asks.
    Sadie holds up a finger. “Just a second.” The ground blurs, there is the scooplike lift upward, and then everything below turns miniature. It always brings a feeling of peace to Sadie, thatsudden detachment, that sense of no going back now. Done. Decided.
    As she looks down, she honors another ritual and searches for her father’s house. She never finds it, but she always looks for it just the same. She doesn’t know why; seeing it would only make her sadder. There would be the roof of his house, his sidewalk and backyard and car in the driveway, and then would come an image of him, missing her. Sitting out on the front porch steps, maybe, leaning back with his elbows supporting him, his long legs stretched out before him, calling hello to everyone who passed by. Or down at the nearby park, where he liked to watch the little kids play T-ball.
    Last night, while they were sitting out on the porch, he told Sadie that he’d been approached again about coaching, but he didn’t think he could deal with the parents. “Shouldn’t allow them anywhere near the field,” he said. “All they do is ruin the game with their big fat egos.”
    “You used to come to my games,” Sadie said. And he said, “Yeah. Where I sat and watched you play and kept my mouth shut.”
    “Except when I scored,” Sadie said, and he laughed and said, “Right. Except when you scored.” He looked at her then and his face changed and he said, “I used to love watching you play.” She wondered if he was thinking of her mother then, too, missing her, maybe; but of course she didn’t ask him that. She couldn’t ask him that. She’d tried once, when she was around ten years old; she’d asked him if he missed Irene, and he’d shrugged and said, “Ah, well, you know,” and then changed the subject. And she’d understood that if he’d answered yes, she’d have felt terrible. If he’d answered no, she’d have felt terrible. And if he’d been noncommittal, suggesting he rarely thought about Irene at all, she’d have been devastated.
    As the plane rises higher, she looks to the west to see if she can find the lake two blocks from her father’s house where he used to walk Festus every day and where he taught her to do the breast-stroke and the sidestroke and the backstroke all in one day, then rewarded her with a triple ice cream cone, most of which Festus ate because she dropped it. Her dad offered to replace it, but Sadie refused, saying it wouldn’t be the same, and she was full, anyway.
    “What are you looking for?” her seatmate asks.
    “I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing.”
    “Ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to ask you to cease all conversation and put down your reading materials,” the flight