one piece.”
“You don’t get up from this table until it’s all gone.”
Regina ate the melon until she passed out in the sticky, sweet, red juice of one of Texas’s best fruits.
Toni Hartwell wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t beautiful either. Regina thought her mother was gorgeous. Toni often walked around in a housecoat, with a cigarette in her hand, and her brown hair in curlers. She covered the curlers with scarves or bonnets. The bonnets had feathers on them. If she didn’t cover her hair with curlers and scarves and bonnets, she covered it with a wig. She needed glasses.
Antoinette E. Hartwell made a lasting impression.
The sweet aroma of mother mingled with the sickening scent of burning flesh. Toni Hartwell pressed her lit cigarette into her daughter’s back. The hot, ashened tobacco made a perfect circle of black around red, blood red.
Toni did it time and again until Regina’s fair-skinned back became dotted with scars, dotted like beautiful Swiss fabric.
Regina, Toni’s sweet-eyed, twelve-year-old daughter, was proud of her mother. In fact, Regina hero-worshipped her. Toni had a couple of years of community college behind her, San Jacinto Junior College. She was an expert seamstress and marksman, and she’d won contests and medals for her sewing and shooting.
Regina couldn’t get enough of her mom; they were a pair.
But her mother was busy. She had to work. It didn’t matter that Toni Hartwell had multiple sclerosis. She was a working wife and mother with her own business, cleaning airplanes. Her cleaning service wasn’t a big business, but it brought in a few extra thousand and nudged the family’s annual income into the $30,000 range. Not bad for 1982.
So, despite her ever increasing physical pain, Toni still got up and made the minimum one-hour drive from Pasadena to Houston’s giant, sea-of-concrete Intercontinental Airport.
There, Toni cleaned planes for Airesearch Aviation, a division of The Garrett Corporation, a sometime employer of her plane-mechanic husband, Mark L. Hartwell.
On April 22, 1982, while at work at Intercontinental, Toni walked out of an Airesearch personnel door that was built into a huge, sliding, metal hangar door. Just as she passed through it, another employee slid open a portion of the hangar with a tractor. He didn’t see her. He didn’t hear her. No one did. The hangar door slammed against the personnel door and snapped it shut. It snapped closed on Toni Hartwell. She was crushed to death.
She was thirty-seven years old.
At the time of her death, the whereabouts of Toni Hartwell’s father was unknown. It had been unknown since the day Toni was born, November 22, 1944 in Kansas City, Missouri.
Toni’s husband of almost fifteen years (they were married on May 20, 1967) sued Airesearch Aviation and his employer, The Garrett Corporation.
Mark Hartwell’s lawsuit stated: “Antoinette E. Hartwell was a loving wife, parent and daughter, and her services to your Plaintiffs have been lost forever. She was working and earning money to help support her family and was fully able to carry out her duties of employment and other activities and responsibilities of life provided by a wife and mother. But much more importantly, her life meant much more to her family than just her ability to help care and provide for her loved ones. The loss of inheritance of prospective accumulations is also gone.”
The lawsuit also read, “The survivors’ greatest damage and loss results from their deprivation of her comfort, care, advice, counsel, education, and loss of society. Moreover, they have suffered mental anguish.”
After Regina’s mother died, the tension and harsh discipline eased. But a new opposition arose—a tension between father and daughter. Before Toni’s death, Mark didn’t figure prominently in his daughter’s life, but now he was her sole emotional support. Mark Hartwell didn’t appear to know what to
“You don’t get up from this table until it’s all gone.”
Regina ate the melon until she passed out in the sticky, sweet, red juice of one of Texas’s best fruits.
Toni Hartwell wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t beautiful either. Regina thought her mother was gorgeous. Toni often walked around in a housecoat, with a cigarette in her hand, and her brown hair in curlers. She covered the curlers with scarves or bonnets. The bonnets had feathers on them. If she didn’t cover her hair with curlers and scarves and bonnets, she covered it with a wig. She needed glasses.
Antoinette E. Hartwell made a lasting impression.
The sweet aroma of mother mingled with the sickening scent of burning flesh. Toni Hartwell pressed her lit cigarette into her daughter’s back. The hot, ashened tobacco made a perfect circle of black around red, blood red.
Toni did it time and again until Regina’s fair-skinned back became dotted with scars, dotted like beautiful Swiss fabric.
Regina, Toni’s sweet-eyed, twelve-year-old daughter, was proud of her mother. In fact, Regina hero-worshipped her. Toni had a couple of years of community college behind her, San Jacinto Junior College. She was an expert seamstress and marksman, and she’d won contests and medals for her sewing and shooting.
Regina couldn’t get enough of her mom; they were a pair.
But her mother was busy. She had to work. It didn’t matter that Toni Hartwell had multiple sclerosis. She was a working wife and mother with her own business, cleaning airplanes. Her cleaning service wasn’t a big business, but it brought in a few extra thousand and nudged the family’s annual income into the $30,000 range. Not bad for 1982.
So, despite her ever increasing physical pain, Toni still got up and made the minimum one-hour drive from Pasadena to Houston’s giant, sea-of-concrete Intercontinental Airport.
There, Toni cleaned planes for Airesearch Aviation, a division of The Garrett Corporation, a sometime employer of her plane-mechanic husband, Mark L. Hartwell.
On April 22, 1982, while at work at Intercontinental, Toni walked out of an Airesearch personnel door that was built into a huge, sliding, metal hangar door. Just as she passed through it, another employee slid open a portion of the hangar with a tractor. He didn’t see her. He didn’t hear her. No one did. The hangar door slammed against the personnel door and snapped it shut. It snapped closed on Toni Hartwell. She was crushed to death.
She was thirty-seven years old.
At the time of her death, the whereabouts of Toni Hartwell’s father was unknown. It had been unknown since the day Toni was born, November 22, 1944 in Kansas City, Missouri.
Toni’s husband of almost fifteen years (they were married on May 20, 1967) sued Airesearch Aviation and his employer, The Garrett Corporation.
Mark Hartwell’s lawsuit stated: “Antoinette E. Hartwell was a loving wife, parent and daughter, and her services to your Plaintiffs have been lost forever. She was working and earning money to help support her family and was fully able to carry out her duties of employment and other activities and responsibilities of life provided by a wife and mother. But much more importantly, her life meant much more to her family than just her ability to help care and provide for her loved ones. The loss of inheritance of prospective accumulations is also gone.”
The lawsuit also read, “The survivors’ greatest damage and loss results from their deprivation of her comfort, care, advice, counsel, education, and loss of society. Moreover, they have suffered mental anguish.”
After Regina’s mother died, the tension and harsh discipline eased. But a new opposition arose—a tension between father and daughter. Before Toni’s death, Mark didn’t figure prominently in his daughter’s life, but now he was her sole emotional support. Mark Hartwell didn’t appear to know what to
Similar Books
Can't Let Go
Michelle Lynn
Jackie Draws a Straight
Patricia Green
Desperate Chances
A. Meredith Walters
Player's Ruse
Hilari Bell
Ascent of the Aliomenti
Alex Albrinck
Ghosts at Christmas
Darren W. Ritson
Behind the Palace Walls
Lynn Raye Harris
Treason's Harbour
Patrick O’Brian
Night and Day
Iris Johansen
