Decisions

The ride to the airport is quiet. It takes about a half hour, and it's a school day, so I'll have to have my mom write a note that excuses me from my English and math classes. I'm in the back seat of our Bronco II, a year before my mom rolls it on the Midway Road, fiddling with my backpack zipper and looking out the window. All too soon we are at the airport, and I trail along behind my mom and dad as they pick up one boarding pass and check one suitcase. When it's time, my dad walks through the security gate and, with a final wave, disappears down the jetway and into the plane bound for North Carolina. My mom walks to the big window overlooking the tarmac and stares out. I'm sixteen, and I've never witnessed a look of profound lonliness on the face of a loved one until that moment, when my dad left from one of his visits to go back to his job in North Carolina. My mom and I are still here, and she has that look on her face because we decided to let my dad go ahead of us until I graduated from high school. He's been making these visits for a year and a half. After I graduate and start my own life, they can be back together again, they who have been together since high school, they who have lived and loved together for over twenty-five years. My mom stares out the window of the airport, her face slack and pale, her eyes bright with tears and ready to spill over. I decide at that moment that my last two years of high school no longer matter. As a sixteen year old, I decided that it was better to sacrifice my own comfort than to have to continue to see that look on my mother's face, the look that masked the pain of being alone in a world. Later that night, as my mom got ready for bed, I would tell her that we needed to move across the country to be with my dad. I was ready.