I've always had a weird fascination with airports.  Even when I was younger, before I could drive, if I heard that anyone I knew was going to the airport, I secretly wished that I could follow along and see them off.  And then, after I turned 16, I would often drive to the airport, park my convertible up on the roof of the parking garage closest to the sky.  Sometimes I'd put up the top, sometimes not.  I would confidently make my way across the sometimes-busy street that divides the parking area from the main terminal there at TUL, holding my breath against all the environmental assault I could detect in the air.  I would swing those huge glass doors wide open, pretending my mother had sent me on an errand to pick up someone very important to her at the airport.  Of course, that was not the reason I was there.  

Mostly, I would visit the airport during long summers that afforded me the luxury of driving with the top down and then, on a really special night, I could smell the night-blooming flowers who, like me, only came alive after nightfall, after they were just sure the rest of the world was tucked into beds so that they could do their thing.  They appeared to wave to me as I passed by, with their delicate petals and pointed, planted existence, maybe jealous in their own way of me, but definitely joyous for me.  Maybe we WERE two separate entities, but, wildflowers and teenage girls have nothing and everything in common, after all.   

Whenever I arrived, I would immediately find a comfortable spot where I could see the people as they shuffled past.  I liked to watch people, notice the lines on faces and the way the corners of  mouths either pointed up or down.  I liked especially to sit outside the terminals nearest the International flights so that I could try and clue in to body language and posture and which people hung their heads, and make mental notes of how other cultures handle happiness, grief, loss, being apart, and then use what I had observed to contemplate it all on my drive back home.  All around me, people were hugging each other through the bulk of their winter coats or their summer tank tops, saying good-bye, wiping away tears.  I hate seeing people cry when they say good-bye.  "Don't go, then!"  I always wanted to say.  "Obviously you love each other!  So don't go!"  But of course they have to, and they do.  Every day.  Everywhere.  It's the ones who are left behind at the gate that I worry about, those with their hand pressed uselessly against a huge plate-glass window, watching, while outside engines roar so loud that no matter what you say, you can't be heard above them.  

One weekend, I go and stay with Chasity at her apartment in Tulsa.  So late at night when I'd arrived, she was not awake, of course, but her husband seemed to understand in that forlorn silence men have when they know there's simply nothing else they can do to try and fix around on things.  

The next morning, I push open Chas's bedroom door, lean in to see if she's awake.  There is a flock of birds in the trees outside chattering outrageously, ruffling their feathers, cocking their heads in the too-bright way of the mechanical toy.  I have been at the living room window drinking weak coffee and watching them for a while, wondering as usual at the secret kind of consensus they seem to keep.  Who will decide, and at what moment, that they should take off together, fly obliquely across the winter sky in their ragged but purposeful formation?  Do they know where they are going?

Chasity is sitting up, looking out the window at the same tree I have been watching.   I nod a greeting, give her my coffee, then stretch out beside her.  There is a slat of sun lying across her face, the light illuminating the tiny golden hairs she still has left on her ear.  Below the curl of cartilage, I see the reddish glow of blood in her lobe.  I remember holding Molly when she was a baby and nursing her, seeing the same thing.  She held tightly onto one of my fingers, and we rocked slowly back and forth in front of her west-facing window in her nursery.  I used to think that if someone about to commit a crime looked up and saw a silhouette on the shade of a mother rocking a baby, it would be enough to stop them.  There was sometimes a wonderful breeze, and the curtain would billow out dramatically, then be pulled up close against the screen, tangolike.  I would watch Molly's face, think of all that lay ahead of her.  Someday she would say in words what it was she wanted; someday she would walk in the door, lunchbox clanging into her leg, and I would open it at the kitchen sink and see what she had chosen, what she had rejected, all without me.  Every maturational milestone seemed a miracle to me, because it was Molly who would be doing it.

Chas is quiet, sipping my coffee and staring straight ahead, and I close my eyes, continue thinking my own thoughts.  Today we are going to a cemetery.  I wonder how Chas's mother would feel if she were still alive, watching the daughter she held in the rocker die, driving her daughter to graveyards as though they were apartments for rent.  It seems the most unfair and impossible of things: how can a baby you bring into life leave it before you?  What sense is there in that?  Of course, if there is one lesson grief teaches, it is that there is no sense in some things.  Still, I know if Chas's mother were alive, she would have handled this.  Sue would have drawn from the reservoir of sacred strength that women are born with.  She would wear clothes whose very smell comforted Chas, she would put on an apron and make her soup and butter her toast and help her to walk to the bathroom when she needed it; and when things turned the worst, she would not leave.  Women do not leave situations like this:  we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, "What do you need?  Tell me what you need and by God I will do it."  I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.  I've heard that when elephants are attacked they often run not away, but toward each other.  Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society. 

I feel Chas looking at me, and I open my eyes.  She says, "You know what I was thinking?  I was watching the birds and then I started looking at the branches of the tree and I was thinking how much they look like nerve cells.  And then I was thinking how everything is so connected.  I mean that there must be one thing, somewhere that ties everything together."  

"Yes, I think so, too."

"Do you?"

"Yes."  

She readjusts herself on the pillow, takes in a breath.  "What I mean is that if you could just get at the real heart of one thing, you'd understand everything else. Like Kanye and cognac.  Like linguine would have something to do with linguistics.  There'd be a link there." 

"Yes, right," I answer, trying hard not to laugh at, with, ​AT my friend.  

"You've thought this, too?"  

"Yes," I say, and of course I have.  Only, nothing even remotely ssociated with Kanye West had ever entered my mind...   

She stares straight ahead, blinks.  "Oh.  I thought I was having profound death thoughts."  

I am back in college.  "What I really didn't get," I say to my friends, leaning in, "is why they were so desperate to feel us up.  I mean it.  I remember being at the drive-in the first time when I let a guy feel my boobs.  It took him about five hours to get my damn bra unhooked, and he was panting and wheezing like he was an asthmatic and I was feeling nothing.  I mean nothing!  I was looking out the window at the car next to us, and it was a family, you know? a mom and a dad and two little kids in their jammies, and the mom had fallen asleep, her head was against the window and her glasses were all crooked.  And I just wanted to shove this guy off me and go get in the car with that family.  And then he finally gets to my boob and just...holds it, like it's his fucking lunch money or something!"  

It is Friday night, late.  Everybody who's anybody with anything special to do has gone home or to a party for the weekend, but because none of us ever ascribe or are privy to any sort of familial or social atrocity here we are, the Nerd Herd, the Kansas Cartel of Fry Hall at Any Conservative Christian University in the country, sitting on the floor in Laura's dorm room.  Maybe I am criss-cross-applesauce, just because I am dumb and unaware of trends, but am rather comfortable with what feels right.​  Laura, a Wynona Rider knock-off with an uncanny, almost sick fascination with the taste of Le Sueur canned peas and a weird aversion to washing off her makeup at night, is in bed, and the rest of us are leaning against the wall facing her.  We look like a lineup accused of some eccentric crime.  "Well," Megan says, "for him, touching you was like. . . I don't know, I mean they fantasize for what, months? years? about feeling a real breast.  So when they do, that's enough.  To just feel it."  I nod yes, hard, with some kind of self-importance that lies within the teenage realm of approval of what everyone else must think of your body, your mind, your soul.  Meggie lives in Chicago now, and has a daughter named Millie who was conceived by artificial insemination.  

"Well, it was cold," I say in defense of myself.  "I remember feeling a little breeze against my nipple and thinking, Gawd, this is so weird.  I'm sitting here in a car with my boob hanging out like laundry.  And then that guy came around with the flashlight, you know, the morals squad? so I smacked my date on the top of the head to make him quit.  He came up like a fish, I swear, his eyes all pop-out and his mouth hanging open."  

Lauren, Laura, Megan, and Susan are laughing so hard and I think, Gawd, this is so strange.  This is the best time I've ever had.  

Susan, the token lesbian of the group, had been cleaning out her fingernails with the small blade of her Swiss army knife.  Now she snaps the blade closed and says with disgust, "How could you have done that?  What was the point?  You weren't having any fun!"

"Well, did you have fun the first time you let somebody do that to you?" Laura asked Susan, not even meaning to save me from Susan's wrath.

"Absolutely.  We knew exactly what we were doing."

"How did you know?!" Lauren asks, her red curls, freckles, and smile the face of pure innocence.  She is a doctor now, a pediatric associate with Children's Mercy in Overland Park.  

"We were alike," Susan says.  "The translation was simple."

We are all quiet for a moment, thinking.  I suppose we are all imagining Susan making love for the first time, and for me, anyway, the thought is a tender thing.  

Suddenly Laura sits up in her bed, lifts up her nightgown, baring her chest, her ugly black comforter flipping on top of itself like an old coin that can't decide which way to land.  Heads or tails, tails or heads, which will it be?  "What's this?" she asks, exposing her rather flat chest. 

No one answers, and she says, "A back."  And then, into the awkward silence, "That's a joke, you guys."  

I found out about 3 years ago that Laura died of breast cancer in 2008.  She'd discovered a lump at some point between 1995 and 2007 I was told, and then the biopsy had revealed the ugly truth:  Malignant. She left behind a husband, two daughters (age 3, twins), a Methodist minister mother, a behind-the-scenes, passive father, and a perfect, pretty sister.