Meet Monday. Directions attached.” Short, efficient. Edward Everett wondered if Claussen’s email from Mark Johansen, MS, MBA, just before the organization had fired him had been as curt.
Chapter Twenty-nine
It had been years since he’d flown and it was only when his stomach gave its slight drop as the plane lifted from the tarmac in Cedar Rapids that he remembered how much he hated it, the anxious moments as the jets roared to give the plane its lift, the precarious bounce of the wing outside his window seat, making him question the integrity of bolts and welds; the mechanical grinding and bump as the wheels retracted; his ears filling, giving him the illusion that sound was traveling from another room—the muted hum of conversation, the scratch of paper from the woman beside him turning the pages of a pulp mystery novel, the nervous clicking of a ballpoint pen button by a woman across the aisle.
Before they finished their climb, rain began pelting the window beside him, the drops slithering like silver slugs across the scratched and clouded plastic. He pulled down the plastic shade and closed his eyes, his pulse thrumming in his jaw. A baby behind him wailed and the woman beside him closed her book.
“I really hate flying,” she said. She was near his age, gray-haired, wearing a peach silk blouse tucked neatly into a charcoal pencil skirt, small, heart-shaped diamond studs in her earlobes, her manicured nails polished pale pink. “Yet, here I am again.”
“I haven’t done it in almost fifteen years,” Edward Everett said.
The woman gave a small, hoarse laugh, her breath clearly that of a smoker, peppermint not fully masking the tobacco odor. “Dummy me; I’m up here a dozen times a year for business. My doctor usually gives me a scrip for Ativan but it makes me feel so stupid sleepy. I didn’t take it this time, since I’m going to see my daughter and granddaughter, and she’s old enough that she’d notice if I seemed drunk.” She made her voice small and high-pitched. “Mommy, why is Gamma falling down?”
When the plane leveled off, she gave him a polite half-smile and went back to her book. He opened the shade beside him and saw that the sky was blue, the rain clouds beneath them, illuminated periodically by a pulsing pale light. Around him, everyone seemed to be relaxing, only forty more minutes in the air ahead of them. Across the aisle, the woman with the pen was writing what appeared to be thank-you notes onto cards so highly calendered they glinted under the ceiling light. She was, he realized, most likely a recent bride, her all-but-useless right hand curled in on itself, a clear symptom of cerebral palsy, nonetheless happy as any woman he had ever seen, glancing appreciatively toward her new husband.
As if she understood his thinking, the woman beside him said in a quiet tone, “They seem happy. I give them five years.”
“Five?” he asked.
“But then, I’m eternally romantic,” she replied, a laugh rattling in her throat. She opened a small silver clutch that had been pressed between her hip and the side of her seat but then snapped it shut and held it on her lap. “You’d think after all of my time in the air I’d remember I can’t smoke.” She opened her purse again and canted it toward him so that he could see she was fingering a cigarette she’d loosened from a pack of Tareytons. “Sad, isn’t it?” She set down her purse and returned to her book. Edward Everett leaned his head back, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
He gave up after several minutes when he heard the flight attendant beginning to push the refreshment cart up the aisle, popping open cans of Coke and Sprite, pouring coffee into plastic cups, unscrewing caps from one-ounce bottles of booze. When the cart was beside them, the woman who shared his row sat up.
“Rum and Coke,” she said, plucking up her purse again and snapping it open, fishing out a ten-dollar bill.
“Anything for you, sir?” the attendant asked, already fixing the woman her drink.
“I hope you won’t make me drink alone,” the woman said.
“Okay,” he said. “Bud Light?”
He leaned forward to take out his wallet but the woman laid her hand on his arm. “The least I can do is buy.”
“You don’t have to,” he said, pulling his wallet from his hip pocket.
“I’m paying for two,” the woman said to the attendant, who glanced in Edward Everett’s direction for