Chapter 45: Did I mention that I fucking hate airports?
Seven weeks later
As if God or Buddha or the fucking Universe or whatever was waiting for my parents to finally make a decision, everything starts happening really fast once they say they’ll sell me the restaurant. My house in Phoenix sells in less than two weeks; Gerry ends up getting into community college; PJ announces he’s getting married; Dutch turns up preggo with Baby Number Three.
Another month goes by. Kiersten quits before I have to fire her, which is fucking awesome, and I hire two new servers I really like, one a new friend of Gerry’s from the community college, one a friend of Katie-the-high-school-hostess. Without the weight of debt dragging the restaurant down, it starts doing pretty well. I buy a condo; Gerry moves in as my roommate.
Jodie and Ben come in every Tuesday to play Scrabble, and Jodie updates me on all the gossip in town. Every week she asks after my mother, and every week I tell her the same thing: “The doctors say it’s too soon to guess yet.”
I settle into a comfortable routine. Gerry takes classes at the college during the day — all prerequisites so he can get into an actual four-year degree program at Ohio State. He relieves me at the restaurant around five every evening, and I let him handle the dinner rush but make it back in time to help him close.
The kid’s in school, after all. I don’t want him staying up too late.
After a drunk driver almost takes Gerry out when he’s walking home from the restaurant one night, Dutch takes it upon herself to buy us a car. It’s a compact that neither one of us even really fit in, but we start driving it home every night, and I let Gerry take it to school each morning.
It’s not an exciting life. But it’s a good life, a quiet life.
Jenny comes to the restaurant about once per week. A lot of times, she comes with kids in tow; once in a while, she comes by herself. I sit and talk with her on the days that I have time. Things are… as normal as they will ever get between us, I suppose.
She comes in by herself one day, and I bring her a menu, but she says, “Two menus, actually, Ani.”
I give her a curious look but she won’t meet my eye. Five minutes later, I find out why. A woman walks in the front door, gazing around like she’s looking for someone. She’s on the tall side (shorter than me, obviously), with a lean, athletic build and short-cropped dark hair. I don’t have to look at her twice to know she’s gay as hell.
When she sees Jenny, her whole face lights up, breaks into this huge smile, and she strides across the restaurant without so much as noticing that I’m standing there. Jenny is her sun; this girl is a planet that’s fallen inside her gravitational pull.
I glance at Jenny. She’s smiling just as broadly as the short-haired girl, and when the short-haired girl reaches her, Jenny stands, and the girl gives her a peck on the cheek.
I smile. I’m happy for Jenny. I really am.
But the peck on the cheek is a glaring neon sign pointing to the one thing still missing in my life: I’m as alone as I was the day I left her.
Maybe I should just get used to it. Maybe it’s going to be like this from now on. Or maybe I should try some online dating or some shit.
Yeah, right. I want to try online dating about as much as I want to try a root canal without novocaine.
#
“You’re sure you’re okay with this?” I ask Gerry one last time. “You aren’t going to get stressed running things on your own? Don’t skip any classes — leave Soul Mountain with Becker if you have to.”
He laughs. “Sis, it’s going to be fine.”
“So you say.”
He smirks at me. “You’re a better businesswoman than you give yourself credit for. Which means that Soul Mountain is going to be fine without you. Okay? So get going.”
I hesitate; he raises an eyebrow. “Alright, alright,” I huff, picking up my duffle. I follow him into our ridiculous compact car outside. “I really don’t want to go back to Switzerland, Ger,” I say once he gets in and starts the engine.
The little fucker just laughs some more.
“You’re going to sit there and fucking laugh at me?”
“I can’t help it. It’s funny. I’m just thinking that the Anika who came home a couple months ago. She never would’ve said something like that.” We roll to a stop at the end of the street, and he gives me a sideways glance before he speaks again. “Amazing how quickly life changes sometimes, right?”
I slouch down in the seat. “Don’t try out your future social worker techniques on me, asshole.”
Gerry chuckles. A few minutes later, we’re on the highway, heading for the Cleveland airport.
#
I have a long fucking flight path. The first leg is a little puddle-jumper from Cleveland to Chicago O’Hare. Then it’s Chicago to London — an overnight flight in which I’ll be guaranteed to get absolutely no fucking sleep and be surrounded by babies screaming in British accents — and from London, it’s an hour and a half to Basel.
Once I get to Basel, I’ll have a lot of cleaning up to do, starting with my basketball contract. I know the whole organization’s already pissed at me, but whatever. If I didn’t take myself out of the game this season, they would’ve done it for me next season. Or the season after that. Or I would end up injuring myself and wind up needing surgery and being gimpy the rest of my life. The way things worked out might just be for the best, in the end.
I contemplate all this over my eight-fucking-dollar salad in the Chicago airport, feeling ripped off because it was labeled “gourmet” and yet the lettuce leaves are tinged with brown and the dressing tastes like somebody mixed in some ranch powder and corn syrup with water and squeezed it into a plastic ramekin.
God. Owning a restaurant is starting to making me a fucking food snob.
A few minutes after I finish my salad, I’m walking onto the plane to London, navigating my duffle bag in front of me, stooping occasionally to avoid whacking my head on overhead bins and protruding suitcase wheels.
I settle into my aisle seat at last, splaying my knees wide around the seat back in front of me, wondering, not for the first time, why airlines seem to think all passengers are the size of fucking African pygmy people. At least I got an aisle seat. And so far, the window seat next to me is empty. Maybe it’ll stay that way and I can turn sideways or some shit and manage to almost sleep for an hour or two.
I pull out the magazine from the seat pocket and start flipping through it. Glossy pages tell me about places that I absolutely must visit before I die, foods I should try, bike paths I should ride. I pause for a second at an article about an NFL guy who loves traveling to Asia, skimming through the interviewer’s questions and wondering idly if I could ever afford to take my family on a trip to Nepal.
The daydream is interrupted when a voice next to me says, “Hey. Anika.”
I glance in the direction of the voice. The window seat that had been empty a moment before is now filled. With Marty McFly.
I groan. “What are you doing here, McFly? I thought I told you I didn’t want to go on any more head-trips to the past?”
He shakes his head, keeps his voice low. “That’s not why I’m here.”
He points up the aisle, and my eyes follow his gesture. Four rows ahead of me, sitting in the center row in the aisle seat, there’s a dark head of hair, cut Jane Lane-style. A row of silver earrings glints in the light.
“Guess who else is flying to Heathrow today?” McFly says.
“No fucking way,” I say, and although I usually speak to McFly only in my head, I accidentally make the statement out-loud this time. A British woman my mother’s age (but about half of her size) catches my cursed mutter, purses her lips in my direction.
“You should go talk to her,” my imaginary seat mate says.
“No,” I say quickly, and this time I manage to keep my conversation with him silent. “She’s made it plenty clear that she doesn’t want to talk to me.”
Now McFly is the one pursing his lips at me. “What kind of attitude is that? You’re an Olympian, for chrissakes, Anika, not a quitter.” He makes a curt gesture up the aisle. “Get up. Go over there. Talk to her.”
“Not only does she not want to talk to me,” I say, “but also, after what happened at Grace’s reception, I think it’s pretty fair to say she doesn’t ever want to lay eyes on me again.”
“Okay, so you have some explaining to do. Some begging for forgiveness, maybe.”
“I begged on at least five separate voicemails. I texted her an apology every day for a week. She didn’t answer any of them. She wants me to leave her alone.”
Marty McFly considers this for a few seconds. Then he says, “Maybe she does. Maybe she just wants you to try harder. To demonstrate that you’re not ready to give up on your relationship with her.”
I roll my eyes. “What relationship, McFly? We met on a plane a couple of months ago. We had all of a fucking week of hanging out together before I screwed up and kissed Jenny right in front of her.”
McFly shrugs. “Yeah, it was only a week. But it was a good week. A special week. You both thought so.”
“Yeah, and we also both thought I was over my past,” I mumble. I stare at the dark hair a couple yards in front of me and heave a heavy sigh. “Besides, if she’s on the plane for London, it probably means she’s going back to Basel. What are we supposed to do, enter into a long-distance relationship when we haven’t even really dated yet? Fat fucking chance of that working out. And ever since Jenny, I’ve pretty much had it on long-distance relationships.”
McFly stares at me a long moment. “Anika. Just go talk to her.”
I shake my head. “Nuh-uh. No way.”
“Go. Talk. To her.”
“No.”
“You’re being a baby.”
I hesitate. Unbuckle my seat belt. Glance over at McFly. “If this ends up totally sucking, I’m sending you back to fucking 1955. Permanently.”
“Go,” is all he says.
Against my own better fucking judgment, I stand up.
One of the few good things about my height is that I’m like a fucking watchtower. I can scope things out from my vantage point without making myself known, getting a bird’s eye view on everything below me. That’s what I do now, checking out what’s happening in Amy’s aisle a few feet ahead of me.
On the far side of her row of seats is what looks like a mother and daughter pair. The girl’s about eleven, twelve, with crazy carrot-top red-orange frizzy hair. She giggles over something her mother’s showing her, and I catch a hint of a British accent. Next to the mother, there’s a balding man reading a newspaper. At first, I assume he’s the father of the carrot-top girl, and I think, well, fuck, I guess that’s it — there’s no way I can switch seats with one-third of a family of three. But as I watch him read the newspaper, his body language — and the fact that he’s completely fucking ignoring both the women sitting on either side of him — makes me realize that he’s not with the mother and the middle-school girl.
Which makes him a prime target for seat switching. After all, who in their right mind would turn down an aisle seat in a row of two, with a possible empty fucking seat next to it, to stay in an row of four, in the middle of the plane, stuck between a mother and a daughter on one side and a stranger on the other?
No one. That’s who.
Rather than striding right up the aisle and making myself known to Amy, I turn around, head towards the back of the plane as if I’m going to the bathroom behind me. But instead of going to the bathroom, I cross over to the other aisle, and work my way up towards Amy’s row, apologizing for every bag and body and baby I have to squeeze by as I work against traffic. When I get to Amy’s row after a minute of this, I reach one of my long, albatross arms out and tap the man with the newspaper on the shoulder. The mom and carrot-top daughter look a little annoyed at me for reaching over their heads, but I’m sure they’ll get over it.
“Excuse me, sir?” I start, and at the sound of my voice, Amy’s head whips around. I see her eyes go wide with surprise, then narrow with anger a nanosecond later. “I was wondering if you would like to switch seats with me so I can sit to my friend?”
Amy shakes her head vigorously, but the man’s facing me and doesn’t see her frantic hell-no signals. Mom and carrot-top do, though. They look from the man, to Amy’s violently shaking head, to me with open curiosity.
The man seems like he doesn’t know what to say, so I help him out.
“It’s an aisle seat,” I say. “About four rows back from where you are now.” I gaze over the heads of the passengers seated in the middle rows. “And the window seat is still empty, so far.”
“Anika…” Amy says, a warning tone in her voice.
“I’d be really grateful,” I say to the man.
The man folds up his newspaper, spares Amy a quick glance over his shoulder, looks back at me. “Of course,” he says.
From his spot next to my previous seat, Marty McFly gives me a double thumbs-up.
It takes newspaper guy a minute to gather all his things and scoot past Mom and carrot-top, but he finally untangles himself from the row of seats and steps into the aisle. Once he’s clear, I squeeze past the mother and daughter with several apologies for my enormous girth, and at last drop down into the seat beside Amy.
She won’t look at me. Her arms are crossed tight against her chest; her mouth is pressed into a thin, white line. The Mom on my right gives us a quick look, but then turns back to her daughter. She can tell that something’s up, but doesn’t say anything about it.
Which is actually one of the best qualities of the British: They absolutely hate it when people cause scenes, and they’re generally really good at minding their own fucking business.
I adjust my knees for a second, trying to get as comfortable as I can while squashed between Amy on my left and the Mom (mum, really) on my right.
“Hi,” I say to Amy.
She gives no indication that she’s heard me.
“So, uh, are you flying back to Basel, too? Crazy that we ended up on the same plane again. Right?”
“Anika,” she says in a low voice between clenched teeth. “I am trying really, really hard not to have a panic attack right now. So if you want to help with that, you can stop speaking right now and leave me alone.”