Marianne heard a low, distant roar and looked up. It was an overcast evening, and for some reason, the only time she ever heard planes overhead was when the weather was cloudy. Maybe if she’d paid more attention in ninth grade science she’d know why that was.
For now, she wondered if that was the plane the Duck-Man was on. More likely, though, it was inbound to Portland, making a big circle while it waited for traffic to clear at the airport.
She could have gone to the airport to see him off. She’d given it serious consideration. It was the sort of thing a movie heroine would do – run to the airport to catch her man before he got on the plane, so she could confess her feelings in person.
Unfortunately, real life wasn’t quite as simple. She had no idea which airline he was on, which city in Florida he was flying to, or if it was a direct flight at all. He might have to fly into Dallas first, or Phoenix, or Denver, or any of probably a dozen other possibilities. And even if she knew which flight he was on, you couldn’t go to the gate to send someone off anymore; if you didn’t have a ticket, you had to stop at the security checkpoint and make your goodbyes there.
So she gave it up as a lost cause for the moment, and busied herself with theater business. But now, with everything in the office sorted out for the day, and the six PM show in the capable hands of her teenaged workforce and her octogenerian projectionist, she had nothing further to busy herself with.
She walked down the street, to the corner of Douglass and Scott, and it occurred to her that one place the Duck-Man might be staying was the Interlude Inn. Surely Izzy Sutton would tell her if he was, and maybe she could even be convinced to divulge some personal details about him. The woman wrote love songs, after all. Surely she could appeal to Izzy’s romantic spirit.
“Hey!”
Marianne looked down to see – God, she’d done it again! – Jack, on the ground in front of her.
“We have to stop meeting like this, Jack,” she said, laughing. What else could she do?
“You could have broken my nose!” It wasn’t broken, or even bruised.
“You’re fine. But I am sorry,” she said, extending a hand to help him up. “I was just – I don’t know, lost in thought, I guess.”
“If you want to get lost, that’s your business, but don’t do it out on the street with other people around.” He tried to sound annoyed, but she could hear that it was just an act. The grin he was fighting to suppress didn’t help his cause any.
“Well, I found you, so it’s OK,” she said. “And just to show I’m really sorry, how about I buy you an omelet?”
“An omelet? It’s almost six o’clock in the evening.”
What did that have to do with anything? You could eat breakfast food any time of day. Everyone knew that. “Yes, an omelet. Have you been to the Good Egg yet? They say it’s a three egg omelet, but I think it’s more like four. Anyway, it’s good, and I’m buying, so come on.”
He followed her into the restaurant. It was a definite point in his favor that, every time they’d met so far, he’d gone along with whatever she suggested. At some point, she assumed he’d probably object to something, or even have a suggestion of his own, but perhaps not. He wasn’t a resident, maybe he was deferring to her not out of chivalry, but simply because she knew the town better than he did.
Whatever the reason, he was eating with her again. Which made this their third date. Which in the civilized world of her old movies didn’t really mean much, but in the terrifying modern world of dating meant quite a bit. Except that they hadn’t even kissed yet, or even held hands. Surely he had no expectations along those lines tonight. Hopefully, anyway.
Half an hour and several eggs later, he dropped a bombshell. Not that he had any idea what he was saying.
“I was over at Sweet Hearts this morning. You know, the pastry shop?”
“The one that’s a couple of blocks away from my theater? Yes, I’m aware of it.” She hadn’t meant to be quite so snarky, but she couldn’t help herself. Thankfully, he ignored it.
“Anyway, I was having some coffee, and this guy was at the table next to me, and I wouldn’t have paid any attention, but I haven’t seen anybody like him in Romance before.” She had no idea where this was headed, so she just nodded for him to continue. “He was – I don’t want to say a hippie, because that’s cliché and everything, but that’s kind of what he was.”
She still wasn’t sure why he was telling her this. “What do you mean by hippie?”
“Well, for one thing, he smelled. I mean seriously. Like he hadn’t bathed in a week. Or washed his clothes in a month.” That was odd, she had to admit. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen someone like that in town. But she didn’t say anything, she just let him go on. “And he had buttons and patches all over his backpack. ‘Make love, not war,’ and ‘ban the bomb’ and ‘legalize drugs’ and that kind of thing. And the pack was all beaten up, like he’d had it his whole life, you know?”
“It’s a free country. He had as much right to be there as you did.” She hadn’t seen this judgmental side of Jack before, and she didn’t know what to think about it. Although, to be fair, if the guy really did smell like he hadn’t bathed in a week, she probably wouldn’t have been thrilled that he was sitting next to her, either.
“Sure, you’re right. It was just interesting, that’s all. And he had this old laptop, it looked like a brick, it must have been ten years old. I was amazed that it even had wifi.”
She was curious despite herself. “How do you know it had wifi?”
“He was booking a plane ticket.”
It couldn’t be, could it? That would be the coincidence of all time. “Where to?”
Jack laughed. “I wasn’t looking over his shoulder. I’m not a voyeur.” Of course he wasn’t, and it was jumping to conclusions to think he would have spied on this random hippie. “But I do know, because he was talking to himself. Muttering, really. It was kind of unnerving, tell you the truth.”
Marianne tried, and failed, to keep the impatience out of her voice. “Where, Jack?”
“Florida. Key West, to be exact, by way of Atlanta. He was going on and on about how Pete, whoever he was, was waiting for him, and he needed the quickest flight he could find. He was talking to the computer, yelling – well, not yelling, it wasn’t loud, but it was like angry whispering, you know what I mean?” She nodded. It was all she was capable of. “Really angry whispering. Kind of the way these crazy conspiracy people go on when they’re writing out their manifestos, you know?”
It was her Duck-Man. It had to be. Flying on short notice to Florida to meet with someone named Pete? It had to be him.
Which meant that her pen-pal, to whom she’d revealed her real name, and offered to pick up at the airport, was an unwashed, unhinged throwback to the 1960’s.
So much for her judgment about men. No wonder she hadn’t had a boyfriend in six months.