3. Chapter Two
Chapter Two
“ P eople,” Benjy said, with sullen practicing-teenager import, as he slouched down into his jacket like a tortoise, “are looking .”
Yes.
Joe was aware. He tried to ignore it as he hitched Cody up on his hip and watched his knight in shining armor make room for his backpack in the overhead bin.
“I could do that,” he protested weakly.
The man tucked in a dangling strap and turned to look over his shoulder at Joe. A dark brown eyebrow twitched up over serious, dark brown eyes. “You want me to pull it out so you can do it yourself?” he offered tolerantly.
Yes.
“ No,” Joe capitulated with poor grace instead.
He raked his fingers through his hair. It needed cutting.
It needed brushing. Today had gotten off to a bad start and had not gotten any better.
Joe took a breath and scraped together what he could muster of his social graces to try again. “Thank you.”
The man shrugged.
“Least I could do.” He closed the hatch and turned to give Joe a concerned look. “Are you going to be OK? Do you need–”
“No. I’m fine. I’ve got it from here,” Joe cut him off firmly, his hand raised to fend off any offers of help. It was well-meant—and Joe did appreciate that, he did—but he’d reached his limit for people being nice to him today.
Already.
His tolerance was low these days.
If Mr. Shining Knight did or said one more nice thing, Joe was going to either burst into tears or flames. He didn’t know which, but he knew it wouldn’t stop anyone staring at him.
Jessie looked up from her phone. “Can I get a coffee?” she asked slyly. “Milk. Two sugars.”
“You don’t get coffee, you’ll get juice. And that’s when we’ve taken off,” Joe told her firmly and then turned back to Mr. Knight. “Honestly, everything is under control. You can get back to…”
He trailed off as he tried to ‘guess the profession’ based on a crisp white shirt and uncallused hands. Accountant? Lawyer?
He seemed too nice to be a lawyer, but that was probably the last year talking.
Mr. Knight shrugged. “I was just doing a crossword,” he said. “And I was stuck on a three-letter prefix for ear.”
“Oto,” Joe provided the answer without thinking. “O.T.O.”
Mr. Knight looked surprised and a little impressed.
“That would work,” he said. “Thanks. I hate to leave one unfinished.”
The admiration on his face made Joe flush and feel like a fraud. Before he could defend himself against any misapprehensions of being smart, the tannoy system crackled to life.
“We’re sorry for the delay,” a woman’s smooth, alto voice said. The passengers all looked up from their phones and magazines to listen to the announcement. ‘But we should be taking off shortly, as soon as our pilot is ready to go.”
Joe had time to think that was a funny way to put it. Then he realized that everyone’s head had swivelled around to look at him. He was ready to hold up his hands to the delay when he realized they were actually…
…looking at Mr. Knight.
Oh.
Oh, no.
Joe squeezed his eyes shut for a moment as he realized just how disruptive his late arrival had been.
“You’re the pilot,” he said as he opened his eyes.
Mr. Shining Knight—or Shining Pilot, Joe supposed, to be accurate—just looked amused. Apparently, from his side of things, it wasn’t absolutely mortifying.
“I told you they wouldn’t leave without us,” he pointed out as he nudged Joe to the side so he could squeeze by. “I should get back to it, though.”
There was a snort from somewhere in the ranks of seats and a muttered, ‘about time’. A phone got stuck out into the aisle, the camera aimed in Joe’s direction. He ducked his head and sank into his seat.
He’d have preferred to sink all the way into the hold, but he’d make do.
Benjy took Cody off him so Joe could buckle himself in. He grimly managed it.
“You are going to be all over TikTok,” Jessie told him as Cody strained from Benjy’s lap to try to grab the end of her ponytail with sticky fingers. “Hashtag Plane Papa. Or…Runway Romeo. Or…”
“Dad in Distress,” Benjy suggested dryly.
“Very funny,” Joe said. “I’m sure people have better things to do than put me online.”
Benjy and Jessie looked at each other. Then at him.
“No, they don’t,” they said in unison.
Halfway to Portland, and the kids were all asleep.
Joe fought the urge to follow suit as he tried to focus on the paperwork that was the reason he was on a flight he could barely afford and why he’d known the answer to SP’s crossword puzzle question.
O.T.O. Get that right in Google, and you wouldn’t need to try and spell the rest of otolaryngologist. That was just one of the little tricks Joe had learned over the last few months.
He scrubbed his hand roughly over his eyes and blinked a couple of times to clear them before he tried to reread the treatment recommendations from Cody’s last doctor. It didn’t help. The words just blurred and ran into each other, full of medical jargon and condescension in equal measure.
Joe heaved a resigned sigh and gave up. He closed the file over and leaned back in the seat, Cody a warm, sweaty weight against his side as he breathed wetly against his shirt.
Tomorrow. There would be time to read it tomorrow morning, before they had to get to their appointment with the specialist.
“Turkey or ham?” a vaguely familiar pleasant alto said.
It took Joe a moment to realize the question was aimed at him. He opened his eyes and blinked groggily at the glossy, auburn-haired woman looking at him expectantly.
“Oh, um,” he said. “No. I don’t want–”
“Compliments of Captain Halloran,” the woman—her name tag said ‘Annette’—assured him. “He said you’d probably not had a chance to eat this morning.”
She gave him an arch look. Joe thought about trying to puzzle it out, but almost immediately decided he didn’t have the bandwidth. There were only thirty minutes left of the flight, and he wasn’t going to waste his time on anything that wouldn’t be his problem soon.
“I really can’t accept that,” he said. “Captain…um…”
Anne looked amused. “Of course, you’d not know his name,” she said. “It’s Quentin. And honestly, just take the sandwich. You won’t get used to it. His love language is not acts of service. Or words of affirmation. He’s not really a hugger, either, so—”
Obviously, resistance was going to involve him getting more involved in whatever this was, so Joe gave in.
“Turkey,” he said.
Anne fished a sandwich in a crinkly, clear plastic case out of her cart and handed it to him. He turned it over in his hands as he looked at it. It was reassuringly sad looking, with wilted lettuce and a dry-looking slice of pressed fowl. Joe could afford the gratitude for this.
“And for the kids?” Anne asked. “We’ve got cheese and crackers for the little ones.”
She dangled two packets of snackables in front of him. Joe took them and set them down on the tray table, on top of the medical file.
“Um, same as me,” he said. “And um, could I get a coffee, if that’s not too much trouble?”
He heard himself and cringed. Free food and he still asked for more? Talk about ungrateful.
As generations of ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ ancestors tutted down his bloodlines, Joe flushed and tried to scramble back the request. Anne ignored him loftily as she poured him a cup.
“Too much trouble?” she said. “Mr. Gardner, I swear if you said your feet were cold, we’d be on our way to Hawaii.”
Joe grimaced an awkward response to that. There had been a time he’d have taken it as a compliment, but as a widower with three kids in tow…
It felt more like the indulgence extended to a lascivious great-aunt as she ogled the barman over her gin.
He accepted the coffee and fobbed off his imaginary, judgmental ancestors by not asking for sugar. Anne handed over film-topped cups of apple juice for the kids and then pushed the cart on down the aisle to pass out the rest of the food.
As Joe drank his coffee, someone reached around from the seat behind and tapped him on the shoulder.
“I have a job interview in Portland,” the man said. “If your feet are cold, let me know, and I’ll lend you a spare pair of socks.”
****
Joe caught a glimpse of the bright yellow strap he’d attached to the stroller through the legs of the other passengers as they jostled to grab their bags. He squirmed between a man in a suit and a frazzled-looking woman in a Disney shirt to grab it with one hand.
“Sorry,” he apologized as he swung it off the conveyor belt. “Just need to grab this. I’ll be out of your way…just…”
A strap that had burst off someone’s overstuffed, soft-shell suitcase had caught around the wheel.
Joe managed to drag it along with him, too, the whole thing tipping off the edge of the carousel.
The case landed with a well-padded thump and fell over.
The man in the suit swore as he stepped back and glared at Joe.
“You’re not the only one who has places to be,” he snapped.
Rather than argue, Joe just mimed an apology with his free hand as he untangled the stroller and headed back to the kids.
Habit made him give them a quick once-over. Head count first. With three kids, it was quicker than with a kindergarten class, but it made him feel better. Everyone was accounted for. Against his will, in Cody’s case, the toddler squirming against Benjy's grip on the hood of his jacket.
“You’ve got everything?” Joe checked. “Nothing left on the plane.”
Benjy was halfway through his sandwich. He swallowed and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Cody’s got his lion,” he said, his voice dripping with so-close-to-adolescence-he-could-taste-it superiority. “If that’s what you mean.”
“It’s a dog,” Jessie corrected him.
“It’s got a mane.”
“It’s a dog,” Jessie insisted. “And he’s my brother, so I should know.”
There was a brittle note to her voice. It had been an early start, and neither of them had wanted to be there. Before the autopilot bickering could escalate to anything more hurtful, Joe interrupted them.
“AirPods?” he asked.
Both of them rolled their eyes as they checked their ears and pockets. It was Benjy who shame-facedly came up with one pod, pinched between his fingers.
“I had it,” he said. “I think.”
Joe braced his foot against the frame lock of the stroller and gave the handles a yank to unfold it. He retrieved Cody from the ground and stuck him in it, avoiding the grip of sticky little fingers. To make sure nothing else went walkabout, he buckled the lion-dog-whatever in as well.
“We’ll report it to lost and found,” he said. “If someone hands it in, we can pick it up on our way back.”
Benjy looked worried. “What if they don’t?”
“Then that’ll teach you to take better care of your things,” Jessie said loftily, her freckled nose stuck up in the air. “I kept track of—”
“This time,” Joe cut in. “And if it doesn’t get handed in, we’ll…cross that bridge when we come to it.”
The promise to ‘order new ones’ had been on the tip of his tongue. A couple of years ago it would have been that easy. Now he was mentally massaging the budget and trying to decide if he could justify the expense for a bit of over-aesthetic plastic.
“But Dad gave them to me,” Benjy pointed out.
Yeah, that went for over-aesthetic plastic with sentimental value too.
Joe hated that. He hated himself a little too. That would have to wait, though.
“And I’m sure someone will hand it in,” he said. “I’m just saying that—”
Jessie interrupted him this time. “You could ask the pilot,” she said. “He liked you. Maybe he’d check the plane.”
Benjy brightened up. “Could you?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works,” Joe said. “And I couldn’t—”
“He was cool, he’d not mind!” Benjy insisted.
Joe took a deep breath of stale, airport oxygen. “I didn’t exactly get his WhatsApp, Benj,” he pointed out. “I don’t even know his name.”
That was a lie, he realized. Anne had told him.
It was Quentin. He felt guilty about that for a second, but it had slipped his mind.
Plus, this wasn’t back home. He couldn’t play Seven Degrees of Small Town to get someone’s life history with only their first name and their job description to start with.
Benjy still looked reluctant as he hunched down into his jacket and rolled his remaining AirPod between his fingers. He took a deep breath and let it out shakily. Joe could sense the meltdown on the horizon.
“Tell you what,” he said to head it off. “If it doesn’t turn up, I’ll ask him about it on our flight back. OK?”
Benjy shuffled his feet, rubber soles squeaking on the tiles. “What if he’s not on the flight?”
OK. Joe was willing to give the kid some leeway––with everything—but there was a limit. At this point he was just borrowing trouble to be dramatic.
“It’s Corvus,” Joe pointed out. “I think they’ve only got three pilots. Besides, how else would he get back home?”