Chapter 1 The Arrival Gate at NAIA #3
“Who taught you that?”
“She did.” Hal tipped his head toward Mina. “Badly. And there is a video on the internet of a man from Ohio getting it wrong, and I watched it several times so as not to be him.”
Meding considered this. Then she reached out and took the chain at Hal’s throat between two fingers and drew the crucifix out from under his shirt and turned it over, unhurried, the way you check a fruit.
It was silver and small and worn nearly smooth on one face. His abuela had worn it for fifty-one years in San Juan and then in Savannah, and she had put it around his neck herself in a hospital room in 2019, and he had taken it off exactly twice since.
“Whose,” Meding said.
“My grandmother’s.”
“She is gone?”
“Seven years.”
Meding let it fall back against his shirt and patted the spot flat with two fingers, twice, which felt like being stamped.
“Okay,” she said, and went to make the coffee.
Mina, by the window, was watching all of this with an expression Hal could not read at all.
“What,” he said.
“Nothing.”
“That was not nothing. That was a hundred and forty things.”
“Drink your coffee,” Mina said, “when it comes,” and turned back to the glass.
She was quiet for a moment. Then, still facing the window:
“I have to be at the studio at four.”
Hal did not say anything.
“I know,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You did not have to, your whole back changed.” She turned around.
“It is a live taping. It goes out at noon tomorrow but we band it the day before, and there are two hundred and sixty people whose Wednesday depends on me standing on a mark at four o’clock, and I have known about it since June, and I tried, Hal, I genuinely tried to move it. ”
“Mina.”
“There is a musical number. There is a costume with a hydraulic component.”
“Mina.”
She stopped.
“I moved freight for nine years,” Hal said.
“You know what I did every single day for nine years? I told people the truck was going to be late. That was the job. Everybody hated me and the truck was still late.” He shrugged.
“You have a shift. Go do your shift. I am going to take a shower that lasts a criminal amount of time and then I am going to fall asleep sitting up, and then you will come home and wake me up and I will be extremely charming.”
Mina looked at him.
“You could come,” she said.
“To the taping?”
“You would be backstage. It is loud and it is boring and there is nowhere good to sit and you have been awake for a day.”
“Yes,” Hal said.
“You did not think about it.”
“I thought about it plenty. I did it fast.”
Hal sat down on a couch that cost more than his truck and put his hands on his knees and looked around the apartment of a woman he had been in love with for eleven months and had known in person for ninety minutes.
Mina came and stood in front of him. She had taken the sunglasses out of her hair and her hair had come partly down with them and she did not fix it.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“You are allowed to say it is too much.”
“It isn’t.”
“Hal.”
“It isn’t.” He looked up at her. “It’s a lot.
It is genuinely a lot, and I am going to say stupid things for about three days while I get my feet, and you are going to have to be patient with me.
But it is not too much.” He shrugged, one shoulder.
“I moved a hundred and forty thousand pounds of frozen chicken through an ice storm in February, baby. I do not scare.”
Mina looked at him for a moment.
Then she sat down on the floor in front of the couch, between his boots, with her back against the coffee table, which was not a thing anyone would do in a photograph, and rested her arms on his knees.
“Say something in Spanish,” she said.
“Estoy aquí.”
“What does it mean?”
“You know what it means.”
“I want to hear you say it means something.”
“It means I’m here.” Hal put his hand on the back of her neck, under the fallen hair, and left it there. “That’s all it means. I’m here.”
From the kitchen came the sound of Meding running water, and then the sound of Meding conspicuously not listening.
Mina closed her eyes.
Hal, looking down at her, thought about the airport. Not the noise, and not the flashes, and not the woman with the microphone. He thought about the quarter turn.
She had put herself between him and that microphone in a movement so economical that he had not seen it happen.
Hal spent his working life watching how things moved through tight spaces, watching forklift drivers and dock crews and the difference between a man who was fast and a man who was efficient, and he had missed it completely, and he had only registered it afterward, the way you register that a door has closed behind you.
He filed it. He did not know where to file it, so he put it in the place where he kept things that did not fit yet, and he let it sit there.
Out past the glass the rain came harder, and the top of the next tower over went into the cloud and stopped existing, and forty-one floors below, in a city of sixteen cities, water began to find the low ground.