2. Gavin
GAVIN
The storm alarm finally stays quiet a little before dawn, and I give it another minute before I trust it.
Allison’s at the control panel in my white shirt and a pair of rubber boots, with her hair twisted up on top of her head and held there by what I’m fairly sure is a plant label. She looks exhausted and beautiful, and she won’t look at me.
“The vent’s holding,” I say.
“For now.”
I tell myself she means the vent.
We spent the rest of the night resetting tripped circuits and hauling basil trays to the dry end of the house.
I could have called somebody. I run a company whose entire job is getting people places in bad weather.
I stayed because she needed another pair of hands, and because she’d asked me how much longer London would be and I didn’t have an answer I was willing to say out loud.
The guilt has been a hard knot under my sternum all night.
I called Rebecca from the potting shed while Allison checked the backup controls. She said the London clients had changed what they wanted, and she wasn’t going to read me the new schedule over the phone. Rebecca only refuses to give me a number when she knows I’m going to hate it.
Allison shuts the metal cover on the alarm panel. “You should go.”
“I’ll wait till Luis gets here.”
“Luis gets here any minute.”
“Then I’ll wait a minute.”
She finally looks at me. “You’ve been checking your watch all night.”
“Not all night.”
“Gavin.”
“Most of the night,” I admit.
I step closer and don’t touch her. I asked last night, and I’m not sure last night’s answer still counts in the morning. There’s a faint red mark above her collarbone where my mouth was, and the sight of it sends heat through me at an hour when no part of me should be awake enough to manage it.
She crosses her arms, and that takes care of that.
“I’ll call you after the meeting,” I tell her.
“Will you?”
She says it quietly, without any meanness in it at all, and it’s worse than if she’d yelled.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
I hate okay from her. It goes into me cold, because it’s the word she uses on vendors she’s already decided to replace.
Luis’s truck turns into the loading yard with its headlights bouncing over the mud, and Allison looks toward it. I lean in and kiss her forehead, because it feels safer than her mouth. She lets me. That isn’t the same as kissing me back, and we both know it.
“Get some sleep,” I say.
“Go save aviation.”
“Just the glamorous parts.”
Her mouth moves, almost a smile, and I leave before I can talk myself into thinking that was enough.
At the penthouse I shower, find mud under my watch strap, and put on a navy suit. Last night’s shoes go to the back of the closet with a note for the housekeeper. I keep them anyway.
Callahan Air flies people who don’t want to wait in airports.
Rich families, movie people, and executives from big companies who’d rather pay a fortune than stand in a security line with their shoes in a bin.
You call us, and a plane’s waiting for you in an hour with your coffee already made the way you like it. That’s the whole business.
It started with one leased plane and a hangar at Teterboro that leaked every time it rained.
Rebecca ran operations off a laptop balanced on a toolbox, and I answered the phones myself because we couldn’t afford anybody to do it for us.
Now we have a real fleet, a hangar that stays dry and offices on the top floors of a glass tower on Sixth Avenue, and the lobby wall is a black map with gold lines running to every city our planes fly into.
Rebecca was there for all of it. We dated in those early years and even got engaged, and it lasted about as long as it took us to try to pick a wedding venue.
It turned out we were very good at running a company together and terrible at planning a party, so we ended it before anybody ordered invitations.
There hasn’t been anything between us since, and there won’t be.
Allison knows every bit of it. I told her on our second date, because I didn’t want her hearing it from a stranger at a party.
Allison came along for the next part. She met me when we had a few planes and no real reason to think we’d ever have more, and she’s been there for every one we’ve added since.
Now there’s London. It’s our first base overseas, at an airfield called Farnborough, southwest of the city.
A lot of our clients do business in Europe, and they’re tired of paying to fly an empty plane across the ocean to come get them.
If we have planes and crews sitting in England, we can pick them up in London the way we pick them up in New Jersey.
I’ve already moved some of our best people over there to start it: pilots, mechanics, a dispatcher who packed up her whole family because I asked her to.
The plan was six weeks for me. Hire a good local manager, shake the right hands, sign a few clients and fly home.
Rebecca’s already in the main conference room when I walk in, in a gray suit, with three screens open in front of her. There’s coffee at my usual seat, black with one sugar. She’s known how I take it since the hangar.
“You look terrible,” she says.
“Good morning.”
“Was there damage at the greenhouse?”
“One bad vent. We saved the basil.”
“Of course you did.” She says it the way she’d note a delayed departure.
I sit down and pick up the coffee. “Give me the number.”
She turns the biggest screen toward me. The title says LONDON: WHO HAS TO BE THERE, and under it is a calendar with most of the year shaded in.
“Six weeks isn’t believable anymore,” she says.
“The big clients over there won’t sign with a base run by strangers.
They’ve met you and they’ve met me, and they want both of us on the ground until it opens.
That means hiring the pilots and crews ourselves, getting the hangar running and sitting through every client dinner in England. We open the first week of November.”
I look at the calendar. April through November.
“No,” I say.
Rebecca doesn’t blink. “No to which part?”
“All of it.”
“Then we don’t open London.”
“That isn’t what I said.”
“Those are the choices.” She taps the screen. “If we’re not there, they sign with somebody who is. They won’t trust their families to people who fly in for the important meetings and disappear after dinner.”
“I don’t disappear after dinner.”
Rebecca looks at me over her screens. I think about cold salmon eaten off a plastic fork well after midnight, and the back of my neck goes hot.
“From London,” I add.
“Naturally.”
“I can be in New York every other weekend,” I say.
“When the clients let you.”
“I own the planes.”
“You don’t own the weather, the crew rest rules or the Atlantic Ocean.” She folds her hands. “Somebody in this building has to say out loud what growth costs, Gavin.”
“You enjoy saying it.”
“That doesn’t make me wrong.”
It doesn’t. That’s the most annoying thing about her.
I open the calendar Allison shares with me, full of hotel installs and delivery weeks and a few dates marked DO NOT ASK ME TO WEAR HEELS, and I start building around the gaps.
I don’t ask her whether she wants her life cut up into pieces to fit around mine.
In my head I’m protecting her work, and that makes it generous.
“She could run the greenhouses from London for part of it,” Rebecca says. “There’s a whole empty floor over the hangar. We could put a desk for her anywhere.”
My head comes up. “Allison has a payroll full of people and acres of live plants that die if nobody’s there to look at them. She can’t put that on a desk.”
“She has managers.”
“So do I. I still came in this morning.”
Rebecca sits back. “Then you understand the problem.”
“She won’t be asked to walk away from her business,” I say. “I’ll build the travel around hers.”
“Then tell the clients that when they ask who’s running their base.”
“I’ll tell my wife how my marriage works before I tell any client.”
“Good.” Her voice doesn’t change at all. “Tell her today.”
The gala is the day after tomorrow. It’s our party for the London launch, and the two biggest clients are flying in for it. They’ve said they’ll give us their answer that night.
Allison picked out a dress for it. Last week she texted me a picture of one bare shoulder and a thin strap of rust-colored silk, with a message underneath. Will you actually see me in it? I told her I would, and I meant it. My mouth went dry over that one strap in the middle of a budget meeting.
If I tell her about London today, every hour between now and the gala turns into London, and the one good night I can still give her becomes a going-away party.
And the clients haven’t said yes, so there’s nothing final to tell her.
The relief of putting it off loosens my shoulders, and I’m ashamed of how good it feels.
“After the gala,” I say.
Rebecca’s eyes narrow. “Gavin.”
“They haven’t said yes.”
“They will.”
“Then I’ll tell Allison when there’s something real to tell her.”
She closes one of her screens. “You know she’s going to hear that as you deciding without her.”
“I’m not deciding whether she gets to have a career.”
“No. Just where you’re going to live until Thanksgiving.”
It irritates me, because she meant it to.
“I’m not discussing my marriage with you.”
“You’re discussing whether you can do the job you signed up for. Your marriage is part of the schedule.”
The paper cup buckles in my hand, and I set it down before I crush it. “Don’t call my wife part of the schedule.”
Rebecca looks at me a moment longer, then nods. “Fine.”
She doesn’t apologize, and she doesn’t bring it up again. That’s how we’ve always worked. We push until we both know where the line is, and then we go back to work.
By noon she’s put together a townhouse in London, a hiring chart and a travel plan with more hopeful guesses in it than I’d accept from anybody who worked for me.
I read it anyway. New York every other weekend.
Allison in London whenever she can get away, with a room in the townhouse set up as an office so she can work while she’s there.
A call every night that nothing gets scheduled over. No meetings on our anniversary.
I put that last one in myself.
It looks reasonable, better than reasonable, and temporary. I tell her to book the townhouse, and she goes out to call Farnborough.
The last page stays up on the conference room screen after she’s gone. At the top are the two people who have to be there.
GAVIN CALLAHAN, CEO
REBECCA KENDALL, COO
Underneath our names, seven months are blocked out in red.