6. Gavin
GAVIN
Allison doesn’t answer right away, and I stand in the little glass office at the back of the Farnborough hangar and wait for her.
Upstairs, the client dinner is still going in the lounge, and I can hear somebody laughing too loud at a story about Monaco.
In here it’s quiet. For once nobody else can hear my wife.
“Are you coming home?” she asks.
I close my eyes. “After the opening. The way we agreed.”
“We never agreed, Gavin. You told me in a car.”
She’s right, and I hate how quickly she’s right. I turn my back on the window. Out on the hangar floor there’s one of our jets under the work lights with a mechanic lying on a creeper under the nose, and a lot of empty concrete around it where the rest of the planes are supposed to be by November.
“Then come home now,” she says.
There’s no good answer to that, and I try one anyway. “I can’t move a hangar to North Salem.”
“No,” she says. “The plants would hate the planes.”
I almost laugh, and that makes missing her worse, so bad my throat aches. For a moment I can see her exactly: hair twisted up with a pencil through it, mud on her knees, looking at me like I’m irritating and hers. My ring clicks against the glass when I lean my hand on it.
Then I hear it in her breathing. She isn’t just angry.
She sounds scared, the way she sounded the night a heater failed in propagation three in January and she didn’t know yet whether she’d lost the whole crop.
I haven’t heard that fear in her voice often, and I know it right away. The back of my neck goes cold.
“Why did you call today?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer. I pull the phone away from my ear and look at the log. One call from her, while I was at the table with the client. Rebecca leaned down and told me it was nothing urgent, and I took her word for it and went back to my fish.
“Was it about your things from the penthouse?”
“Yes.” It comes too fast.
“Only that?”
She’s quiet again, and it’s shorter this time, and worse.
“Allison, is there anything I need to know?”
I hear her breathe in. “No,” she says. “There’s nothing you need to know.”
This is the moment I could fix it. I could walk out of this office, past the dinner, and tell the crew to fuel the jet sitting right there on the hangar floor. I could be in New York by morning and find out for myself what’s wrong with my wife’s voice.
I don’t. She said no, and Allison has never been shy about telling me what she wants, so I believe her.
If something were really wrong, she’d say it.
I stay here until the opening, I come home in November, and we have the rest of our lives to fix whatever this is.
My stomach stays tight anyway, and I press my palm flat on the glass until it goes cold.
“All right,” I say, and it tastes bad.
“Okay.”
“Allison.”
“What?”
I have too many things to say, and none of them is that I’m coming home. “I love you.”
She pulls in a breath hard enough that I hear it across the ocean. “I know,” she says, and she’s gone.
I keep the dead phone against my ear until the screen goes dark, with dread prickling up the insides of my arms, and then Rebecca opens the door. She doesn’t come in.
“He’s asking where you went.”
“Why did you tell me my wife’s call was nothing urgent?”
Her face doesn’t move. “She wouldn’t say what it was. She asked for you and wouldn’t leave a message. I assumed it was about the move.”
“You don’t get to assume that.”
“You were in the middle of the biggest dinner we’ve had since we got here.”
“I don’t care if I’m in the middle of a speech to the King.” It comes out louder than I mean it to, and the mechanic under the jet looks up. I lower my voice. “If she calls that number again, you hand me the phone. Even at a client table. Even in the middle of a meeting.”
Rebecca glances past me toward the dinner. “Even then?”
“Especially then.”
“Fine,” she says, and steps back to let me through.
I take the long way, down the length of the hangar floor, because I’ve gotten in the habit.
It’s big enough to hold every plane we own in New Jersey, and right now it holds one jet, a row of new tool chests still wrapped in plastic and a whiteboard where the dispatcher has written NOVEMBER in huge red letters and underlined it like a threat.
The paint on the floor lines is so fresh I can still smell it.
Every morning I walk in here and see how much is missing, and every night I tell myself we’ll fill it.
The mechanic rolls out from under the nose on his creeper and looks up at me. That’s Dom. He’s worked for me since the leaky hangar at Teterboro, and he moved his wife and their two little boys from Newark across the ocean for this.
“Everything all right at home?” he asks.
“Fine.”
He rolls back under the plane without believing a word of it.
Upstairs, I sit back down at the table. The client is a man who owns half the hotels in the south of France, and he’s been deciding for a month whether to trust us with his family and his managers.
He wants to know about our pilots. I tell him about the ones I interviewed today.
There was a woman who flew search and rescue in the Scottish Highlands for years and asked me more hard questions than I asked her, and a young guy from Manchester who brought his grandfather’s old pilot’s wings in his pocket for luck.
I hired both of them before lunch. Deb Kowalski sat in on the interviews with me.
She ran the line at Teterboro for years and came over to run this base day to day, and between candidates she asked me again to let her take this man’s meetings so he gets used to her face.
I told her later, once he signs. It’s the best part of this job, and for a while I stop wondering whether I understood my wife when she asked me not to go.
My phone sits face up by my plate the whole dinner. I check it when he talks about his yacht, and when the waiter brings the cheese, and when Rebecca walks him through the hangar schedule. Nothing comes. By dessert I’ve turned it over so I’ll stop looking, and then I turn it back.
He signs at the end of the night, shaking my hand in the hangar doorway with the jet behind us.
Rebecca smiles like she won a bet. The people I brought over from New Jersey, the mechanics and the dispatcher who moved her kids into a rented house in Farnborough, will all have work through the winter because of that handshake.
I tell myself that’s what I’m here for, and it’s true, and it doesn’t help much on the drive back.
The townhouse Callahan rented for me is in Chelsea, tall and white and very clean. Rebecca has her own flat across town and goes home to it every night. There’s no wine and no soft lighting, nothing that looks like the vacation Allison accused me of. It still took me away from her.
The house was stocked by people I’ve never met: stacks of white towels, a set of identical mugs, a refrigerator full of food somebody picked off an assistant’s list of things I’m supposed to like.
Allison would hate it. She’d put one of her ugly terracotta pots in the middle of the polished dining table just to upset whoever stocked it.
I open the refrigerator, look at all of it, and close it again.
I’m not hungry. I’m lonely, and it sits in my gut where dinner should be.
Upstairs the bedroom’s quiet. Half my shirts are still in the suitcase. Allison’s side of the bed has never been slept in, and I get in on my side anyway, out of habit, and maybe out of hope. I take off my watch and leave my ring on.
Our text thread is mostly logistics now.
The driver has the box from the penthouse.
I can arrange a flight tomorrow. The last picture she sent me is a bare shoulder and a rust-colored strap, the week before the gala, with Will you actually see me in it?
underneath. I type I heard fear in your voice tonight and delete it, because if I heard fear, I should’ve done more than type a text in the middle of the night.
I type Call me when you wake up, and that sounds like one more instruction, so I delete that too.
I tell myself she’d have told me if I needed to come home. I tell myself I asked her twice.
I type I miss you.
My thumb sits over the arrow. It sounds like asking her to come to London, and I’ve already asked her that, and she’s already said no.
I delete it.