26. Gavin
GAVIN
The call from London comes in while I’m eating a bagel over my desk. I do that now. Allison says I eat like a man who’s never seen a plate. She’s not wrong.
It’s Deb Kowalski, who runs the Farnborough base day to day, and she doesn’t bother with hello. Deb ran the ground crews at Teterboro for years before she came over with me. She’s been doing two jobs since Rebecca left, and she sounds like it.
“Another captain quit this morning,” she says. “He’s going back to his old airline. He said he didn’t move his whole family to England to wait three days for New York to answer a question about his own schedule.”
I put the bagel down. “Did he say that to you or did he say it loud?”
“He said it in the crew lounge, Gavin. Everybody heard it.”
I close my eyes. I can see that crew lounge. I picked the couches. The sound of it goes through me cold, because he isn’t wrong either, and I know exactly whose fault it is.
London’s been going bad all winter, slowly and then not slowly at all, and the truth is it started going bad before the opening.
Rebecca and I built that base the way we built the first hangar, with every decision running through the two of us.
We signed the clients ourselves and set the schedules ourselves, and nobody over there got to make a real call without one of us saying yes.
When I fired Rebecca, half of that went with her.
When I stayed in New York, everything else had to wait for me to answer my phone, and I was answering it from a greenhouse office.
Crews wait days for answers now, and they’re leaving faster than we can hire them.
The hangar that was full of champagne and clients on opening night is half empty again.
“There’s worse,” she says.
“Tell me.”
“The family called.”
She means the family company that’s the biggest client we have over there.
It’s three generations of them, and every single person they employ flies with us, from the grandfather down to the sales staff.
They were the first people I signed in London.
They were in the front row at the opening, clapping at my speech, while my wife was in labor in a storm.
The old man who runs it has only ever dealt with me.
I signed him and took every one of his calls, and I liked it that way.
“He wants you,” Deb says. “He says he signed with Gavin Callahan and he hasn’t seen Gavin Callahan since November. He wants you at his house for dinner on Friday, in person, or they’re gone. He says he’s got a competitor who’ll fly his people and actually show up.”
“This Friday.”
“This Friday.” She lets out a long breath. “I’ve been asking you since the pilot interviews to let me take his meetings, so he’d get used to my face. I asked you again in September, and at the opening, and every night since Christmas. You kept saying later. This is later, Gavin.”
She doesn’t say it to score a point. She sounds too tired for that.
“I know,” I say. “You were right every time.”
If they walk, the base closes. It’s that simple.
Nobody else we’ve got is big enough to keep the lights on.
I think about Dom, who moved his wife and their two little boys from Newark because I told him it was the chance of a lifetime.
I think about Tanya, who sold her car to make the move and cried at the opening party because she’d never lived anywhere but Queens.
A whole year of work, and all those people, and every one of them came because I asked.
“I’ll call you back,” I say.
“Gavin.” She hesitates. “They’re asking me if you’re coming. The crews. What do I tell them?”
“Tell them I’ll call them back too.”
The board chair calls an hour later. He’s a patient man who flies with us out of Palm Beach and has never raised his voice at me, and he doesn’t raise it now. “Go to London, Gavin, or we’ll find someone who will. For what it’s worth, I like your wife. This isn’t about her.”
It’s always about her. Every time somebody tells me the company needs me, what they’re telling me is that my wife can wait, and for most of my marriage I nodded along.
When my assistant puts her head in to ask if she should have the plane ready for Thursday night, I tell her not to book anything.
She blinks. I’ve never said that to her before.
Then I sit and wait for the phone to ring again, because I know the board chair golfs with half the men my mother ever dated.
“Darling,” Evelyn says. “I hear you’ve been asked to do your job.”
“Hello, Mother.”
“Don’t say hello, Mother like I’m a telemarketer. I’m calling because nobody else in your life will say this to you plainly, and I’m the only one who doesn’t need anything from you.”
That’s a lie, and we both know it, but she says it so smoothly it almost sounds true.
“You’ve spent the whole winter in a greenhouse,” she says.
“Changing diapers and writing in a notebook, I’m told.
It’s very sweet. I’m sure it’s done wonders for your conscience.
Now there are people in England who uprooted their entire lives for you, and they’re watching you sit in Westchester while the thing you promised them falls apart. ”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because it looks from here like you’ve decided that since you missed one thing, you’re never allowed to leave the state again.” She lets that sit. “It’s a few days, Gavin. It’s dinner. Even your wife can survive a few days.”
“She survived seven months,” I say. “And having our son, and most of the rest of it, without me.”
There’s a pause on the line. When she talks again, her voice has gone quieter, the way it used to when I was small and sick and she sat on the edge of my bed.
“I’m asking you not to watch the thing you built fall down because you feel guilty. That’s all. Your father would have been on the plane already.”
“I know he would have,” I say. “That’s sort of my point.”
“Don’t be clever. It doesn’t suit you.” The softness is gone, and she’s Evelyn Callahan again. “Go to London. Come home. Buy her something nice. You’re good at that.”
“Goodbye, Mother.”
“Gavin…”
I hang up. My hands are steady. That surprises me.
The ugly part is that I want to go. I want to walk into that dinner and look the old man in the eye and save it.
I want the crews to see me show up. I built that base out of nothing, the way I built the first hangar, and the thought of it closing because I couldn’t be bothered to cross an ocean makes my stomach turn over. Most of that is pride, and I know it.
The last time I felt like this, I booked the plane and told my wife in the back of a car.
I get my coat.
The drive up to North Salem takes an hour, and I spend most of it with the radio off.
It’s late March, and the snow along the Saw Mill has gone gray and ugly, and the trees are still bare.
By the time I pull into the loading yard at Barrett, the light’s going and the glass houses are lit up gold from inside.
She’s in propagation three, the greenhouse where she starts her seedlings.
It’s where she goes when she’s thinking.
She’s got her sleeves pushed up and soil to her wrists, moving tiny seedlings into bigger pots, and Henry’s asleep in his bouncer on the end of the bench, in a knit hat with bear ears that Janet bought and Allison pretends to hate.
He’s four months old now, and he’s gotten long.
His feet hang off the end of the bouncer.
She looks up when the door shuts behind me, and she looks surprised for a second. It isn’t my day.
“Is something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong with anybody,” I say. “I need to talk to you about work. Before I do anything.”
She looks at me for a second longer. Then she wipes her hands on her apron, pulls a stool out from under the bench with her foot, and nods at it. I sit.
So I tell her. I tell her about the captain in the crew lounge and the crews leaving and the half-empty hangar.
I tell her about the family and the dinner on Friday, and that if I’m not there, they walk and the base closes.
I tell her Deb’s been asking for months to take the old man’s meetings and I kept telling her later, because I didn’t want anybody else’s hands on it.
I tell her about Dom and Tanya. I tell her what the board chair said, word for word, and what my mother said, mostly word for word, leaving out the part about buying her something nice.
She listens the whole time without interrupting, pressing soil down around a seedling with her thumb. Henry sighs in his sleep.
“When would you go?” she asks.
“Thursday night. Dinner’s Friday. I’d be home Sunday. I’d be back for his bath.”
“Is she going to be there?”
She doesn’t have to say the name. “No. Nobody’s called her. Nobody’s going to.”
Allison nods slowly and reaches for another seedling. “Did you book it already?”
“No.”
Her hands stop. She looks up at me, and I can’t read her face at all. That almost never happens anymore.
“I haven’t booked anything,” I say. “I told my assistant not to. I came here first. I want to know what you think.”
“What I think.”
“If you tell me not to go, I don’t go,” I say, and it’s true.
My heart’s pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.
“I’ll call the old man tonight and tell him I’m sorry, and the base closes, and that’s on me.
I’m not going to hold it against you. I’m asking because it’s your life too. I should have asked you last April.”
She looks down at the seedling in her hand and doesn’t answer. It’s tiny, two leaves on a white thread of a stem, and she turns it carefully so the roots don’t tear. I watch her put it in the new pot and firm the soil down around it with her fingertips.
Then she looks at Henry asleep in his bear hat, and then she looks at me.
“Go,” she says. “Come back when you say you will.”