Free First Class Killing by Lynne Heitman Page B

to do a lot of bustling in a very confined area. “I see no reason not to use all of the syllables.”
    Jamie kept shifting from one side of the doorway to the other. “Am I in your way? I feel like I’m in the way. I’ll go back to my seat.”
    “Not at all. I’m leaving now. Please, you two. As you were.” He vanished and left us alone again, but not without a quick wink that only I could see.
    Jamie reached up and scratched the back of his head, which changed his view just enough that he wasn’t looking at me when he asked, “Do you want to get together tonight? I have meetings all day, but I could…I’d like to take you to dinner.”
    Instead of raising his head, he stared at his shoes, waiting for me to accept or reject his offer, and I remembered how after Mom died, he wouldn’t let me buy him new shoes. He only wanted to wear the ones she’d bought him, so he walked around for months in sneakers that hurt, but he wouldn’t let them go. It was completely unreasonable to be in such pain, and it made perfect sense, and for a second, as I stood watching him stare at his shoes, I wanted nothing more than to go sit with him and talk and try to put things back together, to make them the way they used to be. But I couldn’t. I might be able to talk, but I didn’t know how to make us the way we used to be, and I was afraid I would make it worse, because any relationship I had with him could not include my father, and I was afraid to ask about that.
    I looked down at my own feet. We were both standing there in shoes that hurt because they didn’t fit anymore, but we had no new shoes to put on.
    “Jamie, I don’t…I can’t make it tonight. I’m sorry.”
    “Don’t you think it would be good for us to talk?” Now he was looking at me. I noticed as I turned away.
    “Yes. I do want to talk.” My hands were moving, and things were happening on the galley surface in front of me. I just wasn’t sure what. “I can’t do it tonight.”
    “Fine.” He said it with bite, the verbal equivalent of a door slamming.
    “I have to work.”
    “Doing what?” He may not have meant to put that sneer in his voice, but it was there and I heard it. It was all I heard.
    I turned to him, one hand on my hip. “This is a job, Jamie. I do real work. I earn real money. It might not be something you can feel proud of, but I’m proud of the choices I’ve made.”
    “You chose this?”
    “Jamie—”
    “Come on, Alex. The last I knew, you were on a VP track at a major airline. Then you lose your job, and you show up serving me breakfast. I’m trying to understand what’s going on with you. Not that you would ever tell me, anyway.”
    “I didn’t lose my job.”
    “What?”
    “I resigned my position at Majestic. It makes a difference.”
    “What makes a difference?”
    “The way you say it. I didn’t get fired, Jamie. It makes a difference to me.”
    “It makes a difference to you what I think? Since when?”
    That was a dig that could not go undefended. “Maybe we can get together for dinner next time you’re in Boston.”
    He looked at me, and he was angry and hurt, and he seemed to feel betrayed with an intensity that went beyond this little encounter we were having. I was feeling all those things, too. He walked back up the aisle to his seat, buckled in, and spent the rest of the flight staring out the window. I spent the rest of the flight in the galley.
    As he walked off in LA, he was polite and distant, and I knew it would be a cold day in hell before he ever called me from any city, and I wasn’t even sure how it had happened.

Chapter

10
    T HE GRASS WAS BROWN AND BRITTLE IN THE Hollywood Hills, and the trees looked exhausted.
    “Must be a drought out here,” I said, to no one in particular. No one in particular answered. Our cabbie, a man with only consonants in his name, spoke a weirdly paced version of English with the accents on the wrong syllables. He and Tristan were busy trying to locate the