The Last Family

41

Eve was standing on her porch beside a suitcase. That morning Mr. Puzzle had been picked up by the garbage truck as Eve had frowned at the collector through the kitchen window. Larry lost the five dollars he had bet Sierra that Eve would have a change of heart and get the animal out of the can.

Eve was wearing a glen-plaid cloth coat. A scarf printed with a violent fury of flowers, vines, and greenery covered her hair and shrouded her face like a hood. She had the wicker purse locked to her chest when the yellow cab pulled up in front of her house. The driver stepped out and walked toward the porch.

“Airport, ma’am?” he said.

“Get this.” She tapped the suitcase with her toe. The driver lifted it and carried it to the car. She followed five feet behind and watched as he placed the case on the floorboard and pushed it in.

“Drive carefully,” she admonished from the backseat. Larry Burrows smiled to himself and pushed the ill-fitting cab-driver’s cap back. He had watched her dress on a black and white, he hadn’t been ready for the savage ferocity of the scarf and the effect of the rhinestone-encrusted cat’s-eye glasses with deep green lenses. Her brilliant red lips seemed to float angrily in the center of the luminous white oval of face. The look was withered movie star fleeing the press after a scandal of epic proportions-or a deranged, over-the-hill geisha.

“Taking a trip?” Larry asked.

“I don’t answer personal questions from servants,” she snapped. “USAir.”

Good grief, he thought. Servants?

After a ride conducted in complete silence, Larry pulled the cab against the curb under the USAir sign.

She handed him a twenty, which was worn almost white in places. He tried to hand her the change, but she waved it off. “That’s for you. You drive okay and you’re quiet.”

She turned and handed her ticket to the porter while Larry climbed into the cab and drove away past the other airline entrances.

At the end of the next airline’s entrances he pulled over, opened the trunk, and traded the knit shirt, golfer’s jacket, and chauffeur’s cap for a blue button-down, a navy blazer, khaki slacks, and loafers. Then he put on a pair of horn rims and slicked his hair down, using some cream from a tube and a thin comb. He lifted a briefcase, closed the trunk, and entered the airport. A police officer stepped from the curb and got in and took the cab, which had been borrowed from local vice’s motor pool. Stephanie was waiting for Larry and hooked her arm in his. Minutes later they were at the gate a few feet away from where Eve sat clutching her purse and staring at the waiting airplane’s tail section through the windows.

Eve boarded nearly last. Larry and Stephanie got on ahead of her and began to get nervous as the plane started filling up and she still hadn’t come on board. Just as they were about to decide that she had other plans, she walked in and took her seat beside a man in a red sweater. The last people on board were, according to their uniforms, a pair of airline personnel.

The airplane taxied out and took off. As soon as the plane was off the ground, Eve pushed her scarf back until it was off her head and gathered on her neck. She busied herself with a flight magazine.

Two rows behind her, Stephanie smiled because she knew Eve couldn’t be reading without her prescription glasses. Larry had a Scotch and water and fell asleep for the duration of the flight.

Stephanie was glad Eve was almost blind-or she might have recognized the two cable-repair agents who were sitting a few rows in front of her, trying to look inconspicuous. Joe McLean, boarding last in a pilot’s uniform, walked back to the bathroom, passing her without so much as a sidelong glance.