First Class Killing

Chapter 9

TRISTAN WAS IN THE GALLEY, WORKING FROM the seating chart to prepare the drinks. I stared over his shoulder, bounced on the balls of my feet until my calves ached, and did nothing useful. “Do you have any celery? Jamie likes celery in his tomato juice.”

“He didn’t ask for it, but I’ll check.” He found a stalk, dropped it in, and placed the glass in the last empty spot on the tray. I stared at the drinks for half a second, then picked up Jamie’s and left the rest. “I’ll be back for those. Let me do this first.”

I tried a couple of smiles, all of which felt forced and painful. I picked the one that felt the least cheesy. When I pulled up next to Jamie’s seat wearing my forced and frozen smile, he didn’t even raise his head.

“Jamie.”

He glanced up and didn’t quite register who it was leaning over him to deliver his drink. He reached for it with a polite smile that turned to stunned surprise.

He blinked at me, then looked up toward the galley, as if it would help his understanding to see precisely where I had just come from.

“What are you doing here? What are you wearing?”

Then I watched his eyes as they made the slow and deliberate sweep from my face to my uniform to my name tag and back. The look that crossed his face in the moment of comprehension was pure reaction, a translation, stark and true, of the thoughts running through his brain. He recovered, but not in time. I hadn’t seen my brother in ten months. The first thought he had when he saw me in my uniform was disappointment.

“Hi, Jamie.” I crossed my arms as though I could hide my entire body behind the two bare lengths of skin and bone. Awkward was not even close to what I was feeling. He was strapped to his seat, bound by FAA rules to stay that way, so we couldn’t greet each other as we might have before the great estrangement-with a hug. I didn’t feel comfortable leaning down to kiss him, and shaking hands would have been beyond weird. So we did nothing, and the space between us might as well have been the space between Mercury and Pluto.

My smile was gone, but he offered an uncertain one that grew bigger when an idea came to him. “Wait. Is this one of those management walk-a-mile-in-my-shoes programs?”

“No. I’m your flight attendant, and I’ll be serving you today.”

“Oh.” Now his smile was frozen.

“How are you, Jamie? How have you been?”

“Good. I’ve been good. When did you start-”

“A couple of months ago. How’s Gina?”

“Good.”

“The kids?”

“Great.”

My next question would have been about what he was doing in Boston, but if I asked it, he might feel obligated to offer a lame excuse about why he didn’t call while he was there, something he didn’t want to say and I didn’t want to hear. But with that question in the way, I couldn’t see past it to another. I smiled and nodded. He smiled and nodded and moved his juice a centimeter to the right.

“You changed your hair,” he said, looking and then not looking at me.

“I did. Yeah.” I reached up and pulled at the ends in the back. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might look different to him, too. “Do you like it?”

“It’s really different. I’m not sure I would have recognized you.” He looked at me steadily for the first time, not at my uniform or my waistband or the tray table. I was the one who flinched.

“We should talk, Jamie, but I have to serve the other passengers first. I’ll come back.”

“Wait, are you…will you be in LA tonight?”

“I’ll come back when I have a minute.”

“Okay. I’m not going anywhere.” He managed a real smile for the first time, one that helped me recognize that he was really in there. It was good to see, but I didn’t have one for him, and I wasn’t sure why.

Not being the best flight attendant ever to travel the skies, I’d had difficult trips, most of which were memorialized in my personnel file. But I’d never had one as tense and nerve-racking as this one. I mixed up meal choices twice. I had to be asked three times to bring creamer out to a coffee drinker. I actually dropped a sticky almond pastry onto a man’s sleeve when the tongs slipped. Eventually, Tristan took pity on me and swapped positions, leaving me to hide out in the galley, where I hoped Jamie wouldn’t come and find me, and I hoped that he would.

“Alex.”

I turned, and he was standing there with his hands in his pockets, his expression a little hopeful and a little nervous, and now what I thought about when I looked at him was last Christmas Day and my celebration of pizza, butter pecan, and self-pity. It made me feel vulnerable, and I couldn’t have that, so I went with angry, which was why I couldn’t make myself hug him. I knew he was waiting for a sign. That’s the one he got. I felt crummy about it, but it was how I felt.

He tried to find a comfortable place to lean against and couldn’t seem to. “I…uh, so I got promoted.” He pulled his hand out of his pocket and offered his business card. I took it.

“You switched firms.” I ran my thumb across the raised letters and the phone number I had never called. I wasn’t the only one who had made changes.

“They offered me a partnership.”

“A partnership. Wow, Jamie, that’s…great. I know that’s what you’ve been working for. Congratulations.” I reached down to slide the card into my pocket and saw something on the back. A phone number he’d written in. “What’s this?”

“Our new home number. I bought a new house.”

“You did?”

“About six weeks ago. We just moved in.”

Hearing that was like a blow to the chest. He had changed practically his whole life, and I had missed it. I couldn’t tell if I was angry or sad or…I couldn’t be angry. I had done the same thing. We had done it to each other.

Tristan slipped around behind Jamie and joined me in the galley. I introduced them, and they shook hands. “Alexandra told me you were onboard. I’m so delighted to meet you, Jamie.”

“Alexandra.” Jamie grinned at me. “I thought Mom was the only one who ever called you that.”

“It’s a wonderful name,” Tristan said, managing 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.