She laughed, short and too loud. “Who’d you steal that joke from?”
“The travel agent. And the point is, I’m safe. I will do my absolute best to be home tonight. It’ll probably be late. I might not get in until after midnight, I don’t know. But I will get home. I’ll forward you my new flight info when we get off the phone, and if anything changes—if my outbound flight is canceled because of the crash, or anything like that—I’ll call you immediately.”
“Immediately?”
“Yes. Immediately.” His eyes were damp. He wiped them with the back of his hand. “Now I should go check in at my new gate. You can go ahead and get back to work, and don’t worry. I’m safe, you’re safe, we’re all safe.”
“I already clocked out.”
“What?”
“I told them my dad was in a plane crash and I had to leave. I’m on the bus, headed home.”
“You heard that my plane blew up, so you left work and caught a bus, and then tried calling my phone?”
“In my defense,” she told him, “I saw the bus coming, right when I threw my apron down on the counter. I started crying, and my boss Krista started crying, too, and she sent me home. I mean, by then I was running out the door, so it was either cut me loose for the day or fire me.”
“She’s a good manager. You owe her a pickup shift, or something.”
Molly laughed again, still wound up tight and a little sniffly, but calming down the longer he kept her on the phone. “I’ll cover for part of her honeymoon. Dad?”
“Yes, baby?”
“I’m super glad you’re not super dead.”
“Me too,” he agreed. “Go home, take a hot bath, watch some Netflix, whatever. Order some food. There’s extra petty cash in my closet.”
“In the shoebox on the top shelf?”
They both were quiet for a few seconds.
Then he said, “Yes. There should be cash in there, if you need it. If you left any.”
“I only took a few bucks, just one time! I had to tip a pizza guy.”
“Right.” He was flashing her the unibrow of deepest suspicion, even though she couldn’t see it. “What were you doing in my closet?”
She didn’t answer right away. “You remember when we had that junior-senior prom last year, and I got the Betsey Johnson dress, and you said it looked like one that Mom used to wear? Well, if Mom had a dress like mine, she probably had shoes that looked good with it, right? I wear about the same size she did.”
His throat was almost too tight to squeeze out a single word, but he managed. “Right.”
“That box in the closet was made for ladies’ shoes, so I opened it. I wasn’t looking to steal anything. You said you put some of her things in storage, but I didn’t want to bother you about it.” She sniffed hard and coughed to cover the sound.
“It wouldn’t… you never bother me. You can ask me anything you want, whenever you want. About your mother or anything else.”
“It seemed too hard.” Whether she meant it was hard for him or hard for her, she didn’t say. Candice Merritt had been gone for almost four years. Sometimes it felt like a long time ago. Sometimes it didn’t.
Great. Now they were both crying.
“Hey,” he said, trying to say something else and not knowing how to begin it. He tried again. “Hey, I know I had a close call today. I’m so sorry I didn’t call you the moment the plane caught fire. I should have. I screwed that up, and I’m really sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. I bet there was a lot of stuff going on.”
“Yeah,” he said with the world’s grimmest laugh. “It was just so sudden, you know? I’d been stuck in traffic, and I knew I was cutting it close, so I was running to the gate as fast as I could. But I got here just in time to watch the plane leave and I was so mad about it.”
It was her turn to laugh. She did it with a snort, followed by the loud honking of a world-class nose-blow. “That traffic saved your life, Dad.”
“Either the traffic or the travel agent.” Now that he’d said it out loud, he turned the thought over in his head.
“The one with better dad jokes than you?” Molly asked.
“Yeah, her. She changed my flight, before I got here. I don’t know why,” he added before she could ask.
“Hell of a coincidence.”
Or something else, but he couldn’t say what. “Hell of a coincidence,” he echoed. He heard the bus creak to a stop and the doors squeal open. If that wasn’t Molly’s stop, it’d be coming up soon. They didn’t live far from the Starbucks where she worked, and if the weather wasn’t too bad, she usually walked. “I’ll text you when I hear something, okay? I love you, and I’ll see you soon, and… and… just help yourself to whatever’s in the shoebox and go buy something trashy and delicious. Call me if you need anything, or even if… if you just want to talk.”
“I will. All of those things, I will. I love you, too, Dad. Please be careful.”
“I always am.”
Then he hung up, feeling somewhat less shaken but no less eager to get home.
He thought about what’s-her-name. Foley. The travel agent who’d had “a very strong feeling.” A very strong feeling… what did that even mean?
3.
Niki was a little hungover, and Leda was trying to work, ignoring the intermittent moans and the occasional rustle as her friend shifted, rolled over, and tried to get comfortable on the secondhand IKEA love seat that sat along one wall of the tiny office. It wasn’t made for sleeping—it was barely made for sitting—and Niki’s plastic-bound foot kept falling off the arm, landing with a thunk on the floor.
“Oof. Ow.”
“Stop doing that,” Leda grumbled. “You’re going to hurt yourself even worse.”
“Worse than the Jägermeister?”
“Nothing hurts worse than Jäger, but that was your own damn fault.”
“They had dollar shots. In test tubes. It was amazing. Some dude was just… passing them out. What was I supposed to do?” she asked, sitting up with no small degree of effort. “Not drink any?”
“Abstinence might’ve been the right call, considering,” Leda mused.
“It’s not like I’m bothering you. You’re not even working.”
“I am too working.”
“On what?” Niki asked.
“Targeted Facebook ads. I’m trying to research and… um… budget. I’m also thinking about Craigslist and the newspaper, but is that too—I don’t know—tacky? Does it make me sound sketchy? How else do people even find travel agents these days? I’m already in the phone book, and I have a web page and everything. I’m easy to find! Hire me!”
Niki pointed her encased toes at the entrance. “Tacky, sketchy. Whatever gets people through that door.”
On cue, a shadow darkened the frosted glass that made up the top half of the agency’s door. After a brief hesitation, somebody knocked.
Both women sat upright with a start.
“Client!” Leda hissed. “Look professional, or something.”