three times, her mother twice. Handfuls of marriages make sense to her, though she intends to marry only once. She intends to be different from everyone else in the Stollen line. To be better.
“If you get hungry, darling, I have plenty of snacks. I refuse to touch that foul airplane food. If you can even call it food.”
Linda’s stomach grumbles. When did she last eat a proper meal? Yesterday? She stares at her bag of chocolate candies, peeking forlornly out of the seat-back pocket. With an urgency that surprises her, she grabs the bag, rips it open, and tips it into her mouth.
“You didn’t tell me your name,” Florida says.
She pauses between chews. “Linda.”
The flight attendant—the same woman who welcomed them at the gate—saunters down the center aisle, checking overhead compartments and seatbelts. She seems to move to an internal soundtrack; she slows down, smiles, then changes tempo. Both men and women watch her; the swishy walk is magnetic. The flight attendant is clearly accustomed to the attention. She sticks her tongue out at a baby seated on her mother’s lap, and the infant gurgles. She pauses by Benjamin Stillman’s aisle seat, crouches down, and whispers in his ear: “I’ve been alerted to your medical issue, because I’m the chief attendant on this flight. If you need any assistance at any point, please don’t hesitate to ask.”
The soldier is startled; he’d been staring out the window at the mix of grays on the horizon. Planes, runways, the distant jagged city, a highway, whizzing cars. He meets her eyes—realizing, as he does so, that he has avoided all eye contact for days, maybe even weeks. Her eyes are honey-colored; they go deep, and are nice to look into. Benjamin nods, shaken, and forces himself to turn away. “Thank you.”
In first class, Mark Lassio has arranged his seat area with precision. His laptop, a mystery novel, and a bottle of water are in the seat-back pocket. His phone is in his hand; his shoes are off and tucked beneath the seat. His briefcase, laid flat in the overhead compartment, contains office paperwork, his three best pens, caffeine pills, and a bag of almonds. He’s on his way to California to close a major deal, one he’s been working on for months. He glances over his shoulder, trying to appear casual. He’s never been good at casual, though. He’s a man who looks best in a three-thousand-dollar suit. He peers at the curtain that separates first class and economy with the same intensity he brings to his workouts, his romantic dinners, and his business presentations. His nickname at the office is the Hammer.
The flight attendant draws his attention for obvious reasons, but there’s more to it than sheer beauty. She’s that magic, shimmery age—he guesses twenty-seven—when a woman has one foot in youth and one in adulthood. She is somehow both a smooth-skinned sixteen-year-old girl and a knowing forty-year-old woman in the same infinite, blooming moment. And this particular woman is alive like a house on fire. Mark hasn’t seen anyone this packed with cells and genes and biology in a long time, perhaps ever. She’s full of the same stuff as the rest of them, but she’s turned everything on .
When the flight attendant finally steps into first class, Mark has the urge to unbuckle his seatbelt, grab her left hand with his right, wrap his other arm around her waist, and start to salsa. He doesn’t know how to salsa, but he’s pretty sure that physical contact with her would resolve the issue. She is a Broadway musical made flesh, whereas he, he realizes suddenly, is running on nothing but alcohol fumes and pretzels. He looks down at his hands, abruptly deflated. The idea of clasping her waist and starting to dance is not impossible to him. He’s done that kind of thing before; his therapist calls them “flare-ups.” He hasn’t had a flare-up in months, though. He’s sworn them off.
When he looks back up, the flight attendant is at
Christine Zolendz, Frankie Sutton, Okaycreations