In a Perfect World Read Free Page B

black leather jacket. Women looked up from their magazines and their cell phones, from the pacifiers they were struggling to place in their squirming toddlers’ mouths, to watch him pass. If there was a female flight attendant in the country who did not know who Captain Mark Dorn was, Jiselle hadn’t met her.
    He looks like a movie star. Those eyes!
    And his wife…I don’t know.
    Something tragic.
    Brain tumor.
    Suicide.
    Car accident.
    He never talks about it.
    That he was a widower made him even more mysterious and romantic.
    The other flight attendants were ebulliently envious. “You hit the jackpot,” one said, “you fucking bitch.” Another said, when Jiselle announced her engagement, “I’m so jealous, I want to kill you. I could kill you. We all wanted to marry him.”
    If there was a single woman—and a single woman in her thirties!—who would have said no if Captain Dorn had asked her to marry him, Jiselle hadn’t met her, and couldn’t imagine her.
    Even the children. The romance of the handsome devoted single father, reliant on nannies and fast food, calling before takeoff to find out who’d won the soccer game, how the math test had gone. He carried their photographs in his wallet, although he apologized that each one was outdated. The children had grown older more quickly than he’d remembered to exchange each year’s school photo for the next.
    Camilla, in her picture, was a ninth-grader. A cascade of blond hair. Her perfect teeth, gritted. Sara was in middle school, wearing a black beaded headband and a low-cut T-shirt. Looking at the photographs of these beautiful, provocative girls, the flight attendants would joke, “You’re going to have your hands full there, Dad! I hope you’re ready for that!”
    And his son, Sam. In the photograph Mark carried in his wallet, Sam was only six, with a big gap in the front of his smile—but smiling nonetheless, as if he were perfectly happy with this life, as if the whole idea of life itself pleased him beyond all reason. He had masses of curly, shining, strawberry-blond hair—the kind of hair Jiselle suspected women had been touching, longingly, since he was a baby, saying things like, “Why are the beautiful curls always wasted on the boys?”
    Those children were frozen at the ages they’d been on some past Picture Day. The school photographer’s absurdly blue sky behind them swirled with the implication of summer clouds.
     
     
    “You’re not marrying the man,” her mother said. She was wearing a black skirt, black blouse, a string of black pearls, and had her hands on her hips. Jiselle took a step backward, shook her head, and looked toward the coffin, as if for help.
    The dead man in it was a great-step-uncle. He’d been ninety-two years old when his heart finally stopped. Even the people gathered around the corpse, laid out in a tuxedo, were laughing, patting one another on the back, punching each other in the arm. Jiselle, her mother, and the dead man were the only ones in the room not smiling, the only ones wearing black, which Jiselle had worn only because she knew her mother would say something about it if she didn’t. Even in his coffin, Uncle Ernie looked comfortable with the idea that he was dead—hands folded over his ruffled chest, chin set, eyebrows raised above his closed eyes. He might as well have been twiddling his thumbs. It had been a decade since Jiselle had seen him alive, but she could tell he hadn’t changed. Really, she’d come to the funeral to tell her mother, in person, in a public place, about her engagement.
    “No,” Jiselle said. “I am marrying him, Mom.”
    Her mother shook her head, looking around the room as if for a silver lining, and then she said, “Well, you’re not going to live with him.”
    She was serious, Jiselle realized. It wasn’t a question. It was a command—like, Clean your room. Or, Clear the table.
    “Mom, I’m—”
    Her mother raised a hand, pointed a finger at her daughter,