Blue Skies

“Me?” she asked with a laugh. “This doesn’t really have anything to do with me. Just another one of those difficult divorces. When have you ever seen an easy one?”

But she didn’t warn him. She served the first-class cabin coffee and thought about striking up a conversation with Mrs. Darnell, but in the end stuck to the professional courtesies. It wasn’t necessary to gather any more information—the truth was obvious. Mrs. Darnell was very confident about her birthday surprise.

They weren’t separated. Branch was just getting a little on the side.

The passengers poured out of the plane, but Mrs. Darnell lingered. When the pilots came out of the cockpit, Branch second, he saw Dixie in the forward galley alone. “Well, angel, you have a good flight?”

“I did, cowboy. And there’s a little birthday surprise for you in 4A.”

He grinned stupidly, confused, and looked down the aisle. Dixie couldn’t see his face, but she heard him. “Darlin’, what in thunder you doin’ here?”

Dixie peeked out. Mrs. Darnell was so happy, grinning from ear to ear, eyes sparkling, arms outstretched as she embraced her husband and kissed him. And he returned the favor.

Except for a sheepish glance over his shoulder to see if Dixie had drawn a bead on the back of his head, Branch made no attempt to communicate with her. First Officer and Mrs. Darnell took a cab to the hotel rather than ride with the rest of the crew in the hotel van. F.O. Darnell must have been a tish nervous about the prospect of his wife and girlfriend getting to know each other better.

The captain and five flight attendants stood curbside, waiting for the van, when Dixie came up behind them. She heard Karen say, “Well, what the hell does she expect? God, she’s such a ditz.”

“Karen!” Bea warned, looking over her shoulder at Dixie, who stood there frozen.

“Oh. Sorry, Dixie. But, you know…” She shrugged lamely.

Dixie said nothing. She did know.

Unwilling to face her coworkers’ curiosity and censure, Dixie skipped dinner, which she shouldn’t have done. She opened the very good bottle of wine she’d brought with her and sat cross-legged on the bed and drank. She couldn’t afford to have a good cry; her eyes would be all puffy and everyone would know the extent of her misery, including Branch, who would be on tomorrow’s flight. She’d be damned if he would find out she’d cried over him.

It was about eleven when a knock sounded at her door. Discreet tapping. No surprise there. Empty bottle in hand and wearing only navy blue panty hose and her striped uniform shirt, she opened the door. There he stood, pilot shirt open at the neck, ice bucket in hand—his obvious excuse to leave his wife in their room—and a lame expression on his stupid face. He lifted his arms in helplessness. “Well, darlin’,” he drawled. “You coulda knocked me over with a feather. What can I say?”

She stared at him for a minute, stricken by the fact that even under these circumstances, she was tempted to embrace him, draw him to her and love every long, tall inch of him. How humiliating! Before she could reconsider, she rammed the empty wine bottle bottom first into his gut. “Ugh,” he grunted, bending over in pain and grabbing the bottle as he did so. She backed into her room and slammed the door on him. There was a loud thud, which, she acknowledged with a wince, must have been his head.

Well, she thought, you could’ve knocked him over with a feather…or whatever.

Three

Dixie sat in the airport with the rest of her crew. She lazily filed one of her perfect red nails when her cell phone chirped from inside her purse. She pulled it out, identified Nikki’s number on the caller ID, and answered, “Yes, Captain.”

“Hey. Where are you?”

“We’re sitting in Kennedy. How about you?”

“Chicago. About to push back. I heard the craziest thing. Did you guys have a pilot fall down the stairs and crack his head open?”

“We did hear that,” Dixie said, “but I don’t think anyone’s talked to him. It was supposedly the first officer—Darnell. Do you know him?”

There was a moment of stunned silence. “Oh, shit, Dixie.”

“I guess he was after a bucket of ice, slipped on the stairs and whacked his head. He couldn’t remember exactly what happened so his wife called a cab and took him to the emergency room. We hear he has a slight concussion. Nothing bad, but he spent the night in the hospital for observation and can’t fly until his flight surgeon clears him.”

“His wife?”

“Yeah, poor thing. She got on in Denver and was gonna surprise him for his birthday with a special night in New York City. I just can’t imagine their disappointment.”

Dixie could feel the eyes of her fellow crew members on her. They might not know what had really happened, but from their looks and whispers, they knew there was more to the story. So, screw ’em. Dixie was beyond caring. Karen had called it the evening before at the curb—Dixie had been a stupid fool. About a hundred times.

“Dixie…”

“Hmm?”

“Are you sure someone didn’t…push him down the stairs?”

“For heaven’s sake, what a thought,” she replied with the blandness of a yawn.

“When do you get back to Phoenix?” Nikki asked.

“Our flight was canceled because of the first officer’s injury, which screwed up the rest of the segment. They had to deadhead a cockpit crew out here, so we’re going to work the next flight back to Phoenix and then quit. I don’t work again until Sunday. How about you?”

“I’ll be back tomorrow night. Maybe I should swing by and see you on my way home?”

“You know you’re always welcome,” she said. “All I have planned is to clean out the closets. High time I got rid of all those old clothes just clutterin’ up the place.”

“Are you all right?” Nikki asked.

“’Course,” she replied coolly.

“And he doesn’t remember what happened?”

“Isn’t that fortunate?” Dixie cleared her throat. “I’m sure his wife’s very grateful.”

She clicked off, slipped the phone back into her purse and asked, in her very sweetest and most innocent drawl, “Can I get anyone a latte?”

“Great idea,” Bea said. “I’ll go with you.”

“Don’t get up, darlin’,” Dixie said. “My treat. Anyone else?”

There were no other takers. Dixie walked to the coffee kiosk, allowing the rest of the crew the privacy to talk about her behind her back. Lost his memory, huh? Forgot he was married for a while? How does she let herself get into these situations? All she’d have to do is make one phone call to check him out. What does she use for brains? Ah, she’s just thinking below the waist, as usual. Lots of miles on that chick. They would be quite entertained. They would also be quite accurate.

Dixie, whose given name was Helen, came from real brainy stock. Her father was a CPA with an MBA, and her mother had her doctorate and taught anatomy and physiology in a nursing college. Her older brother was a pediatric oncologist and her younger sister was in computers—the vice president of Information Systems for a large corporation. And Dixie had been the Homecoming Queen and the Fiesta Queen and the Oktoberfest Queen and Miss Temple, Texas.

At twenty-one she had dropped out of college to become a flight attendant, and there was no question this disappointed her parents, if not her entire family.

There was a very familiar pattern to what she’d just been through with Branch, Dixie realized. The only wonder was that she never saw it coming. Her denial must have been powerful. Over and over again she kept falling in love and getting lied to, cheated on and dumped.

She wished she’d been as brilliant as the rest of her family, but what bothered her even more was that she’d apparently missed out on the meaningful-relationship gene, as well. The rest of them, Mom and Dad, her brother and sister, were all very happily married and had wonderful family lives. From high school through her short college career and every year since, all Dixie had wanted was to have a partner she could love, count on and have children with, like the rest of the McPhersons had.

Her brother, Hal, was a wonderful husband and father, as well as a big-shot doctor in Houston; her sister, Sue, was married with two kids who went to the day care in her Dallas office building, but Dixie just limped along looking for love, getting jewelry instead. She had been kicked in the teeth so many times it was a surprise she didn’t need dentures. And not just by pilots. She had been used and then jilted in nearly every profession. She couldn’t count the number of times she’d had to go get tested for STDs after discovering the man of her dreams had been cheating on her. In fact, she couldn’t count how many men she’d had sex with—and she’d tried. Suddenly she was terrified.

Still, despite the brevity of her college education and the lunacy of her romantic life, Dixie knew she was intelligent. Maybe not brilliant like the rest of the McPhersons, but damned smart enough in other ways.

Although it might not seem like much to the Ph.D.s in her family, at thirty-thousand feet, her kind of skill could be priceless. No one could get control of a cabin or calm a ruffled passenger better than Dixie. She was good with people and she was excellent with safety procedures. She had administered CPR along with an onboard physician, had blown a slide to safely evacuate an aircraft after an engine fire, and had even once calmed the hysteria of a crew member who was suffering some form of posttraumatic stress disorder after the 9/11 attacks.