The Woman He Dared To Fly

Some of the investors chuckled again, quieter this time, the kind of laugh that comes from people watching a joke land on someone they’ve already decided doesn’t matter. I felt my face go hot and I felt something colder underneath that, something that had gone quiet a long time ago and was now, very slowly, sitting back up.

“I’m just doing my work,” I said, and turned back toward the window.

He did not let it go. He wanted a show, the way men like Alford always want a show when they’re scared and don’t know how to say it out loud. He walked over, close enough that I could smell the cologne that cost more than my grocery budget for the month, and he pointed at the open cockpit door of the Meridian like he was offering me a throne.

“Tell you what,” he said, pitching his voice for the room, for the phones already coming out of pockets. “Climb in there and fly it. Successfully. And I will marry you myself, right here in this hangar, in front of every one of these fine folks.”

The hangar went electric. Phones came up. Somebody’s banker laughed so hard he had to set down his coffee. I looked at Alford and understood, underneath the cruelty, that he believed absolutely nothing could go wrong, because a janitor cannot fly a two-point-four-million-dollar aircraft, and a man who is certain of that can afford to be cruel in front of an audience.

I looked past him at the Meridian, at the tail rotor and the collective and the cyclic stick sitting exactly where I knew it would sit in any airframe built in the last forty years, and I felt something in my chest that I had not let myself feel since the day they folded a flag into a triangle and handed it to me at my husband’s graveside, not for his service, but because I was the widow who had once worn the uniform too and somebody in that VFW hall thought it was fitting.