Sandra Brown - Low Pressure

She continued watching him, dozens of follow-up questions implied.

Finally, he said, “I never saw a death certificate. My old man never took me to visit a grave. We never commemorated her birthday or the day she died. There were no maternal grandparents. None of that. I don’t even know what she looked like because I was never shown a picture of her. It was like she’d never existed. So what I figure, she left me with him. Split. Vamoosed. He just didn’t have the guts to tell me.”

“Maybe he never came to terms with it himself.”

“I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. Anytime I bugged him for information about her, he would say, ‘She died.’ End of discussion.”

“So it was just the two of you?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t call it cozy.”

“You speak of him in the past tense. He’s no longer living?”

“No.” Then, bitterly, “Not that you could call what he did ‘living.’”

“He was a ghost,” she said, using the word he’d used earlier to describe the man.

“You know, on second thought, that’s not an apt description. Because he did take up space. He wasn’t invisible. He just wasn’t there . He provided for me. Roof over my head, food on the table, clothes on my back. He saw that I got to school every day.”

His moss-colored eyes turned hard. “But he never attended a single school event. He never met a friend. Never watched me play a sport, and I played them all. I signed my own report cards. He functioned. That’s all. He wasn’t into sports, women, religion, gardening, stamp collecting, basket weaving. Nothing. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke.

“His conversations consisted of maybe three sentences, including the ones he had with me. He went to work every day, came home, served our supper, turned on the TV for a couple of hours, then went to his bedroom and shut the door. We never took a vacation. Never went anywhere. Not to the movies, ball games, pool halls, the city dump.” He stopped himself and took a deep breath. “We did nothing together.

“I’d misbehave, do something really bad, just to see if I could get a rise out of him or, at the very least, cause a change in his facial expression. My bad behavior didn’t faze him. But nothing good I did fazed him, either. He didn’t care one way or the other.

“He was a consistent SoB, I’ll say that for him. He died a puzzle I never solved and had lost interest in a long time before. All I know about him is that whatever it was that shut him down permanently shut out the rest of the world.”

“Including you.”

He raised a shoulder. “No matter.”

Bellamy didn’t believe he was as indifferent to the parental neglect as he pretended, but, for the time being, she let it go. “When did you first meet Mr. Hathaway?”

“He would hate you calling him that.”

“All right, when did you first meet Gall?”

“I was twelve, thirteen. Thereabout. One day after school I didn’t want to go home, so I struck off on my bike. No destination. Just wanting to put miles between me and my house. When I got pretty far out, I spotted this small airplane swooping down and disappearing for a few seconds, then soaring up over the horizon again. I rode toward it and wound up out at Gall’s airfield, where he was instructing a student. They were doing touch-and-goes. Man, I envied them. I wanted to be in that airplane so bad.”

“Love at first sight?”

He fired a finger pistol at her. “Right on target, A.k.a. You’re a writer, after all.”

“You fell in love with flying that day.”

“Head over freakin’ heels. I stayed there watching until they landed. The guy taking the lesson left. Gall had noticed me lurking, waved me into the hangar. I figured he was going to tell me that I was trespassing and to get lost.

“Instead, he offered me a Dr Pepper. He asked if I liked airplanes, and I told him yes—although until that afternoon, I didn’t know it. He motioned me out to the airplane they’d been flying and asked if I’d ever been up in a single-engine. I hadn’t been up in anything, but I lied and told him I had.

“He pointed out all the parts and told me what they were called. He let me sit in the pilot’s seat, and gave me a rundown on what all the gauges were for. I asked if it was hard to fly one. He looked at me and laughed. ‘If it was hard, could I do it?’

“Then he asked if I wanted to go up. I nearly wet myself. He asked if my folks would care, and I told him no. Which was the truth. So we switched seats, and he took off, flying directly into the sunset. We made a wide sweep and were back on the ground in under five minutes, but it was the best time of my life up to then.”

He was smiling at the memory and remained lost in thought for several moments before resuming. “Gall let me help him secure the plane. By the time we’d finished, it had grown dark. When I got on my bike, he asked me where I lived, and when I told him the general vicinity, he said, ‘That far? Jesus, kid, you don’t even have a light on your bike. How are you going to see to get home?’ I came back with something like, ‘I got out here okay, didn’t I?’

“He called me a damn-fool kid and a smart-ass to boot, got in his truck, and drove along behind me so I could see my way by his headlights. That was the first time—” He broke off, leaving the thought unspoken.

“The first time what?”

He averted his gaze and mumbled, “The first time anybody had ever been worried about me.”

Bellamy reasoned that he had fallen in love with more than flying that day. He had started loving Gall, who had paid attention to him, talked to him, been protective of him. But she knew the man the neglected teenage boy had become would rebuff any discussion of that, so she returned to their original topic.

“Detective Moody raked you over the coals.”

Emerging from the nostalgic recollections, he frowned. “Several times. I told him over and over again that Gall and I had been test-flying a plane, that I wasn’t at the barbecue, and that I didn’t get to the park until after the tornado.”

“Why did you come to the park at all?”

“There were thunderstorms around that forced Gall and me to return ahead of schedule, so I figured I had just as well try to smooth things over with Susan. Given a choice, though, I’d have stayed in the air. Every minute I spent in a plane was better than being on the ground.”

“Better even than the time you spent with Susan?”

He grinned. “Tough choice.”

“She was as good as all that? As exhilarating as flying?”

“Susan, no. Sex… hmm. It’s the only thing that comes close.”

“What time did you get to the state park?”

“Hold on a sec.” He folded his arms on the table and leaned across it toward her. “Let’s explore this some.”

“Explore what?”

“Sex and flying. Sex and anything. Sex and, say… writing.” He narrowed his focus on her mouth. “Given a choice right now, which would you rather be doing?”

“Are you flirting with me?”

“What do you think?”

She thought her cheeks were growing so warm he probably detected her blush. His grin was unrepentantly suggestive and made her feel twelve years old again. “It won’t do you any good,” she said. “Because even if I was open to comparing sex to my lifework, I wouldn’t want to be compared to my late sister.”

His grin faded, and his eyes reconnected with hers. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“Yes you would.”

“No I wouldn’t. In any case, I don’t even remember how it was with her.”

“Because there have been so many since?”

“I’m a bachelor with a basic sexual appetite. I make it clear to the women I sleep with that there are no strings attached to my bed. We fine-tune the hormone levels, then go our separate ways, nobody gets hurt.”