Leslie Kelly - Killing Time

Unfortunately, her job sometimes required long-distance travel. Like today. But, for once, landing didn’t seem much better than flying, which said a lot about how little she wanted to arrive at her eventual destination.

“Derryville, Illinois,” she muttered. “How on earth could I have forgotten the name of Mick’s hometown?”

She quickly put him out of her mind. Unfortunately, as had been the case for the past three weeks—not to mention the past eight years—he was never completely gone.

She killed time in the usual way during the flight. And, as usual, she drew a few sidelong looks from her seat-mates and the passing flight attendant. Because she was singing.

Oh, she tried not to, tried to do it just in her head, but she couldn’t help it. When Caro was nervous she couldn’t stop herself from breaking into song in a low, quavering voice. This time as she sang, she pictured Tootie and Blair and the gang.

The woman next to her shot her a puzzled look. Caro almost identified the song as coming from The Facts of Life. Then she realized the woman probably wasn’t curious about the song. More about the wacky singer.

Okay, so she was a professional twenty-eight-year-old woman with a great hairstyle, perfect makeup, wearing a thousand dollar Donna Karan suit and carrying a leather briefcase that had cost more than her first junker car.

And she sang TV jingles under her breath.

Sue me.

Everyone had their quirks, didn’t they? At least she wasn’t clicking her teeth or cracking her knuckles or blowing her nose into a tissue and then peeking at the goods like other people she’d sat next to on airplanes.

All in all, her nervous habit seemed pretty innocuous. It was just the TV part that made it look weird. If she’d been humming the latest Alanis Morissette song, nobody would have looked twice.

But Caro’s nervous singing habit stuck strictly to her childhood repertoire of TV theme songs and jingles. Like a gambler might only play at a particular table, or an athlete wear a particular pair of socks, Caro relied on her old standby for good luck in avoiding things like midair collisions: television.

It had been her baby-sitter, then best friend and closest companion throughout her childhood. She’d needed somewhere to lose herself with two parents who worked all the time and either fought like cats and dogs or went at it like bunnies—depending on their moods—when they were home. Either way, she’d learned to keep the TV turned up as a kid. Loud—to block out the sounds. So loud that she could swear she still sometimes heard the tune the Huxtables had danced to in 1983 or every note from the Family Ties ditty.

Family Ties or The Cosby Show her family definitely was not.

From the seat in front of her, a man began to hum the song from Cheers. Funny how everybody responded to TV. Like it or not—and Caro liked it—television was as intrinsic to American culture as a Big Mac. It sparked water cooler debates, show-watching parties, betting pools and hairstyles.

It was also good for airline small talk. Caro strictly avoided weather chats on airplanes, because of the whole lightning, burning, crashing thing. She stuck to TV. She just had to be sure she didn’t talk about any disaster movies of the week. Sitcoms were safe. Soaps were right out.

This wasn’t the first time Caro had gotten distracted from her fear of flying by getting into a discussion of how the dancing midget had been the beginning of the end for Twin Peaks, or how lame the last season of Roseanne had been.

Or this. “Mikey from the Life commercials did not die of a Pop Rocks and Pepsi eruption,” she said to the older woman sitting across the aisle. Caro was in the biz. She knew the urban legends.

“Well, I heard he did.” The woman sniffed and turned away.

The one beside her in the center seat continued to feign sleep, probably wondering why she always ended up beside the psychos on airplanes. Caro didn’t mind seeming psycho. It kept her distracted from the flying. Or, rather, the crashing. That was the part about flying that she really didn’t like—the crashing part. She wasn’t MacGyver, who’d crashed with four teenage gang kids and survived by making stuff out of other stuff.

“Another one down,” she whispered after the plane landed.

“Next time take a sleeping pill,” she heard. Turning, she saw her seat mate. The woman smiled. “I do. It works every time.”

“Thanks.” Caro could have been put out with general anesthesia and she didn’t think that’d relieve the anxiety. Frankly, she’d rather be conscious and alert in the last few minutes before her death, if she really was going to do the crashing and burning thing.

“Crash and burn,” she muttered. Funny, that’s pretty much what had happened on her first ever plane trip. Okay, not on her first plane trip, but rather right before it.

She and Mick had crashed and burned right before she’d dropped out of college and flown out west, needing to make a fresh start somewhere where she wouldn’t hear rumors about his latest escapades or run into him with his latest girlfriend. A distinct probability since the first couple of times she’d met Mick had been when he was with his girlfriend of the week.

She’d heard the stories from the time she’d started school. Mick was the guy who’d climbed down a third-floor drainpipe to avoid being caught with someone in an on-campus sorority house. The charmer who’d somehow managed to get Hootie and the Blowfish to play at the homecoming dance. The prankster who’d rigged the electronic scoreboard at the football field to flash the answers to an upcoming midterm exam in a tough sociology class. The one who’d drawn over a thousand bucks in a charity bachelor auction…from the ex-wife of one of the professors, no less.

The one she’d found hiding in the storage room of her dorm, trying to avoid the two girls he was dating at the same time.

God, what a dog. And she’d been crazy about him. Crazy about him for a year, up until the day she’d realized being crazy about a bad boy was a much different thing from being in love with one.

Crazy was cool. Crazy was just fine for a college kid. But in love? Even worse, in love with Mick Winchester? Insanity.

Exiting the plane, she got her bags and the rental car the studio had reserved. Then she hit the road to Derryville.

By the time she arrived, it was full dark, a lovely September night with a sky full of stars and a huge watery moon. Too perfect a sky to be over a place Caro had begun thinking of as her personal hell.

All except the house. Inside the pretty house was a lovely mother-in-law suite, waiting just for her. With antique furniture, a four-poster queen-size bed, an old-fashioned claw-foot tub. Plus a huge window overlooking the kind of neighborhood the Huxtable or Keaton kids would have lived in.

Not the trailer park where Caro had grown up. Not the high-rise where she paid a fortune for her own small apartment now.

All she could think about was arriving at the little oasis in Derryville. The lovely home with the nice, quiet old landlady on the nice, quiet old street. The house would be her home base, a place to escape from the frenzy that always erupted on a reality television show set.

Best of all, the landlady would give her a physical barrier. She’d be a perfect chaperone in case Caroline lapsed into momentary insanity and lusted for Mick Winchester.

No. No lust. No stroll down a mind-numbingly hot memory lane with a guy who’d always been able to fry her circuits with a smile or have her flat on her back with a touch of his hand.

Damn. No woman should ever be unlucky enough to have a Mick Winchester as her first lover. Starting out with the best meant everything else was downhill from there. And it had been, until it got to the point where she hardly found sex worth it anymore.