Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

Richard was nervous, but he stopped trying to censor himself and just started talking. “We came here on our second date.”

“You tried to get me drunk.”

The waitress came, and Richard ordered two beers. “How did I do? Was I successful?”

After a long gulp and a swallow of her water, Cadence said, “You twisted my arm.” A satisfied smile expanded from the corners of her mouth.

Richard took her arm at the wrist and turned it a quarter clockwise, pantomiming that he might twist it further.

“That’s exactly what you did,” she said. “You twisted my arm. I was just happy you were touching me.” She pushed some hair behind her left ear and raised her eyes to meet his.

“I missed that.” Richard was still holding her, his fingers encircling her remarkably thin wrist, an autonomic response. When she looked down at his hand, he shyly released his grip.

“You missed a lot.”

“I meant I wasn’t sure you’d want me to touch you. I wasn’t even sure it was a date,” he said.

“What convinced you?”

The beers arrived, in frosted glasses, already dripping rings onto the tabletop. “When you straddled me on my couch, I was pretty sure,” Richard said, and the departing waitress rolled her eyes toward her overdyed Bettie Page bangs. “I think that’s how I finally figured it out.”

He slid his fingers back into Cadence’s, interlocking them like a child’s mismatched plastic building blocks; they fit together, but something wasn’t right, either the tension or the alignment, so he withdrew and used the same hand to pick up a napkin and move it around the tabletop. It left a wet sheen across the brown Formica like a Zamboni resurfacing a hockey rink. “It’s really something,” he started again. “You never expect to get to someplace like this. What are we even doing here?”

Cadence picked up the napkin Richard had wadded up, put it in the ashtray, and moved the ashtray to the edge of the table near the aisle. “We’re having a beer. We’re being friendly.”

“How friendly are we going to be?”

Cadence smiled because this sounded like the usual innuendo that passed between the two of them until seven weeks ago. “I’m not sure. Friendly, but perhaps not as friendly as we used to be, for example.” She laughed.

The humor felt one-sided to Richard, like joking with the clerk at the DMV. There was no easy way to say what he needed to say about Mary Beth, about the ways in which his life had irretrievably changed in the past few hours. It seemed ridiculous to blurt it out and equally artificial to wait. For now, he chose silence.

“We are going to be friendly, right?” Cadence had her hands on her knees, as if she was ready to spring backward, up, out of the booth.

“And civilized.”

She took a decent slug of beer and shook her head as she swallowed. “So what couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

He finished the last ounce of his first beer and thought about fleeing to the men’s room. How he hated the telephone, but now he would have given anything to have blurted out the truth the hour before and avoided this moment. His stomach tightened, and he felt a sudden pressure in his temples as if he’d been squinting at a document riddled with fine print. All he could manage was, “It’s my sister.”

IN THE four days that she had been Gabriel’s temporary caretaker, Sarah Hensley had gotten used to summarizing his activities for his mother, shaping the routine events of the day into a narrative that sounded as if his solitary efforts at play had been great teachable moments. She had no reason to think that this was anything other than an ordinary holiday. She was watching the news, almost inadvertently, as a live shot of the rescue equipment and floodlights that brightened the edge of the airfield filled her screen. She’d been flipping channels, looking for something to pacify the kid, and now that she was paying attention, she saw the chyron along the bottom of the screen: 77 PASSENGERS AND 6 CREW. FLIGHT 503 WAS HEADING TO DALLAS–FORT WORTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT FROM SALT LAKE CITY. She checked her watch. How random. Mary Beth’s flight wouldn’t be in for another two hours. She’d need to start the daunting task of cleaning up the house but was having a hard time getting motivated. She flipped past to another football game. Gabriel played along, unimpressed.

Sarah sank into the couch to watch as Gabriel played with Lincoln Logs and Legos, designed the imaginary skyline that made up the cityscape of his mind; she watched as he built houses and office buildings and the secret lairs of millionaire superheroes, populated the mise-en-scène with the appropriate set of vehicles, and then swept it all to untimely destruction. Monsters from Tokyo Bay, tornadoes, and hurricanes.

Gabriel took a break to eat a repast richly loaded with trans fats and American processed-cheese food product, washed down by a fruit punch that contained no actual fruit juice. An inadvertent nap followed, wherein he slept for about ninety minutes while the party went on around him; Gabriel nodded off, leaning against the couch in the den, and Sarah carried him to the quiet retreat of his room, then eased into the bed next to him. Contorting herself around his body was a challenge, given the twin mattress. Gabriel pushed closer to the wall. Sarah spooned in, and when he awoke, they watched football. During the halftime report, Sarah switched the channel from an update about the crash of Panorama 503 to a channel in the middle of a Looney Tunes marathon. Gabriel sat transfixed by a cartoon in which the child was not a child at all but a Martian superbaby, misdelivered by the stork into the comforting custody of a suburban family; the cartoon boy built himself a flying saucer for his escape from earthly bonds, the return trip to Mars. “All he wants to do,” Gabriel said, “is see his dad,” clearly admiring the Martian boy (his name was Yob) and his single-minded purpose. Mary Beth had never spoken to Sarah about Gabriel’s father, and neither had Gabriel, as if the word were absent from his vocabulary.

Soon after, the party dissolved in the usual way, one person leaving and many following. Sarah had not even noticed as the bulk of the crowd began to leave; a few girls she didn’t really know had bagged up the plastic cups and paper plates, taken out bags of garbage. One of the other women from Mike’s office still sat on the leather couch in the den, talking on the telephone with her legs folded beneath her, giving every appearance that she was moving in. Sarah went to clean the kitchen, where she found the counter still strewn with dishes of half-eaten snacks, congealed melted cheese, smears of ketchup and salsa and guacamole; a hubcap (she had no idea where it had come from) had been inverted and used as an ashtray, and she guessed there were more than a hundred cigarettes crushed out in it. The disposal’s maw was stuffed with the snapped spines of limes. Pizza boxes covered the round table.

She put Gabriel to work finding bottles all over the house, promised him a nickel for each one, a trick she’d learned from her grandfather when she was about Gabriel’s age. Sarah opened the garage door and carried out more garbage. Gabriel emerged from the den with his arms loaded down with brown bottles. A woman in a pantsuit that Sarah did not know stood behind him, and she bent to Gabriel’s level and took the bottles from him one by one, placing them on the counter.

Sarah jutted out a hip, asked, “Can I help you?” A challenge. This wasn’t a random partygoer.

The woman in the suit ignored Sarah and talked to Gabriel. “We’re going to need to get your things together. Do you think you could help me do that?”

“I’m not supposed to go with strangers,” Gabriel answered. He was well trained in this area. All men and women Gabriel did not know, anyone he had never seen in his house, they were all strangers.