I am afraid of no man...one woman... and here she comes.

******************

Part 19

I must say, that my very first instinct, once I was done waving my father away down the street was to rush inside the house, dig up a Western Union message boy out of archives and send a telegram to Thomas FLEE AT ONCE---ALL IS DISCOVERED! However, self control got the better of me.

Somehow.

I instead left a voice mail on his cell phone and sent an email off, one of which I hoped he checked before the General inevitably got his hands on him. I had a feeling we would be having quite a few late night talk sessions ahead of us trying to figure out what to do but that was for later. For now I had a siege to prepare for. My mother was coming to visit, though she didn’t know it yet.

It was said by some, and believed by many that my lady mother could hold a grudge until it died of old age, and then subsequently have it stuffed and mounted on her wall. Those that said it knew it for the truth and those that didn’t were too afraid to speak her name aloud lest the devil come knocking. And this was the woman who would very shortly be given a call that her only son and baby boy had been entrapped by a no good girl from Nebraska and oh by the way you’re going to be a grandmother. Strangers who met my parents always seemed to pigeonhole my mother as the submissive and weaker member of the couple. And really when you saw her standing next to the General in his uniform with all those pretty shinies on his chest it was hard to credit otherwise. But my father could at least be counted on to leave his enemies dead, my mother…had more permanent methods.

She gave me the courtesy of a month’s notice. I’m still not sure, even after all these years, if she meant it as a blessing or a curse, the waiting for the hangman’s noose and all that. Professor Ryan needed a few weeks to sort out her affairs, and then she would be coming to town for an extended visit. She was currently between universities and teaching positions. The gypsy life she had led from one end of the world to the other had precluded her from the tenure track anywhere and she was relegated to a sort of permanent visiting professor status. She used that time in-between gigs to write history books, several of which are used as textbooks at those same universities who wouldn’t let her in the front door because of her travels. And one of which you might even have seen at your local bookstore. Oprah made it a selection of her book club. “The Recent Unpleasantness,” it was a history of the American Civil War from the point of few of the wives and widows of Virginia’s finest who had to deal with the aftermath. The title comes from what those ladies and their daughters called the War Between the States, even over a hundred years after the last shot had been fired.

Southerners are very strange about that war…

I picked up my mother at the airport alone, well, Melanie and me anyway. I wore a blue floral maternity dress that was very conservative for someone in my demographic but would, I hope, put her mildly at ease. I stopped just short of the hat and white gloves; I didn’t want to be seen as pandering. When I waddled up to the waiting area just after the security gate for arriving passengers every seat was taken. However I noted that, as I started developing my own gravitational pull, true gentlemen would pop out from nowhere and I only had to look forlorn for less than ten seconds when before I was offered two different seats. Unfortunately for me they were separated by several chairs so I was only able to use one to park my fat ass on.

Margaret Ryan was 55, though the rest of us were polite enough not to discredit her in front of strangers when she implied she was in her mid-forties, even if this meant she would have given birth to my oldest sister Anne when she was a mere 13, something grandmother Sullivan would NEVER have allowed. She was able to get away with the untruth, never so common a thing as a lie, because she was, until I met my Jessica of course, the most beautiful woman I had ever known.

Now I know what you are thinking, and just don’t go there. I don’t have an oedipal complex. Even if I DID want to kill my father on occasion I would never be crazy enough to sleep with my mother. She was just the standard I judged all other girls against and most of them came up wanting. A few minutes after I had parked my mass in front of the gate she appeared at the head of the pack of unloading passengers. When she saw me she gave off a big smile and I didn’t even detect any hesitation. But of course, my mother was from the south, where they would smile at you and say “bless your heart” even if they hated your guts.

“Katherine!” she said as she held out both her arms for me, not seeing any way around refusing I gave in and let her wrap me in as feminine a bear hug as could be managed.

I was to put it simply, shocked.

Mother somehow sensed my discomfort and my attempt to rearrange the not so little blockade between us and let loose just enough so that we could look in each other’s eyes. “You’re not much of a hugging girl are you?”

“It’s not that,” I said hesitantly. “Well maybe a little, I just didn’t think YOU were the hugging sort. Or at any rate wanting to hug me.”

“I’ve been speaking to my son about you for years Katherine,” she said letting me go entirely. “Particularly when news of this all broke, he loves you a lot you know, even willing to risk his career it seems. And he has made it very clear that he considers you to be the wounded party in all this. There are times I was listening to him it was almost like it was HE, that was the one that was pregnant!”

“Yes well, it’s just, you were always very polite to me I just thought…”

“That I was some Jessica Tandy throw back to the era of mint juleps and beating on the darkies?”

“Something like that,” I muttered my face going red.

“Well I shall certainly keep that in reserve if you misbehave young lady! But for the nonce I am pleased enough to be welcomed in your home and to help you and my granddaughter through this difficult period. Now, let’s go collect my luggage. You won’t BELIEVE what those…people, at Delta wanted to charge me in overages.”

******************
The Katz cousins had flipped for who was going to lose out on their bedroom to the southern invasion. JoAnn lost and moved in with Laura but I made it up to them by buying a new bed and cutting both their rent in half for the duration. There were now two girls in one room but the accommodations were still better than any dorm in America so they didn’t grumble…much. Mother was able to tell she had dispossessed an occupant by the still fresh sticky tack on the walls that had previously been holding up some boy band posters. And when the subject came up at dinner that night she felt positively devastated at the inconvenience and vowed to make it up to the girls. A promise they were not above taking her up on as often as possible.

She tore me a new asshole on my pregnancy preps. Apparently all my book learnin' was entirely inadequate. You would think I was planning on carrying the baby around in a wicker basket and calling it done. The damn pregnancy shopping list was five pages long. We made THREE separate COSTCO runs and that was just for the consumables. Then we went in for the big ticket items like cribs and strollers and car seats. I tried paying for it, but she gave me such a withering stare that I wanted to see if I could photograph it for further study. That sort of weapon is something I would very much like in my own arsenal.

Baby would be taking over the music room on the ground floor. A forward thinking Scott had provided soundproofing in the room and that combined with its proximity to the laundry room and the industrial sink seemed to me an ideal place for a nursery. Mother looked at all the fancy woodwork and the gilded faux gaslights and raised an eyebrow but didn’t see a better place in the house for it and let it be, cautioning me of course, that I would be getting my exercise in by all the back and forth running to my bedroom upstairs.

Caroline was the strongest of all of us, for reasons that none of you need to dwell on. And she was drafted to help carry all the packages inside. We were running out of storage space until the new furniture arrived so I directed her to just store the leftovers in my bedroom for now since it was the largest empty space in the house, and I hardly spent any time there except to sleep and all I needed for that was a bed. She came back downstairs to see me sorting baby clothes with a confused look on her face.

“Katie what’s that plastic thing at the side of your bed,” asked Caroline as she walked inside.

“It’s my chamber pot,” I answered without stopping my folding.

“Your what?”

“My porta potty. A space aged high endurance portable toilet that set me back more than I feel comfortable talking about.”

“Eeeeeewww,” she squirmed out. “Right next to your bed?”

“Little Miss Piss I have on board wakes me up about four or five times a night to go to the bathroom. I need it.”

“But you have your own bathroom?” she continued still amazed at my urinary practices.

“Yeah but it’s like a thirty minute walk from my bed, and once I get there freaking COLD marble floors. This way I roll over on the toilet, do my business, roll off and if I’m quick about it I don’t even have to wake up for the process. My sleep has improved dramatically since I put that in.”

“You sleep next to your PEE all night?” she said making a disgusted face.

“Well, yeah, but I clean it out every morning. Usually I just upend the container into the bathtub and give it a good going over while I shower…saves time that way. “

“GROSS Katie!”

“What’s the big deal? I’m just using a little applied engineering to build a better pregnancy. I’m thinking of writing those dear Abby people and letting them in on my secret.”

“Are you sure that you are a girl?” Caroline asked me half seriously as she held her face in both her palms.

“There is a bit of supporting evidence,” I said looking down at my eight month baby bump. “But maybe I should be going to some of those meetings you go to, to find out.”

“What meetings,” asked my mother as she came in with some freshly laundered baby towels.

“Um,” Caroline hesitated lowering her face to look at the floor again.

“There are support groups at the college for just about everything these days,” I said trying to save my friend from an awkward conversation she was just not ready for. “Caroline was just here giving me some grief over the toilet arrangements next to my bed.”

“Oh that,” she said, waving her hand. “I wish I’d thought about something like that in my day, it would have saved a lot of aggravation. It would have disturbed the General of course. He can render his enemies into a fine meat paste but show him a perfectly normal bodily process and he probably would have lost his dinner. You’ll understand more when you get married and have children of your own dear.”

I could see that casual statement from my mother had kicked her in the guts and my friend started crying and ran quickly out of the room.

“What did I say,” my mother asked confused at the young girl’s reaction. “She’s not pregnant already is she? Of all your girls I thought she was the least promiscuous.”

“No she’s not pregnant,” I replied a bit sadly. “Which might be part of the problem, she won’t ever be pregnant.”

“Oh dear, well I walked into that land mine then didn’t I? Was she in an accident did she have to have a hysterectomy?”

“No mother, she’s… like Deirdre,” I said feeling a little embarrassed myself.

“Deir… Tommy told you about my cousin Deirdre?”

“We tell each other a lot. I bet you could ask me anything he would know and I would too,” I said sort of hoping she would take me up on it.

“Obviously, you love each other. It’s just I always thought my son was rather embarrassed about Deirdre.”

“Thomas just needs the occasional kick in the ass and he can usually be counted on to mind his manners.”

“Quite,” my mother said with only the slightest of smiles. “I’ll speak to Caroline tonight after dinner, I don’t want her to think I was being insensitive. I couldn’t tell at all, she hides it very well.”

“Part of the reason why I think is that she isn’t hiding anything but rather displaying to the world who she truly is.”

“Yes, I suppose you're right,” she said with a considering look on her face. “And you want to go to some of her meetings? Do you consider yourself transgendered then?”

Gulp

“It was joke, mostly a joke I guess if I’m being honest,” I said looking down. “I just sometimes think that it would be so much easier all things considered if I was a boy.”

“I think, all pregnant women think that at some point, particularly at the delivery. But you’ll get over it when the baby comes. And think… if you had been a boy we would never have met!”

******************
The leaves had mostly dropped, the first snow had fallen, and I was laying by the fire in my office when my mother saved the Scott Company.

I was sitting in my la-z-boy chair, and as always, enjoying the irony. I had asked to work ahead in all my classes and most of them being intro classes the professors agreed. So there I was, five weeks until the official end of the semester and I was done with everything but the paperwork. So I took a moment to lean back and enjoy myself for a few minutes and was quickly kicked in the kidney by my daughter when she sensed the opportunity.

I was going to have to keep my eyes on her.

As had become our tradition, a few hours after dinner and shortly before bed she brought to my office a hot chocolate and something light on my stomach and we talked about whatever needed talking about that day. At the moment she seemed to be to be more concerned that I was overloading myself too much, and quickly made to remove all the papers my lawyer had showered on me.

“Time enough to worry about this after the baby is born,” she said scowling as she lifted a stack of scattered papers from the floor and tossed them into a random box.

“That’s just it mother, my father’s company may not last another year. Not the way it’s being run anyway.”

“Well what can YOU do about that?”

“If I had control, lots, or at the very least fire the idiots responsible and start over again. But I don’t have control; the partnership agreement prevents it.”

“Well then, as the General would say, put them into tactical priorities. Your strategic plan is to save your father’s company but to do that you need control, how do you get that back in your hands, what is preventing you?”

“Like I said, the partnership agreement.”

“Very well, attack that. I can speak to my cousin Festus, perhaps it can be fought in court.”

“Sure it can be fought, but at the cost of millions of dollars I don’t have. The partners will leverage and borrow everything the company has left to keep me out.”

“It just seems silly, that you own but you cannot vote. Seems un-American somehow. How did such a communist thing come about anyway?”

“Capitalism,” I countered to her bark of a laugh. “They didn’t want to reward any freeloaders. A partner who does not contribute after one year loses the voting rights. The Scott heir, me, was too young at the time to put the hours in and others took control. When the agreement was written there were dozens of adult Scotts that could take over if something happened to the president. But after a few generations of only one or two babies they were just left with me.”

“Well then, why can’t you gain the rights back if you work now. If your partnership works like the others I’ve encountered such a measure is meant to be corrective not punitive. To encourage the partner back in the fold so to speak.”

“It will be years before I even get my undergrad, and more years of graduate study before I could get an engineering certificate and license by the state. If I even wanted to do that, which would cut into my plans to join the Marines after O.C.S.”

“Going into the service is something that we will discuss later, but, from what you said, the partnership agreement is almost a century old. Did they even HAVE licenses back then? Does it specifically say a partner must be certified in order to be a part of the company?”

“Um,” I said searching my mind for the answer and not coming up with a thing. I had read the agreement cover to wretched cover and it certainly hadn’t mentioned such a thing. “I guess not.”

“Well then, build something or break something, but either way make sure to bill for it. And voila you have your rights back.”

“Fuck!” I said as the realization came to me. “And the barrier of entry is ridiculously small post inflation. It’s only $10,000. Back then that was real money but these days… but still, who am I gonna get to hire me even for that amount?”

“Language Katherine,” she scolded me and took away my only half empty hot chocolate by way of punishment. “Children are walking tape recorders and will catch on to those naughty words right quick.”

“They have to learn it somewhere. It might as well be from their parents. Besides, the way… Thomas talks I’m sure you are not free of sin.”

“THAT, can be laid at his father’s doorstep, him and his cronies. It occurs to me though that you have some small skill in construction. Unbecoming though it may be. Rachel and Karen were speaking to me at breakfast, oh that reminds me, we need to go grocery shopping again.”

“AGAIN!”

“Growing girls,” she said and then stifled a smirk as she continued. “And girls of course who are GROWING girls. But back to my original point, they said that you designed, set up and did most of the work in building that garage expansion outside, even though Karen had to practically wrench the hammer from your hand to prevent you from doing damage to the baby.”

“At no point was I lifting anything more than like, ten pounds, maybe. I know how to take care of myself and practice good safety,” I said mildly insulted that they didn’t think me smarter than that.

“No doubt, people are just overprotective of pregnant women. Particularly ones they care for. Now the General will be retiring soon, he just doesn’t have the lips for four stars. We have purchased a house on sixty acres in Virginia for our golden years.”

I had made the tactical mistake of choosing that moment to take a sip from my drink and unfortunately did a minor spit take when I started laughing.

“What,” my mother asked haughtily. “Do you find so funny Katherine?”

“The General…he bought the farm, that’s a euphemism for--”

“I know what it’s used for Jessica Katherine and I’ll thank you not to infer it again, my husband is not dying!”

“Yes Ma’am,” I said suddenly serious. “I apologize for my disrespect.”

“Well,” she said her posture becoming a little less stiff. “Perhaps that came out stronger than I liked. At any rate the house is actually larger than this one but almost a hundred and fifty years old. Built during… ‘Reconstruction’. It needs a bit of work; the General is quite looking forward to it actually. Renovation costs will probably exceed what we paid for the whole thing combined and I see no reason why we can’t send $10,000 of it your way.”

“I don’t need your charity; you are already doing so much…”

“It’s not charity when it's family…which you are of course. Nor is it in this case, you are after all uncertified and rather young. So all things considered I expect to get $30,000 of work out of the $10,000 we pay you. The General likes to think he can build a civilization with his own hands, two sticks and a flashlight but his field of study has been rather specialized in the last 40 years and if he tries to do this all himself he will muck things up if he doesn’t do himself an actual injury. Tommy was always more mechanically inclined than his father but he probably won’t be able to lend more than a weekend or two’s worth of help in the next few years.”

Probably less than that, I thought. Since Jessica doesn’t know which end of wrench to hammer with!

“So please,” she continued with a warm smile at me. “I have most of the particulars in an electronic file and I’ll forward it to you. Take a look at the plans, research what we need and don’t. Pick out building materials…try to go green, and try not to let the General know that you did. And as the opportunity presents itself after the baby is born perhaps in the summer we can all go east and start on the work. For your partner's benefit though we can pay you the retainer now.”

“But that’s another thing,” I countered warily. “How do we get them to accept payment? A dozen different ways they could refuse to hire me.”

“That perhaps is a question better left to your attorney,” she said as she delicately pushed a telephone across the table to me.

******************

“Son of a bitch!” said DeGeas after we had told him what we had come up with. My lawyer had arrived at my home in his casual clothes which for him meant three piece suit with his tie slightly undone. A bottle of Napoleon brandy had been unearthed for him and either the shock or the booze had brought forth the expletive, and he was grateful for the chair he was sitting in.

“I thought about the possibility of your gaining back your voting rights by working of course but discounted it because you were so young and we needed action now not after you finish college. But you are right there is no rule in the agreement that you have to be a certified engineer! And 10,000 bucks! That’s nothing! I spent more than that when my wife wanted to change toilet seats in the bathroom. We spent so much time thinking of the Scott Company as building bridges or damming rivers or sinking mines halfway to China but meat and potatoes construction work is how they got started.”

“But how will I get them to hire me?” I asked looking down at my belly. “Particularly now?”

“You’re already hired, that’s how partnerships work. Ever since those shares were transferred to your ownership the bigger issue will be getting them to accept the billing. They don’t have to re-grant the rights if they can prove in court you never actually contributed to the partnership. But Ha! Those sloppy fuckers are going to pay for their own arrogance.”

“MR DEGEAS!” my mother scolded from her chair which rather had the effect of looking like a throne from this angle. “I will not have that language in this house.”

“Arrogance?” he asked chagrined. “Don’t worry I won’t use it again. Now…which of these damn dirty boxes are those statements in.” He then started moving heavy boxes of paper about in my office for about two minutes searching for the one he was after. Even so much as going down on his hands and knees to bring forth one that was under the table.

“Here we are,” he said slamming a box down on my cherry wood desk. “There are over 900 partners and three times that in associates and people who just do scut work. The bookkeeping is atrocious every partner has a billing code that they apply to the invoices they send out so accounting knows who to credit it to. But over the years as all these associates get pulled from this project to that and under and out of the supervision of one partner or another that they have work that slips between the cracks so to speak. But they are certainly not going to not get PAID! So when they don’t know what partner gets the credit they apply billing code 001 as a sort of cover all for the company as a whole. But that code is for the Scott himself! Has been since the beginning and that is now your billing code.”

“Well then can’t I just walk in tomorrow and demand my company back?” I asked confused.

“No, because they can fight it by saying, and entirely justified too, that it was not you that did the work. But this is where it gets perfect. You bill for the ten grand, we can create an invoice that looks just like the real thing and then we send payment to Scott headquarters. All they have to do is cash it and you’re back in. The accounting department may raise an eyebrow when they don’t see an original invoice generated on their end. But they see associate Katherine Ryan providing such and such services billing code 001. I bet some hardworking young pencil pusher cashes that check while they try to figure out what is going on and at that point you’re in like Flynn.”

“It can’t be that easy?”

“Maybe not, I’m going to go over all this again and find out. Most of this stuff I haven’t checked in years. MY BILL for this is probably going to be more than the one that gets you back in but we will worry about you paying it once you’re back where you belong. Just one catch though.”

“What’s that?”

“You have to let me be there to see the look on their faces when you tell them.”

******************

My mother had been in my house for three weeks when preparations for Thanksgiving began in earnest. The girls left the house Wednesday morning for their own family homes. All except Caroline of course, she made an attempt in vain to move out to a hotel for the long weekend but I put my pregnancy to work for me and threatened tears if she left me alone in a house with all these “strangers.” and she quickly caved in and threw herself into the preparations with a convert's zeal. It helped to have a country girl at work on the food. I could muddle through if I had to but really my expertise was on the consumption and not the production side of things.

I had four older sisters… god help me.

Anne was the oldest, and in a just world would have been the first to provide my mother and father with a grandchild but she didn’t have any desire to settle down just yet. At 26 she had several steady boyfriends and had threatened marriage several times but nothing came of it. The General didn’t even have to dust off his scowl and growl at them, none of them even made it that far. It would seem his mere existence was enough to send away most comers. None of the boys appeared to be up to Anne’s standards, set of course by being a real daddy’s girl.

Martha, named after our first, first lady. Was a slightly younger clone of our mother. Refined and educated she was in graduate school at UC Berkley and had a goal of finishing her PhD a decade before our mother did. I thought it was cheating a bit, since mother had married and had three children to interrupt her studies by that point but Martha wasn’t going to let a thing like that get in the way. She had some sort of affair with a young enlisted man when we were stationed in Okinawa but nothing came of it. And nothing since then, if she had a boyfriend in all her years of college I never heard her speak of it.

Connie, or Constance when she was being lectured to, was a stereotype of the middle child. She had just graduated from Brown and wasn’t going to let anyone forget it. She had brought her boyfriend Dan along and while she had a room in my house he most particularly didn’t. I wouldn’t have minded much but mother put her foot down and got him a rather nice hotel room a few miles away. No doubt they already knew each other in the biblical sense of the word but my parents could be slightly old fashioned about this sort of thing. And Dan took it all rather well and just smiled and kissed his girl on the way to check in to his room.

Abigail was only 11 months older than I and we were referred to as “Irish twins” growing up. I should feel offended at the racial slur but meh, I resemble that remark. Abby was the littlest Ryan, even after I had been demoted. Some combination of genes had produced a girl almost a foot and a half shorter than her father and significantly below her mother and siblings as well. She sort of over compensated for that and signed up for, and excelled at, every sport she could get away with. She had actually got a gymnastics scholarship to the University of Georgia and there was some speculation that she would be able to represent her country at the next Olympics.

I spent most of the morning ferrying relatives back and forth from the airport. Melanie was a good girl but she had a gymnasts build herself and had a hard time accommodating four people let alone any luggage. So mother had rented a Ford Expedition for the week and I gloried in the newest features Detroit had brought forth. I felt mildly traitorous when I discovered the heated seats option and how much I enjoyed it. And did a feasibility study in my head for how complicated it would be to retrofit my Jeep with one and didn’t like the answer. The General would be flying in via a military flight in the morning. So the only two people we had left to pick up on Wednesday night were Thomas and my grandfather.

Grandpa would have been traveling for most of the day at this point and would be extra crabby. When grandma died he had decided to retire in Belize. After the Chosin he never wanted to be near ice again and Nebraska in November was probably the coldest he had been in years. Belize is a nice little English speaking country near the tropics where the economy was such that a retired USMC Sergeant Major’s pension could be stretched to a sort of mild extravagance. But not so down in the dirt poor that a revolution was just around the bend. But even if there was, the local gun control laws were such that they didn’t mind that he had several of his own crew served weapons, something that south Florida just didn’t let you get away with for some reason.

He had first joined the Marine Corps in 1950 and he wasn’t part of the occupation in Japan for more than a week when he was thrown into a troopship and sent against the North Koreans. He first saw action in the fighting retreat that was the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. It was the toughest combat the Marine Corps had ever seen and that wasn’t just his opinion but the verdict of Marines that had also fought at Tarawa and Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. And even one crusty sergeant that had been a fresh faced devil dog at Belleau Wood. Afterwards he married, settled down and had children just in time for him to be sent off again to a different part of Southeast Asia. Where he subsequently had a bounty put on his head of $25,000 by the NVA.

Dead… for no one would try taking him alive.

His exact age was kind of fuzzy, legend has it toward the end of his career he leaned hard on clerks in the records office to every once in a while "edit" the year of his birth so that the inevitable mandatory retirement could be postponed. Eventually he was betrayed in the 90’s by the advent of a computer that couldn’t be intimidated. Despite that bounty, it was generally accepted that he would live forever. Heaven wouldn’t have him, and Hell wouldn’t take him back, he having made such a mess of things on his last tour of duty there.

Sgt. Major James “big Jimmy” Ryan Sr. was a man apart. And mildly embarrassed to have his son go for officer and advance to the academy when he was 20 and already in the Marine’s for three years. When he would get particularly irritated at his son he would call him “corporal”, the last rank he ever thought his son had “earned.” What he would think of his new granddaughter-in-law was yet to be determined. But I wasn’t going to let him push me around, he would probably hate that more. He exited the plane last and walked towards my mother and me with a powerful stride interrupted only slightly by the limp of his prosthetic left foot.

“Maggie!” he said smiling at my mother and then trying to appear somber. “Pardon me, Frau professor Margaret,” he finished in a pretty spry imitation, all things considered, of clicking his heels. “I’ll remember one of these days.”

“Maggie, is fine” Mother said, only slightly exasperated. “I’ve long since given up hope on decorum.”

“And this is Tommy’s girl Katherine?” he said turning to me. “Won’t be long before you’re called miss Kitty I promise. Knocked you up did he? I’m pretty proud actually. I was beginning to fear that this one over here,” he indicated my mother with his thumb. “Had bred the improper all out of my bloodline.”

“Little chance of that,” I said grinning.

“So where is the scoundrel? I have to see what sort of a pussy the Navy has made out of him when I wasn’t looking.”

Sort of the other way around I thought, but kept it to myself.

“Thomas has a flight from Reagan arriving few minutes after yours,” explained my mother while she tried and failed to pick up his carry on bag from him.” It’s on the other side of the terminal of course so by the time we get near the security gate he may already be waiting.”

“Lead on,” he said indicated the concourse.

We arrived after only a few minutes, Grandpa was stalled momentarily by a larcenous glance at the kiosk for Omaha Steaks but I got him moving again with a promise to send him a crate down south for Christmas. Post 9/11 you could no longer wait for arriving passengers directly at the arrival gate and had to huddle like sheep with the other friends and relations beyond the security gate so it was difficult to determine when one flight began and the other ended. And of course which group was which. We waited an hour, or two trips to the ladies room, whichever way you wanted to count it. Eventually irritated beyond belief I waddled down the escalator to the information desk and on one of the busiest travel days of the year eventually was able to win through and ask about the status of my husband's flight, though I wasn’t about to tell this stranger that we would probably be getting an annulment soon.

“I’m sorry miss,” the lady at the information desk offered.

“What, look at the flight information again,” I practically shouted at her. “That’s a precise printout of his e-ticket.”

“I see the ticket and his name on the original flight register. But, according to the information I have here, Thomas S. Ryan refunded his ticket two days ago. He never boarded this flight.”

******************

typos maid off by Robynn Hoode