Page 48 of Married in Michigan
“Shouldn’t the captain make an announcement or something?” I ask.
“That’s commercial. Our guys just fly the jet. If there’s something important, he’ll come back and tell me himself.”
“Like what?”
A shrug. “Like if there’s a diversion or something, or if we were to hit a rough patch of air with no way of avoiding it.”
“What the hell is a rough patch of air?” I ask.
He chuckles. “Air currents, I guess. I don’t know. Turbulence. That’s what they call it, a rough patch of air.”
I swallow hard. “Doesn’t sound fun.”
He makes anehface. “Like hitting a section of road with a lot of potholes, basically.”
“You must fly a lot,” I say. “You’re so blah about all this.”
He nods. “All the time. I live in DC, but I hit up New York and LA a couple times a month, and London, not regularly, but several times a year.”
“What’s London like?”
He grins. “Amazing. If I were going to live anywhere just because I like it, it’d be there. DC is where I have to live because I’m in Congress, but I don’t love it. When my time on the Hill is over, I leave pretty fast. New York? No thanks, not on your life. Too big, too fast-paced, too many cranky people. LA is…I don’t know. It’s LA. Not my scene. But London? Yeah, baby. Fun, fast, interesting people, good food, culture…it’sold. A sense of history, like you’re walking these streets and you know Darwin and Shakespeare and Dickens, Winston Churchill…they all lived here, walked the same streets. You can live in the same building they lived in. You can see plays in the actual Globe Theatre.”
I sigh. “Sounds amazing.”
“Never been, I take it.”
I laugh at that, and hard. “I’ve been precisely two places—Detroit, and Petoskey.”
“What about, like, Mackinac Island?”
“Hard to go on vacation even to Mackinac Island when you gotta work seven days a week to make ends meet. Even if I could afford a day off, I couldn’t afford the ferry ticket, and couldn’t afford to do anything while there. Shit, I couldn’tgetthere simply because I ain’t ever owned a car.” I hiss, annoyed. “I’ve never owned a car.”
He tilts his head. “Why’d you correct yourself?”
I hesitate. “I lived in Detroit with Mom until high school, then we moved up here—up there, rather. I talked like my mom. Like someone from Detroit. Nothing wrong with that, in and of itself.” I hesitate again. “But, when we moved up here, I stuck out. It’s mostly rich white kids in the schools up here, so that alone set me apart. But talking different, too? I made a point of changing the way I talked, so I sounded less like Mom and more like the rest of the kids. The old accent comes back sometimes, and I correct myself out of habit.” I shrug. “Besides, Camilla won’t let us speak with obvious accents.”
He blinks. “Wait, really?”
I nod. “Oh yeah, absolutely. The front desk clerks are actually required to receive ‘elocution training’ from a Hollywood acting coach, so as to speak with region-less neutrality.” I snort, using air quotes around the phrase. “Even we lowly housekeeping staff are given a handful of lessons so we don’t sound like we’re from wherever we’re from. Obviously, you have to speak at least halfway decent English to even be hired. No fresh off the boat hires allowed.”
Paxton shakes his head. “That’s stupid. No one cares how the housekeepers talk.”
I eye him with an arched brow. “Because who would bother even talking to them, right?”
“Exactly—” he cuts off, looking at me. “Don’t take insult where I don’t mean it, Makayla.”
“Actually, I agree with what you’re saying. She wants us to be essentially invisible. Like the hotel cleans itself, or there’s like magic cleaning gnomes or something. Yet we have to speak proper English and be articulate and without accent. Sort of clashing ideas, you know?”
“Mom has always been very particular about things,” Paxton says by way of explanation.”
I feel a variance in the pressure, a sense of weightlessness. “What’s happening?” I ask, hating how squeaky, breathless, and panicked I sound—and feel.
His hand finds mine. And, to my great chagrin and deep confusion, I immediately twine my fingers in his and squeeze hard.
“We’re landing,” Paxton explains, as calm as can be. “It’ll be nice and easy. Our pilots are the best. Ex-military, most of them, and our regular pilot out of Pellston was a copilot on Air Force One for a few years. So, you’re in the best possible hands.”
I glance out the window, which is a mistake—the ground is rushing up at the airplane with dizzying speed, the runway getting bigger and closer and bigger and closer. I gasp in helpless fear, turn my head away from the window and bury my face in Paxton’s shoulder.