Page 6 of Protecting the Flame

Chapter 2

“Well,that sounded exciting from my end.” Kim’s voice was tinny and thin; snow always messed with Emma’s cell. “Where are you?”

“Airport,” Emma said, trying to ignore the tinkle of bad Muzak dribbling from the airport’s overhead speakers. If Emma had to listen to Burl Ives go on about a holly, jolly Christmas one more time, her brain was going to melt. Well, if she didn’t vomit again first. Actually, she thought both were excellent possibilities. Man, instead of acid rock, they ought to blast old Burl at terrorists. After a couple of hours, those guys would be gibbering idiots.

“I got that,” Kim said dryly. “But which one? Are you in Montana already?”

“Nope. Catching a connection in why-not-Minot,” Emma quipped, trying for perky and chipper though she was anything but. Even after brushing her teeth a third time and swishing with mouthwash so strong her eyes watered, her mouth still tasted like something vile had taken a crap, crawled under tongue, and promptly died.

Kim laughed. “I take it Minot’s still a garden spot?”

“Oh, yeah, you betcha,” she said in her best Upper Midwest accent, which was really the same as North Dakota when you got right down to it because almost everyone who first settled there came from or through the Midwest. Back when she’d last been here…six years ago felt right…Minot was Fargo on steroids. (She thought the TV series was good, but the movie was way better, mostly because Frances McDormand not only had the accent down—really, all the natives sounded exactly like that—but even seven months pregnant, Sheriff Gunderson kicked some serious butt. Many women in North Dakota and most of the Upper Midwest were like that. Emma’s grandmother, a wickedly good shot who’d schooled Emma on the ins and outs of a rifle, had learned from her mother, whose own family had done a Laura Ingalls Wilder but abandoned the Dakotas in favor of heading back to the Wisconsin Northwoods because, as her Bubbe Sarah often said, Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes, oy, mein Gott, you never saw so many potatoes! The only other thing to eat was prairie dog except we couldn’t—and why, you may ask? Because, girlchik, prairie dogs aren’t kosher.)

“When do you fly out?”

“Within the hour, I hope. If we don’t, we’ll never beat this storm.” She was camped out at the Trestle Tap House on the airport’s second floor…oh, no, sorry, that was the Terrazzo Story for the cultured among us. Whatever. Morose, bleary-eyed guys who clearly lived by the maxim that it was always five o’clock somewhere lined the bar like sardines in a can. Above the bar, three ESPN announcers splashed on a big-screen TV nattered on about college bowl picks with all the enthusiasm of manic chipmunks on speed. The air smelled of old beer, bacon, fried eggs, and warm milk.

She’d considered eggs. Protein was supposed to be good, give her staying power, but then she thought about how slimy eggs were before they were cooked and, you know, they really did look a little bit like snotty eyes, which was mixing metaphors but whatever. In the end, she’d ordered a cup of herbal tea—something vaguely Asian she imagined only really flexible women in formfitting yoga getups choked down—and a muffin whose raisins resembled rat turds. Sawdust would’ve tasted better. She managed two nibbles before her stomach heaved and tried crawling into her throat, and she gave up.

Cupping her tea, she turned her back on the tap house in favor of a view of the tarmac through the terminal’s enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The snow was more blowing than truly falling, great balloons of the stuff swirling back and forth in curtains through which she glimpsed snowplows with winking lights. The way the plows worked a grid reminded her of Pacmen gobbling energizers. Looking at all that made her shiver and want to crawl into her steaming cup instead of drink it. “I’m waiting for the pilot to text when he’s ready to go.”

“Really?” Kim’s voice crackled through an earbud. “Text? What kind of airline is this?”

“It’s not. An airline, I mean. My Delta connection got canceled. I guess it got hung up farther west, I don’t know.” On the tarmac, a worker in an enclosed yellow cab at the end of a long, extended boom mounted on a large white truck sprayed clouds of deicing liquid over a jetliner. Did they de-ice little itty-bitty bush planes? She hoped so. “I think they’re also worried about how long they can keep the runways clear with the storm headed this way,” she said, sipping at her tea, which truly sucked and no amount of sugar could possibly save. Gwyneth Paltrow always made herbal tea sound like heaven in a cup, which only went to show what a great actress the woman was. Then again, it was probably a blessing in disguise because whatever Emma couldn’t get down could not come back for a visit. “Anyway, I found this private pilot who wants to get out, too. The charter was already contracted, and he had space because somebody else didn’t show, so…” Actually, the guy was probably double-dipping, charging both the client who canceled and her, but being between that proverbial rock and a hard place, it wasn’t as if she had tons of choices.

Well, she did have one. She could punt. She just wasn’t sure she could live with herself after. But, man, she really did want to give up, cry uncle, sign her separation papers, and go find a nice cave. Roll a rock over the entrance. Order in the occasional pizza.

“A charter? How big is the plane?”

“Small. Two prop job, so it’s not going to go high-high, which I guess is good?” She truthfully had no idea. Wasn’t it better to be above a storm than in it? Yeah, but what went up always had to come back down, so it probably evened out in the end. Although having flown a couple of transports in turbulence so bad even the pilot blew his cookies—always exciting, watching a guy try to steer and barf at the same time—she knew it was the in-between that could suck. One person barfed, pretty soon everybody did. A doctor once said it was a sympathetic response. But that was crap. It was the smell. These past couple of weeks of hugging porcelain, she’d become a world authority on the persuasive powers of puke.

Jeez, quit it, will you? The imageof her hanging over a bowl or blowing her cookies into an air sickness bag made her stomach lurch. She forced another sip of tea. “The plane’s got room enough for eight people and luggage,” she said. “The pilot does a lot of backcountry flying, I guess.”

“Are you okay?” Kim sounded suspicious. “You sound weird. In fact, last night before we went out, you were acting weird. You actually looked kind of green there.”

“No, no.” Kim had insisted on treating her to dinner and drinks. She’d only wet her lips on the hot sake and, while she liked sushi, the briny smell and glistening slabs of fish and curdled lumps of raw sea urchin made her stomach flip. All she really managed was rice. “I’m okay. Just tired. We stayed out too late on a school night, I guess.”

“Honey, we got back to your place at nine.”

“Okay, then I’m nervous, all right?” And sick as a dog, she could’ve added but didn’t.

“And snappish, too.”

“I’m fine.” She loved Kim, she really did, but she was this close to throwing her cell across the concourse. “Anyway, about the pilot?”

“Are we changing the subject?”

“Yes. So, he flies hunters, mainly, and fishermen all around the Mountain West and into Canada, Alaska.”

“Oh. Well, sounds like he knows what he’s doing then, although you wouldn’t catch me dead in one of those puddle jumpers.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve considered how truly unfortunate a turn of phrase that was.”

“You didn’t have an alternative?”

Other than running back home and pulling the covers over my head? “For today, no. It was sort of Hobson’s choice. This horse or nothing, you know? Anyway, it’s the Air Force’s dime, so I couldn’t not go.” Though she’d certainly considered it. There were worse things than holing up in a hotel room with a remote and a bathroom within easy reach. As she recalled, Minot had some very good pizza places that delivered. Not many, but a few. On the other hand—she heard herself give a small urk-urk and pressed a hand to her mouth—maybe a loaded meat-lovers of pepperoni, sausage, ham, and bacon with extra cheese was a really bad idea. (It would almost certainly cause her bubbe to turn over in her grave. Bubbe Sarah had kept a strictly kosher house, and although Emma did not, even she couldn’t quite mix milk and meat or chow down on a Polish sausage—and oh, that sea urchin would’ve given Sarah a heart attack—without hearing her bubbe: Nu, these American Jews eating their ham and sausages and shrimp like the goyim, you’d think they never heard their grandmothers. Tu on a khazer a shtrayml, vet er vern rov. She agreed, of course. Putting a streimel on a pig would not make it a rabbi, but she’d pay good money to see that.)

“You sure you’re okay?” Kim asked.

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