Page 9 of How to Walk Away

“I agree.”

“And now she gets to spoil the only wedding day I’ll ever have.”

My luck. I’d throw the most exquisite wedding in the history of time, and the only takeaway would be my drunk, black-sheep sister trying to ride the ice sculpture.

If she deigned to come.

Actually, that summed up our dynamic exactly. I was always trying to get things exactly right, and she was always hell-bent on getting them spectacularly wrong.

***

UP AHEAD, THEairfield came into sight.

Chip was especially good at landings, he mentioned then. He just had a knack for them, kind of the way he had a knack for parallel parking.

That said, the sky up ahead was quite different from the sky we’d seen on the flight down. Darker, stormier. “That’s unexpected,” Chip said, taking it in.

“Was it supposed to rain?”

“Not last I checked.”

“You can fly in the rain, though, right?”

“Not really. You avoid it. Or wait for it to pass.”

“I’m fine with either,” I said. So agreeable with that ring on.

“The thing is, though,” he said then, “we’re going to need to land sooner rather than later.”

“So we don’t miss our fancy dinner reservation?”

“So we don’t run out of fuel.”

I studied the horizon. The sky behind us was bright blue, but up ahead it was grayer and grayer. And a little purple. With a smidge of charcoal black.

“That’s definitely rain—but way past the airport. Right?”

He nodded. “Right.”

Off on the horizon, there was a flash of lightning.

Maybe the storm was affecting our air. The ride back had become quite a bit bumpier, and soon I was motion-sick.

As we approached, Chip called in our coordinates in that official pilot’s voice, which was a little deeper than his regular one, and then he maneuvered us into the flight pattern for landing. We pulled around to the left, then turned to run along the length of the runway, then U-turned to descend to the ground. Chip was all concentration. I felt, more than saw, the ground getting closer. A welcome idea.

And then a funny thing happened. As we were nearing the runway, the wings did a thing I can only describe as a waggle—dipping sideways a little and then popping back up—that gave me a physical sting of fear in my chest.

It was over in a second, but that second changed everything. Something was wrong.

I looked over at Chip. His face was stone still.

“Chip?” I said.

“The wind’s shifted,” he said.

“What?” I asked. “Is that bad?”

“It’s a crosswind now” was all he answered.

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