Page 26 of The Space Between

Vance’s smile is a quick flash; not even a real smile. “Sure,” he says. “Right. But in order to be the lead on a mission of any sort, a man needs to have his wits about him, and Bill doesn’t. We’ve all sat down and agreed that we need to talk to Arvin North about it.”

The blood drains out of Jeanie’s face. “All of you?”

“Well, Todd thinks we should just wait and see what happens, but the rest of us are on the same page. The mission isn’t until the end of the year, as you know, but if we’re going to reconfigure things, now is the time to do it. We need to be prepared.”

Jeanie is wildly uncomfortable with this discussion, and she realizes she must look it when Vance reaches out and touches the crook of her elbow lightly. “Don’t worry, Jeanie. We’re not asking you to bring this up with Arvin North or anything, we just need your help in gathering some of Bill’s latest work, and also maybe testifying to the fact that you were there at the party and saw how he fell apart under pressure.”

Jeanie is shaking her head, but no words are coming out of her mouth. In no way does she want to be a part of this, whateverthisis. It just feels wrong. A man lost someone important in his life just days ago, and now his coworkers—hisfriends—aretrying to usurp his position as leader of the three-man mission so that one of them can potentially get assigned to it. As the sole woman on their team, she knows that her words won’t necessarily carry weight with them, but she also knows that she has the only chance here to make them see how wrong this is.

“Vance,” Jeanie says, leaning against the filing cabinet. “You can’t do this.”

This is clearly not what Vance has expected to hear, and his face falls.

“Bill is a good, strong choice for this mission, and he’s got months to pull himself together. We’re not even doing this until December.” She searches Vance’s face for awareness and understanding. “You have to let him have a moment here,” she says, trying a different tack. “Imagine if you were in his shoes, and you got a terrible phone call that someone important from your past had taken their own life. How would you respond?”

An angry flicker passes over Vance’s face as he realizes that Jeanie isn’t just going to roll over on this one. He lowers his voice. “First of all, I’d keep my shit together in front of other people. There’s no way anyone would see me lose it. And secondly, I would compartmentalize it and make sure I could still do my job. I’ve been through traumatic things, Jeanie, and I know how to keep moving ahead without having anything affect my work.”

Jeanie is listening, but she’s looking at Vance with a distance that she doesn’t normally allow herself. Rather than being the strong, self-contained, patient man she knows him to be, he suddenly looks desperate to her. Desperate and spiteful. Everyone on the team knows that Vance’s wife, Jude, potentially drinks too much, and they also know that she’d once fallen and hit her head on the side of the pool, slipping into the water and nearly drowning while drunk.

The guys might not tell Jeanie all of this directly, but she has ears. She listens. She observes what’s going on around her. And what she’s observing right now is complete nonsense. Jeanie’s arms fall. She’s been holding them across her body protectively as Vance talks, but now she’s lost her defensive pose and she stands up straighter, looking him in the eye.

“We all respond to things differently, Vance, and what you’re suggesting now is completely disloyal. I won’t be a part of it. I think we all have our weaknesses in life, and maybe Bill had a particularly tough relationship with his first wife. But that’s really none of my business. What is my business is being a part of a team, and a real team works together, not against one another. So you do what you need to do, but please leave me out of it.”

Jeanie’s heart is pounding in her chest so hard that her blood is rushing in her ears. It sounds like ocean waves crashing inside of her head. Without waiting for Vance to respond—mostly because she can’t wait; she needs to be away from him—she walks down the hall, her strides long, her eyes focused on a distant point.

Outside the office space Jeanie lets herself relax, and she leans against a wall. The adrenaline coursing through her veins stops moving so quickly, and she begins to shake.

Bill has the right to have a moment of weakness, and he has the right to have it amongst his friends, who are there for him and who will have his back. And even if no one else agrees with her, to Jeanie, that’s just a human right.

She puts the back of her head against the wall and looks up at the fluorescent lights above, blinking away tears. There is no way Jeanie will be a part of this plan to take Bill off the December mission, but she knows she needs to distance herself from him. Because a part of her response to Vance just now had been a veryreal one about loyalty and teamwork, but another part of it had come from somewhere much deeper in her heart.

The pool of the Sunny Tides Condo Resort is surrounded by men and women covered in tufts of white hair. The women have poofs of snowy hair styled into cotton candy clouds or sprayed bobs that they don’t let touch the water. The men have thin wisps of it on top of their heads, and scrubby patches of fur on their forearms, chests, and bellies. They’re laughing and browning together in the late afternoon sun when Jeanie and Vicki join them later that afternoon.

“Let me just process this,” Vicki says as they sit down. She places a cigarette between her pink-manicured fingers. A shirtless man stops right in front of her and flicks a lighter, bending forward to shield the flame with his age-spotted hand as Vicki leans into it. Satisfied, she takes the cigarette from her lips, exhales and smiles up at him. “Thanks, doll.” The man winks at her and walks on.

Jeanie is watching this whole scene with amusement; no matter where they go, men are at the ready to open doors for Vicki, buy her drinks, or light her cigarettes. To her eye, Vicki is a very pretty, rather well-maintained woman at the middle of a life that’s left her with laugh lines and a smattering of freckles across her ample chest, but she’s no teenage beauty queen. She has a laugh so gravelly that it turns heads, and she’s prone to wearing colors and patterns that Jeanie knows she herself could never pull off, but somehow Vicki does nothing but reel in male attention.

It’s mystifying, and Jeanie wants to understand what it is about Vicki that works on the opposite sex. It’s not that the menwho approach her are necessarily ones that Jeanie herself would want, but it’s the very idea that one woman can trail a scent of sex appeal behind her that brings in the teenage bag boy at Publix (an eighteen-year-old recently asked her out as he took her groceries to the car!), but also invites every other man from ages thirty to ninety into her sphere.

“So,” Vicki is saying, seemingly unaware that most of the older gents in the pool are eyeing her hungrily (or at least with some curiosity and interest), “just so I have it straight, the guy with the flat buzz cut who I was sitting next to at the party, he came up to you today and said he wants you to help him overthrow Bill Booker’s mission?”

Jeanie leans back in the lounge chair in the warm yellow sunlight that still covers the entire pool area, even at five-thirty. She unknots the towel tied around her body and lets it fall to the sides so that her bikini is visible. “Not exactly,” she says, closing her eyes as the sun touches her face. “More like they want to overthrowhimand not the mission. I think Vance wants Bill’s spot on the team, but he’s making it out like he’s worried about Bill’s mental health.”

“Hmmm,” Vicki says, crossing her long, tanned legs at the ankle and surveying the older people who are bobbing in the pool like apples in a cauldron on Halloween. “Devious. Underhanded.Interesting.”

Jeanie shrugs and opens her eyes, turning to Vicki as she squints in the sunlight. “But this is all between you and me, okay?” she says pointedly, remembering how hard Vicki had lobbied at the party at Bill’s house to meet an astronaut of her own. She can’t have her private work dramas and office struggles turned into pillow talk between Vicki and some aging space man. “You swear?”

Vicki solemnly holds up the hand that’s holding her cigarette like she’s swearing to a judge before testifying in court. “I swear, Your Honor.”

“Anyway, he reacted badly to the death of his ex-wife. You saw it. He doubled over. He lost it. And I think that not only scared the other guys a little but also gave them an opening. It’s not the kind of job where you can show weakness, and for good reason. I know that someone who can’t keep it together could compromise a mission—everyone knows that. But there’s a balance, don’t you think?” She’s still watching Vicki’s face as Vicki listens to her. “A person should be allowed to experience life and respond to it without their coworkers turning into vultures.”

"You don't need to defend him to me, princess." Vicki blows a long stream of smoke up into the sky. "I'm on your side here, but I also think you need to just let things play out. Don't make your own life harder than it needs to be."

"What do you mean?"

Vicki holds her cigarette aloft; it makes her look like a forties film star. She levels her gaze at Jeanie. "I mean, if you stick your nose where it doesn't belong, you might lose it." She puts the cigarette to her lips again and the tip glows orange. "Let the men sort this one out. If you go running to Bill and tell him about this conversation, then you put yourself in jeopardy with the other men. If you keep defending Bill to them as heatedly as you're defending him to me, they'll sniff it out immediately that you've got a crush on him. You can't win either way, baby girl. So you might as well just stay out of it."

The older man who'd given Vicki a light comes back holding two bottles of beer. "Drinks for you ladies? You're looking rather parched over here."

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