Her Birthday Celebration Was My Exit novel · Chapter 15 of 24

Chapter 15: Grounded

I lay there and looked at her face for a long time.

The sun. The pink drink. The white bikini, bought with somebody's money.

Sunny stirred beside me and opened one eye.

"Is it Christmas?"

"It's Christmas."

"Did Santa come to Bridgeport?"

I turned the phone face down on the nightstand.

"Go look," I said.

She went, thundering down the stairs in her flight jacket.

In January we flew home, and I was still grounded.

The agents had the binders.

Lisetta had a lawyer and a balcony in Miami.

I had a paycheck for doing nothing and a crew room I wasn't allowed to fly out of.

On the third morning of doing nothing, I put on jeans and Pop's old work boots and walked into the hangar.

Tommy was under the belly of a freighter with a flashlight in his teeth.

"What are you doing here?"

"I'm grounded. I'm not dead."

The hangar lead was a big gray man with a voice.

He looked me up and down.

"You're the pilot who landed with no hydraulics."

"Yes."

"You want to be useful?" He pointed at a mop. "Start there."

I started there.

By the end of the week I was handing tools.

By the second week I was on my back on a creeper beside Tommy, in a wheel well, with a mirror and a light.

It was the sister ship of the freighter I'd landed in the snow.

Same year. Same hours. Same lines.

"What are we looking for?" I asked.

"Anything that looks wrong."

I looked for two hours.

Behind a hydraulic line, under three coats of paint, there was a bracket.

It was cracked almost all the way through.

You couldn't see the crack. You could see the paint wrinkle where the metal under it had moved.

"Tommy."

He slid over. He looked. He went very quiet.

"Get the lead," he said.

The lead got on his back on the cold floor in his good knees and looked for a long time.

"That's what killed your hydraulics in December," he said. "Same bracket. Same line. It rubs through." He looked at me sideways. "That inspection's been signed off three times."

"I'm not saying anything about who signed it."

"I know you're not." He got up slowly. "That's why I'm saying it."

By afternoon every freighter in the fleet was getting its brackets checked.

They found two more cracked.

On Friday there was a gray hangar jacket in my locker.

Someone had stenciled the back. BELLINI.

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