Her Birthday Celebration Was My Exit novel · Chapter 5 of 24
Chapter 5: Box Hauler
Tommy looked over my shoulder.
He said a word Pop would have smacked him for.
"Give me the phone. I'm going to comment."
"You're not going to comment."
"I'm going to comment one emoji. The rat."
I turned the screen off and put the phone in my pocket.
"Our bags are going around again," I said.
He grabbed them and didn't say anything else about it.
That was the last time I let her post touch my day.
The next morning I walked into Bering Freight in borrowed boots.
My coat came from the airport gift shop. Tommy had bought it. It had a moose on the back.
The training room was a cinderblock box above the hangar. Eight new hires. Folding chairs. Coffee that tasted of the pot.
The training captain came in at seven sharp.
He was tall and rangy, with a short dark blond beard and gray-blue eyes that looked like they'd been squinting into snow his whole life.
He wore a navy uniform sweater with the elbows going thin.
He dropped a stack of manuals on the table and read our names off a clipboard.
"Bellini."
"Here."
He looked up.
"You're the Gulfstream."
"I'm the pilot."
"Fifty-two hundred hours. Two years flying one private jet for one family." He flipped a page. "Before that, regionals. Nice airports. Nice weather. Hot towels."
Somebody laughed.
"I've never served a hot towel in my life," I said.
"Good. We don't have any." He shut the clipboard. "I'm Ryder Haldane. I fail about one in three of you. I'm not mean. Alaska is mean. I just get there first."
He spent the next two weeks proving it.
We did systems until our eyes crossed.
We learned how to load a freighter so it didn't sit on its tail on the ramp.
He called me "Gulfstream" every single day.
On day nine we got the sim.
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