Chapter 21: Left Seat

We ran.

Through the ballroom, past the cake and the thirty-one candles, past the pinky ring, who stepped out of my way and held the elevator door.

Down twenty-three floors with my heart going.

Out through the lobby, past the doormen in their long gray coats.

Pop was leaning on the Buick with a parking ticket in his hand and a tow truck idling behind him.

"Well?" he said.

"They arrested her. In front of everybody. With the candles lit."

"In front of everybody!"

"Pop, I've got a plane in ninety minutes."

He looked at me. He looked at Ryder. He crumpled the ticket and threw it in the gutter.

"Get in," he said.

I had ridden with my father for twenty-nine years.

He had never once driven over fifty-five.

He took Lake Shore Drive at seventy with both hands on the wheel and his jaw set.

He cut across three lanes onto the Kennedy.

He went around a bus on the shoulder.

Ryder held on to the strap over the back door with his scarred hand and didn't say a word.

"Thirty-five years on the ramp," Pop said, passing a cab. "You think I don't know how to get to O'Hare?"

"You drive fifty-five in the right lane!"

"Because nobody ever had a reason!"

He pulled up at departures in thirty-one minutes.

He didn't get out. He leaned across me and grabbed my face in both hands, rough as sandpaper.

"Go get your seat," he said.

We made the gate as they were closing the door.

The agent looked at our boarding passes, then at Ryder's funeral suit, then at my face.

"Long night?"

"Not yet," I said.

I fell asleep before the wheels were up.

I woke over the Yukon with my head on Ryder's shoulder and his jacket over me and his hand in mine.

He was awake. I don't think he'd slept at all.

"You were snoring," he said.

"I don't snore."

"You snore like a turboprop."

We landed in Anchorage at one-forty in the morning.

Tommy was at the curb with the engine running, in his hangar jacket, a foil package on the seat.

"Pop called," he said. "He said you need to eat and sleep, in that order. I brought both. There's a pillow in the back."

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