Flight Lessons by Patricia Gaffney

Author:Patricia Gaffney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Avon A
Published: 2002-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Mac hadn’t had any religious faith to speak of, so the memorial service was in the funeral home, not a church, where more people than Jay must’ve been expecting showed up. Anna, who had wanted to arrive at the last possible minute, got there just as the service was beginning. There were no more chairs in the airy, parlor-like room, so she and Mason stood in back against the wall. There was no minister; the only people who spoke were friends. Jay spoke, but too briefly, she thought, and nothing he said got to the heart of it, didn’t come close to describing the man his grandfather had been. He called him “hardworking” and “a family man.” Maybe he was afraid he’d cry if he went too close to the truth. Jay wasn’t afraid of passionate extremes, but they had to make him look good. Weeping over his grandfather in front of his friends—maybe that crossed some uncool line.

Or maybe she was simply incapable of giving him a break. It wasn’t hard to see him again, not the shock to her system she’d feared it would be. He looked smaller. Not as if he’d lost weight; as if he’d shrunk. She wanted to correct his version of what Mac was like, but she hadn’t prepared anything, and the thought of standing up in front of these people made her heart pound. Some of them would think she’d lost the right—Jay had thrown her away, after all. She was about to do it anyway when an old man she’d never seen before stood up and said, “For a pain in the ass, Mac McGuare was the nicest fella I ever knew.” That was about right. Thank you, she thought, watching him honk into a big red kerchief before he sat down.

At the end, Jay got up and made another little speech. Thanks for coming, Mac would’ve been so pleased, etc., etc.—in the middle of it he saw her, and broke off long enough to smile slightly and send her a sort of knowing half-wave. Several people, Nicole among them, turned around to see who he was acknowledging. Anna stared back into her old friend’s kittenish face, glad she’d had some warning, glad she didn’t look as shocked as Nicole did. Didn’t think I was coming, did you? She hadn’t wanted Anna here, had even asked Jay not to tell her Mac was dead until after the funeral. If he’d done that—

But he hadn’t, so no point in devising atrocious punishments in her mind for him. He’d done the right thing, leave it at that, and don’t speculate on his motives. Such as trying to make Nicole jealous. Trying to get two women to fight over him. No, surely that was unworthy of Jay. If it wasn’t, she’d thrown away two years of her life on a man who was even scurvier than she thought.

She left Mason and went to pay her respects to the deceased. Mac lay in a closed metal coffin in an alcove of the parlor, surrounded by enormous floral wreaths and arrangements.

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