Volume: 1

171

The next day, easy landings and too much money.

I had been up for two hours by the time April knocked on my door the next morning. She came in confused, exhilarated, anxious, depressed and beaming. I barely said good morning before she started a stream of consciousness rant, as if from a bad TV show. Something had happened to her, something unusual. She flew a dinky plane, drove it through clouds, ate lunch on an island and experienced the bonus of an in-flight emergency. She realized how long it had been since she was involved in something other than office buildings, board meetings, strategy sessions and all the other things that sucked time away from her life. She was pursuing money well beyond what she already had and didn't need. She admitted to throwing nice parties. Ethan was a dork. She wondered about the risks inherent in the sky, being held aloft by an internal combustion engine, puttering away, exploding fossil fuel. "What am I doing up there?"

A moment later she said, "What am I doing down here?"

I let the pause linger as long as possible. I asked if she was still game for the trip. She nodded and sat on the bed. She bowed her head, looking at the floor, hair obscuring her face. After about a minute of silence I started. "Today, we have a whopping eighteen-mile flight over to Santa Ynez. Since we don't know how the engine will behave, we'll climb to 12,000 feet while circling. If it all works, we'll descend over the little airport there. If anything so much as sputters or misbehaves or I don't know what, we'll land back here and leave the plane for the new owner to figure something else out."