Her Last Flight(29)

She entered through the side door, which wasn’t locked. “Dad?” she called out.

“In the kitchen, pumpkin!”

Irene smoothed back her hair and turned right into the kitchen, where her father sipped coffee at the wooden table. Mr. Foster stood up and opened his arms. Irene stepped into his embrace and kissed his cheek, then turned her own cheek to be kissed.

“This is a nice surprise,” she said. “You must’ve set out early from Victorville.”

“I wasn’t in Victorville. I was out in Nevada. Reno way. Drove through the night so I could eat breakfast with my best girl.” He sat. “Weren’t out surfing, were you?”

“Sure, I was. Nice morning like this one.” The blue enamel coffeepot sat on the stove behind him, keeping warm. Irene had already taken a cup and saucer from the cabinet. She poured her coffee, added a teaspoon of sugar, stared at the swirling liquid as she stirred it in. The heat felt good on her fingers; she didn’t realize how cold they were.

“How were the waves?” asked Mr. Foster.

“Waves were good. Big, slow rollers, coming in northwest.”

He nodded. “Could maybe join you tomorrow, if you like.”

“Maybe,” Irene said.

He motioned to the other chair. “Sit down a bit and have coffee with me.”

“Can’t. I’ve got to be at work in an hour. I can fry you an egg, if you like.”

“Why, I’d love an egg or two,” Mr. Foster said, as if the idea never occurred to him.

So Irene fetched the eggs from the pantry, fetched the bread to make toast. Mr. Foster made no move to help, although he could make his own breakfast perfectly well, when Irene wasn’t around to do it for him. He made conversation instead, that was his contribution. He told Irene about this fellow in Reno, how he might want to buy Mr. Foster’s new idea, the patent for the thingamajig—Irene wasn’t really paying attention, hadn’t really kept up with her father’s latest gadget—for possibly a lot of money, Mr. Foster wouldn’t say how much, didn’t want to get her hopes up. But the fellow was pretty serious. Bit eccentric, lived all by himself in a ranch way out of town, rich as Midas.

“How do you know?” asked Irene. “How do you know he’s that rich?”

“That’s what people say.”

Irene slid her father’s eggs on the toast—over easy, that’s how he liked them, yolk gushing all over the place as soon as you pricked them with your fork—and handed him the plate. He reached for the salt.

“Go on,” said Irene, so she wouldn’t have to talk, and Mr. Foster went on. He told her about the drive, how he figured to save the money for another night at the motor lodge and set out at nine p.m. over the Sierra Nevada, tire went flat right away in the Truckee Pass, another tire blew out near Modesto. But oh, it was a beautiful night to be out driving. The air was clear and dry, so you could see the whole Milky Way spread out in the southwest sky. Not another soul on the road, not until the sun poked up and the ranchers started their rounds. “And the smell, Irene, you know that smell. The sweet, dry grass and the dust and the sage.”

“It’s a good smell,” she said. By now, she’d come to sit at the table across from him, drinking her coffee. The sound of his voice, it was the sound of her childhood, and it wasn’t all bad. Hank Foster could spin a good story. Whatever his faults, he could make you smell the air and taste the fried chicken and laugh at the poor sucker at the drugstore, whether or not any of those things had actually existed.

Her father pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “You mind?”

Irene waved her hand. Her father pulled out a cigarette, lit it with a match from a matchbook that said Lincoln Motor Lodge, and took a drag or two. Irene went into the sitting room and brought back an ashtray.

“Say, now,” said Mr. Foster. “Here’s an idea. I hear there’s an air show in Burbank this afternoon.”

Irene dropped the ashtray next to her father’s coffee cup and stared at the end of his cigarette. “What did you say?”

“An air show. In Burbank. Fellow’s gone and laid out an airfield there, just the other side of the Hollywood Hills. They’ll be testing out some new planes, flying stunts. You should come with me.”

Irene snatched her cup and saucer from the table and took them to the sink and turned on the faucet. The water streamed over her fingers and swirled around the blue leaves of her mother’s second-best china. “I have to work,” she said.

“Call in sick, why don’t you.”

“Anyway, you should sleep. Driving all night like that.”

“Oh, I can stay awake a few more hours. I was just thinking, out there on the highway, I don’t spend near enough time with you. Leave you all alone for days. Who knows what kind of trouble you might be getting up to?”

Irene thought she might be having a heart attack. Her hands shook as she washed out the cup, the saucer, and dried them with a dishcloth, one by one. She heard the clink of cutlery on china, the mouthy noises as Mr. Foster chewed his eggs and swallowed.

“Said in the newspaper, that fellow Sam Mallory’s going to be demonstrating his new airplane, the one he’s flying to Sydney, Australia, next week.”

“Is that so?”

“That’s so. You remember that business, last summer. The fellow who crashed his airplane in the open ocean, flying to Hawai’i in that pineapple derby, and they picked him up eleven days—”