Flight Paths and Frills

I'm forty-three years old and I've been staring into the crew break room microwave for about four minutes. My leftover spaghetti rotates inside. I'm not even hungry.

It's Thursday at the regional hub, which means peanut dust in the air and Aria hogging the couch. Aria Boone, twenty-nine, ramp agent, divorced, professional busybody. She's watching me watch the spaghetti.

"You good?" she asks.

"Fine. Tired."

"You've been looking at that microwave like it owes you money."

I pull the spaghetti out and sit down next to her. Here's the truth I don't say out loud. Every guy I've dated since college wanted the uniform, not me. They wanted the fantasy of the flight attendant. The scarf. The heels. The idea of me deplaning in Phoenix looking like a commercial. Nobody wanted the woman who wears sweatpants on her day off and eats cereal for dinner because the galley ate her whole day.

The last one, four years ago, actually said it to my face. "You're too much airplane, Darcy." Like that was a diagnosis. Like I was a hobby he was tired of paying for.

So now I date nobody. I work, I sleep, I come home to my ranch house on Mockingbird Lane, and I wave at the neighbors. Riveting stuff.

The break room door bangs open and Julian Mercer walks in with a toolbox and his beat-up thermal coffee cup. He's the mechanic. Forty-six, forearms like rope, always smells faintly of hydraulic fluid. I've known him three years, mostly as a guy who shows up when something on my aircraft is broken.

"Hey," he says. "Fixed your seat."

"My seat?"

"837. Row two, window. The recliner that sticks. Been bugging you for what, a year?"

"It's been bugging me for a year, actually." I blink at him. "You fixed it just now? Between flights?"

"Took ten minutes. The cable was kinked." He sets his toolbox down and pours coffee like this is nothing. It is not nothing. I have reported that seat four times. I once described it in writing as "a medieval torture device with cup holders."

Aria wiggles her eyebrows at me over the top of her phone. Full eyebrow wiggle. She thinks she's subtle. She has never once been subtle.

"Thanks, Julian," I manage.

"No problem!" He looks at me one beat longer than necessary, then leaves with his coffee. Aria turns to me with her whole face.

"Girl."

"What."

"Row two. Window. He knows your seat. He knows your flight."

"He's a mechanic. Knowing seats is his job."

"Uh huh." She goes back to her phone, smug as anything.

* * *

It happens Thursday in the parking lot. I'm walking to my car at shift change with my roller bag and my favorite blouse on. Cream silk, bought in Denver two years ago, the one good thing in my closet. A ramp agent I don't know is pushing a luggage cart past me, too fast, and the corner of a bin catches my sleeve and just rips it. Shoulder to elbow. A clean, horrible sound.

"FUCK," I say. Loud. A guy loading bags three rows over turns around. I don't care. I hold my arm up and look at the tear and I feel actual tears coming, which is embarrassing, because it's a blouse, it's just a blouse.

"Hey. You okay?"

Julian. Of course it's Julian. He's got a clipboard and a wrench and that coffee cup, because apparently he never leaves this place.

"My blouse got murdered by a luggage cart," I say. "It's fine. It's dumb. It's fine."

He looks at the tear. "That's silk?"

"Two hundred dollar silk, from Denver. And it fit me right, which never happens, so."

"I can fix that."

I laugh. I actually laugh at him. "With what, duct tape?"

"No. Needle and thread." He says it flat, like I asked him if water is wet. "I've been sewing since I was a kid. My grandmother taught me. She was a seamstress in Mobile. Made church dresses for half the county."

"You sew."

"I sew." He sips his coffee. "Drop it by my place tonight. I'm two doors down from you anyway."

And that's the thing I keep forgetting. He is. Two doors down, on Mockingbird Lane. I only found that out last spring when I filed a noise complaint about a truck starting at four a.m. and it turned out to be his truck, and he baked me banana bread as an apology, which is a thing I still think about sometimes at weird hours.

"Tonight," I say. "Okay. Sure. Tonight."

"Six. Bring a beer if you want one. I've got the good stuff anyway."

He walks off with his clipboard and I stand in the parking lot holding my dead blouse against my chest like a wound.

* * *

His house is smaller than mine and neater. That catches me off guard. My place has laundry draped on the treadmill and a junk drawer that screams when you open it. His place has a clean counter, a dish rack with two plates, and a wall of tools hung up like art in the garage.

"Cute house," I say, stepping in.

"Thanks. I don't do much here but sleep."

He hands me a beer, an actual good one, some dark local thing, and I sit at his kitchen table while he lays the blouse flat on a towel. He pulls out a little metal case full of needles and spools of thread. He has a spool of cream silk thread. Who has a spool of cream silk thread just sitting around?

He doesn't answer that, because I don't ask it out loud. He hunches over the tear with his reading glasses on and starts working, and I drink my beer and look around his kitchen like a weirdo.

Then I see it.

Through the doorway to the hall, next to the coat closet, there's a dress form. A sewing mannequin, the kind with the wooden stand. And it's wearing a dress. A sundress, yellow with little red flowers on it, and it looks hand-sewn, and it looks finished, and it is just standing there in his hallway like a guest.

"Why do you have a mannequin wearing a sundress?" I ask.

Julian doesn't look up from the sleeve. "That's my dress."

"Your... dress."

"I made it. Three years ago." He ties off a stitch. "It's for somebody. Someday. I don't know who yet. It was mostly practice, and mostly hope, and then it just sat there."

I get up without meaning to and walk over to it. The stitching is tiny and even. The hem is perfect. There's a little bias ruffle at the shoulders that would sit right where a strap would, and I touch the fabric and it's soft, some kind of cotton lawn, cool under my fingers.

"Julian."

"Yeah."

"Why is it facing your front door?"

He's quiet for a second. Then he laughs, short, like it got knocked out of him. "I don't know. Habit. I see it every time I come home. It's dumb."

"It's not dumb." I turn around. He's still at the table, glasses on, needle in hand, and he looks almost embarrassed, this big guy in a work shirt with grease on one knuckle, guarding a flowered sundress. "Nobody's ever made me anything. Let alone a whole dress."

"Well." He shrugs and goes back to the sleeve. "Blouse will be done in twenty minutes. It's a clean tear, you're lucky. Silk forgives you if you catch it in time."

I stay at the mannequin a minute longer. The dress is a size that would fit me. I notice that and then I file it away, because that's a thought for another day, probably, or maybe tonight, maybe in twenty minutes when he hands me back my blouse and asks if I want another beer.

"So," I say, sitting back down. "Grandmother in Mobile. Tell me about her."

He lights up. Not all over his face, but enough. Enough that I notice, and enough that I want to keep it going.

"Sharp woman," he says. "Smoked menthols, swore like a dockworker, made the prettiest hem you ever saw."

"See, that's a person I want to hear about."

He starts talking. And I realize I'm smiling at a man in a kitchen, at six-thirty on a Thursday, in my torn blouse and my work slacks, and nobody is looking at a uniform at all.

* * *

He finishes the blouse at seven. Holds it up to the light. The tear is gone. Not gone-gone, you can find the seam if you know where to look, but it's a neat little row of stitches the size of pinpricks and I almost want to cry about a blouse, which is stupid, but there it is.

"Perfect," I say.

"Grandmother would've redone it. She'd say my tension was off in two places." He hands it to me. "Don't catch it on a cart again."

"No promises. Carts are faster than me."

I put it on right there in his kitchen, over my bra, because it's my blouse and he's seen worse, I assume, working ramp side. It hangs right again. The silk falls the way it's supposed to fall. I do a little turn and he laughs into his beer.

"There it is," he says. "Worth it."

I'm about to head for the door when he says my name, and something in how he says it makes me stop with my hand on the knob.

"Can I ask you something weird?"

"Those are usually the best ones."

"The dress. The one on the form." He sets his beer down. "You asked why it's facing the door. I gave you a bad answer."

"Okay."

"It's facing the door because I imagine somebody coming through it." He rubs his thumb along the table edge, not looking at me. "That's the honest answer. Some days it's nobody in particular. Some days I just like knowing there's a dress waiting."

I don't say anything. My heart is doing something I