“Yes, ma’am,” he said, withdrawing.
Over the decades, his mother’s British accent had morphed into something James had taken to calling pure affectation. Like Julia Child, she had a grandness about her that made the accent seem simply aristocratic. As in, This is just the way we speak, darling.
“I researched the specials,” he said. “I’m told the frittata is divine.”
“Ooh good,” she said. There was nothing she loved more than a good meal. I’m a sensualist, she told people, which was something that sounded sexy and fun when she was twenty-five, but now—at seventy—just sounded wrong.
“Did you hear about the red heifer?” she asked after they ordered. He had a brief, panicked flash that somehow she had seen the article, but then he remembered that she watched CNN twenty-four hours a day. They must have done a story.
“I saw it,” he told her, “and I’m excited to hear your thoughts, but let’s talk about something else first.”
This seemed to placate her, which told him that she hadn’t connected to the story completely yet, the way a plug connects to a socket, drawing power.
“I’ve taken up the harmonica,” he said. “Trying to get in touch with my musical roots. Although I’m not sure roots is the right—”
She handed her empty glass to the waiter, who arrived with another just in time.
“Your stepfather played the harmonica,” she told him.
“Which one?”
She either didn’t hear his quip or ignored it.
“He was very musical. Maybe you got it from him.”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
“Well,” she said, and sipped her drink. “I always thought it was a little silly.”
“The harmonica?”
“No. Music. And God knows I had my share of musicians. I mean, the things I did to Mick Jagger would make a hooker blush.”
“Mother,” he said, looking around, but they were far enough from the other diners that no heads had turned.
“Oh please. Don’t be such a prude.”
“Well, I like it. The harmonica.”
He took it out of his jacket pocket, showed it to her.
“It’s portable, right? So I can take it anywhere. Sometimes I play quietly in the cockpit with the autopilot on.”
“Is that safe?”
“Of course it’s safe. Why wouldn’t it be—”
“All I know is I can’t keep my phone on for takeoff and landing.”
“That’s—they changed that. And also, are you suggesting the sound waves from the harmonica could impact the guidance system, or—”
“Well, now—that’s your area—technical understanding—I’m just calling it like I see it.”
He nodded. In three hours he was scheduled to take an OSPRY to Teterboro and pick up a new crew. Then a short jaunt to Martha’s Vineyard and back. He’d gotten a room reserved at the Soho House downtown, with a one-night layover, then tomorrow he flew to Taiwan.
His mother finished her second drink—they pour them so small, dear—and ordered a third. James noticed a red string on her right wrist—so she’s back on Kabbalah. He didn’t need to check his watch to know that it had only been fifteen minutes since she arrived.
When he told people he’d grown up in a doomsday cult he was only partially kidding. They were there—he and Darla—for five years, from ’70 to ’75, there being a six-acre compound in Northern California. The cult being The Restoration of God’s Commandments (later shortened to simply The Restoration), run by the right reverend Jay L. Baker. Jay L. used to say that he was the baker and they were his bread. God, of course, was the baker who’d made them all.
Jay L. was convinced the world would end on August 9, 1974. He had had a vision on a river rafting trip—family pets floating up to heaven. When he came home, he consulted the scriptures—the Old Testament, the Book of Revelation, the Gnostic Gospels. He became convinced there was a code in the Bible, a hidden message. And the more he dug, the more notes he took in the margins of religious texts, the more he banged out sums on his old desktop calculator, the more convinced he became that it was a date. The date.