Mike didn’t have a chance to admit that yes, he might have his head up his ass, because the man had already walked away. It didn’t bother Mike, however. He was preoccupied with the weirdness of the terminal. He hadn’t been traveling back in 2001, the last time flights were grounded, but he bet it had been like this. On 9/11, people would have been crowded around airport televisions watching the endless loop of the towers coming down. Now, Mike wasn’t exactly sure what they were looking at; the screens were captioned with Delhi, India, and what he saw didn’t make a ton of sense. And yet it did. The families and business travelers stranded in the Minneapolis airport might not understand what was happening, what to make of the brief snippet from India, but it took only a few seconds from Mike’s hearing that flights were grounded to his putting the dots together. Spiders. It had to be. Nothing else really made any sense. Not that spiders made sense. But with what had happened to Henderson, with his trip to DC, meeting the president, that’s what it had to be. And that meant that the president, the good-looking scientist, the people who got paid to tell agents like him what to do, were freaking out. Grounding the entire country? That was some serious shit.
He passed a magazine shop that was shutting down. Middle of the day, and the woman running it was dragging the metal gate across the entrance. Just past that, a waiting area was quickly emptying out. Annoyed men in suits packing up laptops, families with crying children loading up strollers. As Mike came to the signs telling him that once he exited he could not reenter, he pulled out his phone and gave it a click with his thumb, forgetting it was dead. It didn’t matter: there they were, waiting for him. Annie was working on some sort of smoothie, and Fanny was typing something into her phone. They weren’t looking up, and that gave Mike a chance to watch them as he walked up. Fanny looked good. She always looked good. She’d never been the fancy type, but she ran and had a nice eye for clothing. Even when she and Mike were together, before she remarried and suddenly had access to a whole different kind of shopping, she’d been good about picking outfits that worked to her advantage. And she’d done something different with her hair, something that gave a little more emphasis to her face. But even though he recognized that she was still beautiful, most men would have said sexy even, Mike realized that for the first time since he’d met her, he wasn’t attracted to her anymore. Whatever it was—that spark, that little jolt he felt when he kissed her—was gone. Even more interesting, the disappearance didn’t bother him. It was a relief, really. He didn’t know if it was because he was sure she was pregnant and that meant she was finally, irretrievably gone, or that enough time had finally passed, or meeting that scientist, Melanie, had reminded him there were other women he might be interested in, but he didn’t care. What it meant was that he could look at Fanny as somebody with whom he shared his daughter instead of somebody he was trying to win back.
As for Annie, it had only been, what, two, three days? Could she really look older to him? Older and younger at the same time. She had on a yellow sweatshirt with the hood up, her hair partly pulled from her ponytail, and from her profile, Mike could see what she was going to look like in a couple of years. And then she straightened up, pulled the straw out of her cup, and dribbled the smoothie into her mouth, looking very much like the kid she was.
“Hey, beautiful,” he said, leaning over and hugging Annie.
“Daddy!” She wrapped her arms around his neck and squeezed as hard as she could. He kept wanting to tell her she had to take it a little easier, that she was getting big enough to hurt him when she hugged him that hard, but he didn’t have the heart to do it. It was as if she thought squeezing him harder meant she loved him more. “Whoops,” she said. “Sorry. I got smoothie on your suit.”
“No worries, sweetie,” he said, grateful she hadn’t said anything about his slipping and calling her “beautiful” again. He straightened up and gave Fanny a loose, one-armed hug. That seemed best. There was a lot of history, and with his sudden realization that he was no longer interested in trying to win her back, he wasn’t sure what else they had. More than just a mutual interest in Annie? Maybe a friendship? Could it be that simple? A friendship? “Thanks for picking me up,” he said. “I could have taken a cab, but this is nice.”
Fanny did that thing that wasn’t exactly a smile, and Mike understood why she’d offered to pick him up. She wanted to talk. And sure enough: “I wanted to talk anyway,” she said.
Annie jumped up and held on to Mike’s hand. “Mom’s having a baby.”
Mike actually laughed. Maybe because he was expecting it, and maybe because he realized he could just be happy for Fanny, happy that she’d figured out how to move past their marriage and try again, happy that Annie had gotten the bad first deal of divorced parents and somehow still ended up hitting twenty-one. For a minute, it was enough to make him forget about the buzz of people heading out of the terminal. The weird sense that the entire airport was shutting down in the middle of the day.
“Congratulations, Fanny,” he said. He hugged her, this time for real, with both arms, pulling her tight and holding on for an extra second. “I’m really happy for you. For you and Rich,” he said, and he understood that he really meant it.
Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton,
San Diego, California