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Free preview · read by Jessica

My thumb was going down a column of fuel figures on a clipboard just before four in the morning, and the sixth one in a row was a number that had no business being there.

Six freighters. Six uplifts. Not one of them needed the fuel.

Which sounds like nothing, and it is not nothing, and the difference is the whole trade. A freighter that stops here stops for gas. That is the entire reason this field exists in January. The wind comes across the Pacific in the winter the way it does, a westbound bird out of Chicago cannot carry both the freight and the fuel, so it carries the freight and it comes down here for the fuel, and my people meet it in the dark and turn it around in ninety minutes and send it on. That is the business. It has been the business since before I was born. We are a gas station with a snowplow and a very expensive insurance policy.

So six aircraft taking fuel at this field at four in the morning is not a story. Six aircraft taking a top-up of four thousand kilos each, when every one of them landed with the legs to go on to Incheon without me, is a story. Four thousand kilos is nothing. Four thousand kilos is a rounding error with a receipt stapled to it. You do not divert a seven-four across two hours of weather to take on a rounding error.

Unless what you came down here for was the receipt.

I had been doing this arithmetic in my head since the second bird and I was doing it standing at the ops window in a satin slip and a pair of my father’s wool socks, which is not a thing I am going to defend.

My name is on this company. I live in four rooms over the hangar office because I sold the house in 2019 and never got around to buying another one, and the ops window is forty feet from my bed, and when I cannot sleep I come down here and stand in the dark and watch my own field work. That is not dedication. It is a habit I have had for eight years and June has stopped commenting on it.

Although she had not stopped that night.

“Boss.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“You’re saying it with your face.”

June Tallmadge was twenty-nine years old and five months pregnant and she sat the dispatch desk with her boots up on an open drawer because she said it was the only way her back would let her live. She had a headset on one ear and a bag of those dried mangoes she ate by the pound.

“All I was going to say,” she said, “is that there’s a man asleep in your conference room.”

“There is.”

“In a suit.”

“He’s in a shirt. The suit is on the back of a chair.”

“Sigrid.” She pulled the mango bag down off her chest and looked at me over it. “That is worse.”

I let her have it. There was nothing to say that would not have been a lie, and I have a rule about that, and the rule has cost me more than it has ever saved me. I read every line of everything anybody hands me and then I say out loud in the room what it says. Twenty-five years of that. What it cost me was most of the men in this town and a reputation for being hard, and standing there in the dark I was doing the arithmetic on it the way I do arithmetic on everything, and the arithmetic came out the same as it always does. All that reading has never once kept a bad thing off this field.

“Who’s on the pad?” I said.

“Oz. Theo’s running the bucket on three.”

“Who’s on the sixth bird?”

“Seven-four-seven, Harbour Line consol, in from Narita, out to Memphis.” She scrolled. “Blocked in at eleven after three. Fuel on, ninety minutes, gone by five.”

“Who ordered the fuel?”

“The operator.”

“Which one is the operator?”

June looked up. “You want me to find out who the operator actually is, or you want me to read you what’s in the box?”

“Read me what’s in the box.”

She read me what was in the box. It said Gateway Air Logistics, which is an aircraft on a lease, which is a line in a database, which is a company I could have told you the name of in my sleep and could not have told you one human being who worked for.

“Okay,” I said.

“That’s your okay that isn’t an okay.”

“Print me the uplift tickets. All six. Tonight’s.”

“Right now?”

“Right now, and leave them on my desk face down so nobody reads them going past.”

She did not ask me why. That is why she gets paid what she gets paid.

I went down the back stairs to get the tickets myself, because I do not sleep and because walking a hundred yards in the cold at four in the morning is the only thing on this earth that shuts my head up. I got as far as the bottom step and the fire door, and the fire door was propped, and a man was standing in it with my parka over his arm.

“It’s eleven below out there,” Reeve Calloway said.

“It’s nine below.”

“It’s eleven below with the wind and you’re in a nightgown.”

“It’s a slip.”

“I know what it is.” He held the parka open. “I’ve been looking at it for an hour and a half through a conference room window.”

There was no decision in it anywhere. I put my arms back into that parka the way a woman does when she has already decided about a man and is waiting to find out when, and he settled it on my shoulders and he did not take his hands off them, and the two of us stood in a fire door at the bottom of my own stairwell, and out past him the snow was coming across the apron sideways in the sodium light like something being poured out of a truck.

“You’re the lawyer for the people buying my company,” I said.

“I am.”

“Say it out loud, the whole thing, so neither one of us gets to be confused later.”

“I’m Kestrel’s outside counsel,” he said. “I’ve been in your file room for eleven days. I’m forty-seven years old, I’ve been divorced since 2021, and if you tell me to go back upstairs I’ll go back upstairs and we’ll sign on the fourteenth like nothing happened.”

“And if I don’t tell you that?”

“Then I’d like to know where you’re going at four in the morning, and I’d like to come.”

That is the thing about that man and it was the thing about him from the first week. He says the sentence that is bad for him first. He gets it out on the table before anybody can find it, and then he stands there with his hands open while you look at it. Every other man who has come up that stairwell in nine years came up with something on him that I had to find.

I have read men for twenty-five years the way I read a load sheet. Line by line, and I am always right, and by the time I am finished I do not want them any more. That is not coldness. People in this town think it is coldness. It is a woman who was never once allowed to stop reading.

“Pad three,” I said. “Walk fast, you’ll freeze.”

DE-ICING 3 is a Global unit with a six-hundred-gallon Type I tank and a boom with a basket on the end of it, and when she is working she sounds like a diesel bus having an argument with a pressure washer. She was working. Oz Branch had the second truck nose to nose with a Gateway seven-four-seven, polar bear on the tail, and the orange fluid was coming off the top of that wing in a sheet and running down the snow in steam.

“Hold two,” Oz said on the ground freq, and then, “Is that the boss on my pad in a parka and no pants.”

“Boots,” I said into the handset. “I have boots.”

“She has boots,” Oz said to somebody. “Everybody stand down.”

“Oz.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“After that bird, how many more tonight?”

“That’s the last of the bank. Theo’s got the hoses and I’m going home to a house I have told you about.”

“The second cabin.”

“The second cabin, which I will be closing on in March, and which has a view that I have described to you and which you have never once looked at the pictures of.”

“I looked at the pictures.”

“You looked at one picture, Sigrid.”

The bird spooled and started to move and we stood back behind the painted line with the snow going past us sideways, and Reeve Calloway stood close enough that the arm of his coat was against mine, and the two of us watched a hundred and some tons of other people’s freight roll off my pad in the dark.

“Why are you really out here,” he said.

“Because six airplanes took fuel they didn’t need.”

“Is that a lot of money?”

“No. That’s the problem. If it was a lot of money I’d know what it was.”

He thought about that. He did not say any of the four things a man usually says there, which are that I was tired, that it was probably nothing, that his client would look into it, or that I should let him look into it.

“Show me tomorrow,” he said.

“You work for the buyer.”

“Show me tomorrow anyway.”

The cab of DE-ICING 3 is up a four-rung ladder and it is warm in there because the engine runs the whole shift, and it smells like glycol and old coffee and the hand cleaner we buy by the drum. I went up that ladder to put the handset back in the dash cradle. That is actually why I went up it. He came up behind me and pulled the door shut, and the noise of the field went away like somebody had put a lid on it, and there was just the diesel idling under the floor.

He turned me around by the shoulders.

“Say it,” I said.

“Say what.”

“Whatever it is. You say it first, it’s your whole thing. Say it.”

“I’m going to take this coat off you,” Reeve said, “and I’m not going to be careful about it.”

“Good. I don’t want you careful. Everybody out here is careful with me.” I got my hand in his collar. “And don’t ask me anything. Not one question. You ask me a question and I have to answer it, and then I’m running this too, and I run everything from the first bird to the last one and I would like one hour where nothing is my decision.”

“Nothing is your decision.”

“And don’t you dare be sweet.”

“Sigrid.”

“What.”

“Your badge.”

He reached up and lifted the lanyard over my head, careful of my hair, and he hung my airport operations badge on the fire extinguisher bracket behind the seat, where it swung and turned and swung back. I watched him do it. It is the first thing a man has taken off me in nine years and he took the one thing on my body that has my name and my face and my access on it, and he hung it up where I could see it, and then he put both hands on the parka and opened it.

That is when the ferry pilot took the airplane.

That is what I call it. An empty airplane going somewhere for no reason but to be there. No cargo. No manifest. Nothing in the back that can shift and nobody on board I have to answer to. It is the only version of me that does not read anything, and she does not come out often, and when she comes out she comes out all the way.

“Forty-four,” I said against his mouth. “In case you need it in writing.”

“I don’t need it in writing.”

“Everything needs to be in writing.”

He got the slip up over my hips with one hand and had the other one in my hair at the back, closed, not gentle, and he turned my face up with it and held it there. “Not this,” he said.

The satin went up and the cold of the window glass went across the back of my thighs and I made a sound I have not made in this century. He put his mouth on my throat and then lower, and his beard went across the top of my tits and it was like being dragged over gravel in the best way, and I had both hands flat on the headliner of a de-icing truck I have signed the maintenance release for nine hundred times.

“Say what you want,” he said into me.

“I thought you weren’t asking me questions.”

“That’s not a question.”

“Your mouth,” I said. “Down. Now.”

He went down on the bench seat in front of me like a man getting into a wheel well, knees on vinyl, shoulders in under my knee, and he put my leg up over him and he ate my pussy with his hands under me holding me up off the seat, and he did it slow, and he did not stop when I told him to go faster and he did not stop when I told him anything. His beard was wet. The whole cab smelled like glycol and like my pussy. I had one hand in his hair and one hand braced on the cold window and my own badge was turning on its lanyard eight inches from my face with my name on it, SIGRID NYQUIST, and I came looking straight at it with my mouth open and no sound coming out at all.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Up. Get up here.”

“I’m not done.”

“Get up here or I’ll fire you.”

“I don’t work for you.”

“Everybody works for me.”

He laughed into my thigh, which I felt in my teeth, and then he came up and got his belt off and put me down on that bench seat on my back with my boots still on and my hair in the glycol spill, and he put his cock in me with one hand spread across my sternum holding me flat.

I found something out about myself right there with my shoulders against a cold door panel. He was heavy on my chest. He put weight on me, enough that my breath came short and I had to work for it, and I liked it. I liked it so much I heard the noise I made and did not recognize it as mine. I have spent twenty-five years making sure nothing on this field ever gets to press down on me, and a man put a hand in the middle of me and leaned, and the ferry pilot said yes before I had a vote.

“More,” I said.

“More what.”

“Lean on me. Harder. Don’t be nice to me, I will know.”

He leaned on me and he fucked me with the diesel shaking the floor under us and the snow going past the glass sideways, and the two of us talked the whole way through it the way you do when you are strangers and you are not going to be. He said my name the way nobody at that airport says it, with the g soft, the way my mother said it. I told him he was going to leave a mark on my chest and he said good, and I told him I had a conference table full of his client’s people at ten o’clock, and he said then they’ll see it, and I said that was the worst thing anybody had ever said to me and I meant it as a compliment and he knew it.

And I was thinking about other men the whole time, which is an ugly thing to admit and it did not slow me down one bit. The last man who was ever on top of me was a man who ran a line haul out of Fairbanks and he spent nine months being careful with me, and I knew the whole time that what he actually wanted was a fuel account. There is also a man on this field I have wanted for eleven years who is married and will stay married and we have never said one word about it, and I was thinking about him too, in that cab, which is a true thing about me that I would not say out loud to anybody.

When it finished I had my teeth in the shoulder of his shirt and both arms around his back and I held on about four seconds longer than I meant to.

Then I let go. I put my hand flat on his chest and pushed him off me and sat up and pulled the slip down, and the clock on the dash of DE-ICING 3 said what it said.

“I have the tickets to pull,” I said.

“Sigrid.”

“Hand me my badge.”

He took it off the bracket and put the lanyard over my head and straightened it, and his hands stayed on it a second.

“My hair’s in glycol,” I said. “That stuff takes two washes.”

Then I went down the ladder.

· · ·

The tickets were on my desk face down the way I asked. Six of them, and I read all six standing up with my coat still on and melting on the carpet, and all six of them were correct. Fuel loaded, fuel ticketed, meter numbers, signature of the uplift tech, time of day. There was nothing wrong with a single line on a single one of them and I read them twice.

What was on the desk under them is what I actually stopped at.

The front desk mail tray. It is a wire tray on the corner of my desk and Patty fills it at four in the afternoon and I empty it whenever I empty it, and that night it had a utility bill, a seed catalogue that has been coming to my mother since 2008, and a nine by twelve envelope, buff colored, with a courier label on it and my name typed on the front.

Sigrid Nyquist. Front desk.

And in the signature box, in pen, somebody from this company had signed for it and dated it. The handwriting was small and square and leaned left.

I stood there with my coat dripping and I did not open it, because I had six uplift tickets in my hand and a man upstairs in my conference room with my mark on him, and because at a quarter past five in the morning there was not one thing in my body that wanted to read anything.

So I put it in the drawer.