Mason buckled his seatbelt and pulled his headphones on. Then off again. Then on again.
“Do you think Dad knows?” he whispered.
“No chance.”
“Can I tell the flight attendant?”
“No.”
“What if I tell just one person?”
“Mason.”
He grinned and pretended to zip his lips. Then he pretended to lock them and throw away the key.
A few minutes later, the flight attendant pulled the cabin door shut.
Then the speakers crackled.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is your first officer, Tyler Hollis, up here in the flight deck.”
Mason’s whole face lit up like Christmas morning.
He grabbed my hand and squeezed it.
“That’s him,” he whispered. “That’s my dad.”
I pulled out my phone and started recording Mason’s face. I wanted Tyler to see it later. I wanted him to see what it looked like when his son heard his voice on an airplane for the very first time.
“We’ve got about an hour and fifty minutes of flying time to Chicago this evening,” Tyler said. “Weather’s looking pretty good. Little bumpy over Kentucky, but nothing to write home about. And if you look out the right side of the aircraft about forty minutes in, you’ll see Louisville. Or you won’t. Depends how good your eyes are.”
A few passengers chuckled.
It was one of his corny jokes. He made it on every flight. Mason knew it by heart.
Mason was beaming so hard I thought his face would crack.
Then Tyler stopped talking.
The speaker stayed on. I could hear a faint hum. A click.
A few seconds passed.
Then his voice came back.
“Actually, folks. Before we push back, I need to say something a little different today.”
I lowered my phone slightly.
His voice had changed.
He didn’t sound scared. He didn’t sound nervous.
He just sounded serious. More serious than I’d heard him in a long time.
That’s when he said it.
Before we take off, I’d like to do something I’ve never done on a flight before. There’s a very special person on this airplane tonight. Someone who means absolutely everything to me.
And then he said her name.
“Her name is Vanessa,” Tyler said over the speakers.
My fingers went ice cold around my phone.
“And for the past two years, she’s been the person who made every single hard day worth getting through.”
Vanessa.
I knew that name.
Vanessa Cole. A flight attendant. She used to fly with Tyler’s crew out of Charlotte. Tall. Blond. Gorgeous. The kind of woman who laughs at everything you say and touches your arm when she talks to you.
I’d met her twice. Once at the airline’s Christmas party at the Westin. Once at a crew barbecue in somebody’s backyard in Huntersville.
She left the airline about a year ago. Tyler told me she quit to take care of her sick mother in Raleigh.
“Do you two still talk?” I’d asked him at the time.
“Not really,” he’d said. “Barely. Why?”
I’d let it go.
Apparently, Tyler had been lying.
“There were times in my life when I thought I had everything figured out,” Tyler said. “Good career. Nice house. A family.”
His voice softened.
“But sometimes life brings somebody into your world who changes everything.”
Mason squeezed my hand.
“Mom,” he whispered. “Who’s Vanessa?”
I swallowed.
“I’m not sure, sweetheart.”
It was the first lie I’d ever told my son that I desperately wished was true.
Up near the front of the plane, a few passengers started clapping. Somebody in first class let out an excited little whoop. A woman across the aisle from us put her hand over her heart and said, “Oh, how romantic.”
They thought it was a proposal.
Then Tyler said the words that made my stomach turn over.
“Vanessa. If you’re listening, and I know you are, I want you to know I’m done hiding how I feel about you. When we land in Chicago tonight, I want to start the rest of my life with you.”
The clapping got louder. Somebody whistled.
Next to me, Mason stopped smiling.
He looked at me. Then he looked down at the drawing in his lap. At the three stick figures under the blue airplane.
“But Dad already has a family,” he whispered.
I couldn’t answer him.
My husband was sitting in the cockpit of an Airbus A320, making a public declaration of love to another woman, over the PA system, while his seven-year-old son sat in the last row of his airplane holding a crayon drawing he’d made just for him.
The plane started pushing back from the gate.
