Read Online First Class Killing by Lynne Heitman - Free Book Online Page B

Jamie would think I had lost my mind if I told him the real choice I had made. It might be hard to convince him otherwise, since I spent the first five minutes of every day trying to convince myself that I hadn’t.
    “I don’t know if Jamie would accept my choice.”
    “Does it matter?”
    “What?”
    “He’s your brother, not your husband. It would be a shame if he didn’t support you, but he’s got his life, and you’ve got yours, right? At some point, even families end up going their separate ways.”
    “I guess so.” We were in a lineup on the taxiway, so every once in a while, we would inch forward and stop. Mostly we were idling in one spot. “It’s just…he’s my only real family now.”
    “Yet you’re not speaking. Isn’t that interesting? What’s it about, anyway?”
    There was no point in trying to resist him. He would be relentless until he pried it out of me. “Jamie and his wife invited me to come down for Christmas dinner last year, and I didn’t make it, and he got angry, and I got angry, and we never really made up.”
    “That’s it?”
    “It seemed big at the time.” I stared down at the worn rubber floor covering, where a thousand flight attendants before me had rested their feet. “It has to do with my father.”
    “Doesn’t it always? Go on.”
    “We hadn’t had anything close to a family holiday gathering in ages. I’ve worked in airports forever. You know what that’s like. Christmas at the airport.”
    “Or at thirty-five thousand feet.”
    “Right. But I didn’t have a job last year, so I was excited. I bought gifts for the kids and for Jamie and Gina. I got them this really neat…anyway, I ended up sending the gifts.”
    “Why didn’t you go? This doesn’t sound like you at all.”
    “Because after I accepted their invitation, he invited my father.”
    “You said it was a family dinner. What am I missing?”
    “I can’t stand my father.” The sharp pain in my heart was now a stabbing pain in my gut. “I can’t remember the last time I was in the same room with him.”
    “My goodness, you have a lot of estrangement in your life. Are you sure you’re not gay? Who in your family are you speaking with? Your mother?”
    “My mother is dead.”
    “She is? Oh, dear. I’m sorry.” He reached for my hand in my lap, gave it a quick squeeze, and let go. He always seemed to know just the right grace note to hit.
    “It was a long time ago.”
    “How old were you?”
    “Fourteen.”
    “And that made Jamie how old?”
    I always had to think about it. For some reason, instead of just subtracting five from my own age, I always did it by taking the year she died and subtracting the year he was born. “Nine. He was nine.”
    “So you’re his mom-sister. Complicated. Did he beat you?”
    “Jamie?”
    “Your father, ninny. Is that why you hate him? Or maybe he molested you.”
    “No. Nothing like that. My dad’s a bully. He’s intellectually abusive. He loves to club you in the head with his massive intellect. He convinced Jamie he was stupid.”
    “How stupid can he be if he’s a big cheese in a Wall Street firm?”
    “He’s not at all stupid. He has a learning disability, and before it was diagnosed, he had a hard time in school. Really hard. My father used to make fun of him, of how hard he tried. Called him lazy, stuff like that.”
    “Sounds as if Daddy is the one who was fucked up.”
    “Once Jamie was diagnosed, he learned how to compensate. He might even overcompensate.”
    “Thus the whiz kid stuff.”
    “Yeah. But back then, he was just this little kid with no friends and no mother and a miserable, self-loathing prick for a father who got his kicks by picking on him. My stomach is seething right now just talking about it.” Which was exactly why I hated rehashing the stuff.
    “Why would Jamie invite his prick of a father over for Christmas?”
    “I have no idea. Honestly, I don’t know why he invited him.”
    “You didn’t