Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1)

by Noel J. Hadley

  I stumbled back into my seat, only it wasn’t my seat. I was between Joe and Natalia now. They huddled close, and Natalia threw an arm around my neck. They understood how desperate I was not to be seen by her. Not like this. Leah had ripped my heart from my chest, but unlike her show stopping performance, this time she stomped on it.

  In one week’s time I’d watched both loves of my young adult life surrender to the passionate embrace of someone other than me. That was how I spent my last night in New York City. I sat in a subway and watched Leah Bishop kissing another man.

  .

  PART 4

  The Problem with Sitcoms

  SAN FRANCISCO, DAY ONE: THE PAINTED LADY

  1

  Alex and I had very little to say to each other on the flight home from New York. I was petrified of running into Delilah. Lucky for me, she wasn’t on our plane. Of course I had very little to say to my estranged wife too. Ellie and her boyfriend were also on that list. I hoped I wouldn’t run across the Lost Boys, or any Volkswagen Buses for that matter. And then take into account Leah, the Boston Bridesmaid, who promised to call but never did. I guess I wasn’t on speaking terms with many people. Maybe I was an arsonist in another life. I went around burning bridges. God knows I was good at it. Thank the maker I had Michael and Susan to accompany me…. and Aristotle.

  But it was Charlie and Josephine’s big weekend. They were getting married at her childhood home in San Francisco. I had to face the facts. This was Elise’s family, whither I liked it or not, and no matter what anybody said, blood truly was thicker than wine. Being Josephine’s twin sister meant she was also pulling rank as the matron of honor. I somehow managed to end up as the best man. Not only would we be sharing speeches and hosting duties, Elise and I would be escorting each other down the aisle. I wondered how that was going to work out, if Tom would be in attendance, and if Alex, who was scheduled weeks earlier to help photograph the wedding (Charlie and Josephine had already hired another photographer, but they weren’t about to turn something down for free), would even show based on our current standing. I never picked up the phone to call or find out.

  I picked Michael and Susan up at their house, just down the street and around the corner from my own apartment, at 3:40 in the morning. Aristotle rode shotgun. Susan appeared on the front porch with a yawn painted onto her face and stretches tattooed across her arms yet entirely immaculate in her attire. Dressed in a one-piece turquoise blouse and white mini-skirt with thin parallel stripes of black and zip-up leather shoes, Susan never could let her guard down as an ambassador of the fashion community. Michael was wearing a plaid shirt, jeans and flip-flops as usual. He’d let his guard down years ago and apparently never bent over to retrieve it. Susan shivered from the cold while Michael attempted NASCAR times piling their luggage into the trunk of my Ford Country Squire. And then we were off.

  We jumped on the 405 Freeway northbound, exited on Atlantic Avenue, and met Charlie and Josephine at their house in Bixby Knolls five minutes after four. Josephine wore tight white shorts, a loose fitting pink blouse, and those fuzzy Eskimo boots that proved to be the talk of the town that year. Charlie had on jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt. I guess women were dressing fashionably cute and guys were going casual this weekend. I wonder who didn’t get whose memo. Michael arranged their bags in the trunk at record-breaking speeds and I led a spirited toast of coffee to Charlie and Josephine’s weekend. Josephine made special mention of her twin sister, who was noticeably absent from our group. We tapped thermoses. I had this terrible feeling that an emotional volcano was bulging at its seams. I thought about bringing it up in my coffee and thermos talk, but then I decided to leave the finest material for my best man’s speech. Then again, it was probably best not bring up that feeling all together.

  2

  “Well, this is it.” I patted Charlie’s back. We’d ordered five extra value meals between us three guys at the McDonalds in the Tejon Ranch turnout, just after the Grape Vine’s epic four thousand foot descent into the San Joaquin Valley, and the sun had barely risen over the Sierra Nevada Mountains. “I’m handing you off to marry my wife’s twin sister. Any last words?”

  “Excited.” He blushed rather boyishly, returning an overstuffed leather wallet into his back pocket.

  “Yeah, welcome to the club, buddy,” Michael said.

  He was wearing a pair of sunglasses despite the fact that it was still six in the morning. A female worker with ample hips and a full head of pimples slid a paper bag on the counter and called the number 63 to our attention. Michael held up his receipt, immediately dug through the bag to retrieve a hash brown, and shoveled a healthy portion of it into his mouth.

  “I can’t wait to be in it.”

  “If joining the club means a little alone time with the misses, you know, conjugation, then I don’t blame you.” Michael grinned his pearly whites and slurped a large coffee. “I guess I’d choose excited as my word, too.”

  Charlie blushed. “I never thought this day would come. I’m just glad you could be here to share it with me as my best man.”

  “Aw, shucks.” I lowered my head and twirled my toe rather playfully on the ground. “I kind of like eating at McDonalds and pumping gas with you too, big fella.”

  The same female worker with ample hips and a full head of pimples rehearsed the number 65. I raised my hand and gladly accepted the large coffee and white paper bag with a big golden M printed on the side of it.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Michael said. “Because we’ve both been through this before. It’s a big commitment and we know all about those last minute wedding day jitters. And she’s a criminal attorney, so…”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be, skipper.” Charlie smiled, giving Michael some sort of goofy salute.

  “Eye-eye, little buddy,” Michael said.

  Several customers stopped to stare at Susan and Josephine as they returned from the bathroom. Those same people disgustedly sized up their husbands. It was the usual spiel, especially when I was with Elise. Another McDonald’s worker, a baby-faced boy with a comparable display of pimples and whiskers for a mustache, called the number 68 to our attention. Charlie eagerly volunteered his hand and cradled the bag in his arms.

  “Wait, what’s this?” Josephine tightened her lips.

  “An egg McMuffin and hash brown, love,” Charlie said with a full degree of innocence.

  “Yes, I can see that.” His fiancé dug through the bag. “But why are there two of them? I can’t eat all of that.”

  “It’s one for you and one for me, love.”

  “Um no, I don’t think so.” She pulled an Egg McMuffin and hash brown from the bag and returned them henceforth on the counter. “I’m sorry, but I think my future husband got half of the order wrong. I wanted an Egg McMuffin, but he’s having the parfait.”

  The pimple-faced boy gazed dumbfounded at her, looked to the food, gulped, opened and closed his mouth, and then followed her orders to the letter.

  “But love, I wanted an Egg McMuffin,” Charlie said with another full degree of innocence.

  “Sometimes the honeymoon is over before it can begin,” Michael whispered into my ear.

  Josephine picked up the bag and gave his flat belly a tap of her fingers. “I need you looking good for our honeymoon, baby.” She kissed him. She walked back towards the car with a hash brown in her mouth. Susan followed after.

  I patted Charlie on the back. “Let’s get you to San Francisco.”

  “Welcome to marriage.” Michael grinned.

  3

  “So let me get this straight,” Susan said from the back seat of my Ford Country Squire, “your two aunts….”

  “The Sisters.” Josephine kindly corrected her.

  Charlie took up the remaining portside window seat, hardly amused by his current eating arrangements, with Josephine in the middle, and Aristotle was comfortably wedged upfront between Michael and I. I patted him on the head, rubbed his leathery ears, and studied
the three-backseat passengers through my rearview mirror.

  “Yes, the Sisters. They actually live in the same row of houses as Danny, Uncle Jesse, Joey, and DJ Tanner?”

  Michael crinkled a sausage, egg and cheese McGriddle from its wrapper, clamped down, tore at it and chewed. Susan bit into an Egg McMuffin. Then I bit into an Egg McMuffin. Josephine did too. Even Aristotle had his own Egg McMuffin. I fed it to him in scraps. Everyone had some sort of McDonalds McMuffin or McGriddle paired with hash browns except for Charlie, who was thoroughly unamused with it all.

  “Mm-hmm. That’s where Elise and I grew up as children. Except Full House is only television…. and fiction.”

  “What did I tell you?” Michael excitedly grinned at his wife. “All these years and you never believed me.”

  “I didn’t know Full House was a real place.”

  Michael frowned at her.

  “Joshua, do you realize you married an Olsen twin?” Susan said.

  “Funny, I never thought of it quite like that.”

  “Our parents lived there with the Sisters, Patty and Nancy (they’re both my father’s siblings), until the 89 Earthquake killed our dad while he was driving on the Embarcadero Freeway. Andrea quickly remarried. Elise and I think she’d already been seeing him. Those were very dark days. But the Sisters were both equally mothers to us, more than Andrea ever cared to be.”

  Charlie gazed out the window at the rolling hills running northbound alongside the I-5, unimpressed with where our conversation was going. Shell and Chevron gas stations boosted logos into the purple morning dawn simply to taunt him.

  “Sure, gas will get you wherever you need to go.” He jumped into our conversation. “But so will cinnamon rolls, pastries, and Krispe Kreme donuts.”

  “I don’t believe in diets.” Josephine effortlessly slid a hash brown through two bars of teeth while unscrambling paper from her Egg McMuffin. “It’s a lifestyle thing. But in your case….”

  “I can’t believe you wouldn’t let me have an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, love. Or a hash brown.” He slurped on his parfait, wrinkling the corners of his mouth. “I would have even settled for a Rock Star or a Red Bull at the gas station simply to keep awake.”

  “Yes dear.” Josephine patted his flat belly. “You know Red Bull gives you more than wings. If I let you have an Egg McMuffin it would have gone straight to your thighs and stayed there through our honeymoon.”

  Bitterly Charlie gazed down at his parfait and spoon, his new Not-a-diet, as Josephine labeled it, then turned his head to each and every one of us, including Aristotle, as we clamped our teeth on Egg McMuffin’s or Michael with his McGriddle, chewed and groaned from the pleasure.

  “The Sisters must be very well off to live in that row of houses.” Susan said.

  “Well, my father and the Sisters all inherited the address from our grandparents. It’s been in the family for years. Patty and Nancy never married, never had any kids, so they’ve promised to pass it down to us someday.”

  “Wait, hold on.” Michael finished chewing another bite. “Are you telling me that Joshua’s actually going to live in that house someday?”

  The subject surrounding my uncertain future with Elise remained unstated at the moment. In fact, Josephine thought it best not to answer the question. I guess I couldn’t blame her, but the lack of enthusiasm hurt.

  “What did I tell you?” I peered over Aristotle’s head. “And guess who’s moving in to help us raise the children? Uncle Michael. Every week will be another adventurous episode.”

  “Uncle Michael. You’re talking about me, right?”

  Susan nudged him from behind “What about your wife? You’re just gonna run off to live in a fictional TV show?”

  “What are you talking about, baby? We’ll live in the attic together, just like Uncle Jesse and Rebecca Donaldson.”

  Mm-hmm, Susan groaned, trying to hide the fact that she was obviously and thoroughly amused by the potential scenario.

  “Patty is a novelist,” Josephine continued. “And Nancy is a playwright. Patty does well, but consider the fact that the mortgage is long paid for.”

  “Oh really.” Susan perked up. “Anything that I might have read?”

  “Probably not Nancy, since she devotes herself to small stage productions with her aging hippie friends, but Patty’s written the Agartha series. They’ve been somewhat successful. You might have heard of them.”

  “Wait, hold on.” Michael interjected. “Your Aunt Patty is the author of the Agartha series? Constellations over Mu, Escape from Phaeton?”

  Josephine grinned. “Yes, have you read them?”

  “Joshua, you never told me that.”

  I glanced at Charlie through the rearview mirror as he frowned at the No Gas for 50 Miles warning sign. Michael caught sight of it too and smiled.

  “This weekend,” Michael said, “just keeps promising to get better and better.”

  4

  Turning from the I-5 northbound to the 580 west and finally crossing the Bay Bridge on the 80 with a magnificent view of the most romantic city in America, I’d given Michael and Susan ample warning that the Sisters were, to put it kindly, rather on the obese side of things (less on the rather, more of an emphasis on the obese), and often dressed as two argumentative peacocks. They’d understand once they saw them, I explained.

  And another thing, Nancy and Patty regularly made it known that the counterculture happenings of the sixties, whenever or wherever they happened, wither it be the Berkley Free Speech Movement, Mississippi Freedom Riders, the Haight-Ashburry Summer of Love, Chicago Riots, Hog Farm, or Woodstock, they were there, either one or the other and sometimes both at the same time; ambassadors, as they often referred to themselves, of the sixties.

  “Yes.” Josephine agreed. “Don’t let them corner you, or believe me, the sixties will never end.”

  Pulling up to Alamo Square (and finding a parking spot just across the street from their home), Michael stepped up onto the grassy park, lowered sunglasses to the tip of his nose, and stared at the Victorian row of Painted Ladies backed by a magnificent picturesque view of the Financial District, with its triangular Bank of America building, and the harbor slathered in a layer of low hanging clouds beyond. Susan followed. I strapped Aristotle to his leash and led him up the hill.

  “You figure the cast of Full House must have visited your two aunts back in the day, right?” Michael said. “You know, as research for the show.”

  “Not exactly.” I patted him on the back.

  Oh, he sighed, obviously disappointed.

  “But think about it. John Stamos ran along this very hill of grass.”

  “He probably ran with his shoes off…. let his toes wiggle in each blade of grass,” Michael said with an illusory posture, one foot on the grass, another probably in an opening credits dream.

  “You boys are too much.” Susan sighed. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so jealous of another man stealing my husband’s attention as I have of Jesse and the Rippers.”

  “Don’t hate the player,” Michael said, straight-faced. “Hate the game.”

  “Damn you, Full House.” She shook her fist with a lack of enthusiasm, obviously finding amusement with this entire situation.

  “Which one is there’s?” Michael wanted to know.

  A front door extended its arms just as I was opening my mouth to answer him. The Sisters were there to greet everyone. I think Michael was taken back by how truly large they were. Only one could appear in the frame at a time, and filing out together on the porch they looked like Tweedle Dee and Dum. Charlie and Josephine (so many bags strapped to Charlie’s shoulders and suitcases in his arms that I feared a breeze might blow him over) threw available arms around them.

  Elise appeared at their side. She’d dressed in tight blue jeans, a loose fitting white blouse that kindly complimented her breasts, a turquoise necklace, and long black coat. She joyously greeted her twin. I could hear a couple of their exchanges, like, how
long have you been here, and I arrived late last night, and next time we should all ride up together. And then Ellie exited the house, barefoot and in jeans. Dagnabit, why did America’s favorite naked atheist have to be there?

  My wife spotted me from the porch. Ellie did too. Elise looked my way only for a second with sterile, perhaps distant eyes, before joyously turning her attention back to the bride and groom. Ellie just frowned. I knew it. I was an outsider. Every time I saw Elise, I was constantly reminded of how exquisitely beautiful and out of my league she really was, like a lost angel, and how so very foolish I was to not remember that fact when we were apart.

  “Work this out with her buddy.” Michael spoke softly into my ear as Elise crossed the street. “For our future, for Full House. I’ve got my eyes set on that attic.”

  Ellie was crossing the street after her.

  Michael and Susan returned to the Country Squire, retrieved their bags from the trunk (Susan hugged Elise on the sidewalk), and made their way across the street to meet and greet the Sisters on the front porch. Aristotle tightened his mouth and ears, shifting his paws at the sight of Elise making her way for the grass.

  As soon as she arrived, Elise sank down to Aristotle’s nose. “Hi big guy,” she told him with stunning enthusiasm and in a doggy-friendly voice, unlatching the leash from his collar. “I’ve missed you, big buddy. Give me a hug.” She wrapped her arms around him. Aristotle didn’t hug her back. “Look what I have.” Elise retrieved a bulge from her coat pocket in the shape of a ball.

  Aristotle danced light on his paws in anticipation of what was about to befall upon him. She threw it at magnificent speed and height towards the Shoe Garden. Aristotle dashed after, into the trees, and disappeared from her sight. I never understood how she did that. Aristotle was a hound. Hound dogs don’t retrieve. They run away, leaving only a trail of violent brays.