“What did you think?” Jake asked, again, not with simple politeness, but seemingly with genuine interest.
“I liked it,” she told him. “It caught my attention right away. The guitar was good and the lyrics were totally bitchin’.” She flushed a little, forgetting for a moment that she was talking to an adult and not one of her peers. “Uh ... sorry, I mean cool.”
Uncle Jake chuckled. “I’m unoffended,” he told her.
“I really dig a song where I know what the singer is singing about,” she said.
Uncle Jake’s eyebrows went up a bit. “And you understood what he was singing about?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Duh,” she said dramatically. “He’s talking about someone coming to his house and doing his girlfriend when he’s not home. How can you interpret that as anything else?”
Uncle Jake looked surprised and then smiled at her warmly (making her feel a little funny in the stomach). “That is, in fact, what he’s singing about,” he said. “You seem very astute at picking up lyrical meanings.”
She shrugged. It didn’t seem like that big a deal to her. “I love his voice too. Is he good looking? Please tell me he’s good looking ... and single.”
“Phil is a pretty good-looking guy,” Uncle Jake said. “And he is single.”
“Wow,” she said, already starting to fantasize about him.
“He’s also quite gay. He used to be Laura’s roommate when she and I first met.”
Her hopes came crashing down. This was tempered, however, by the shocking revelation that Uncle Jake had just laid on her. “Aunt Laura used to live with a gay guy?” she asked.
“For several years,” Jake said. “Until she moved in with me after we got together as a couple. They were really close friends. Still are, as a matter of fact. Phil walked Laura down the aisle in place of your grandfather at our wedding.”
“No shit?” she said, forgetting again that she was talking to an adult.
Uncle Jake did not even blink an eye. “No shit,” he assured her.
They talked more about the V-tach song as they continued the drive and Uncle Jake promised to give her a copy of the CD as long as she promised not to give any copies of it to her friends prior to its actual release. She promised not to. He then pointed to the radio. “I noticed a little wince on your face when Alanis started to sing,” he said. “You’re not a fan of Ironic?”
“No,” she said, making the sour face again. “Not only have they played that friggin’ song to death—I mean, they play it at least once a friggin’ hour on the alt-rock station we get out of SLC—but the lyrics are just dumb.”
“Really?” he said, that keen interest showing in his face again. “Why do you think so?”
“Because most of that shi— ... uh ... stuff that she’s singing about is not ironic. If you’re going to sing about things that are ironic, you should make sure they actually are ironic.”
“Explain,” Uncle Jake requested.
She explained something she had tried to describe to her dumb-ass friends who loved that stupid-ass song on multiple occasions. “Having it rain the day you get married is not friggin’ ironic. It’s a bummer, yes, but not irony. Not taking someone’s good advice is not ironic either. It’s stupidity or ignorance. And having a dude who is afraid to fly die in an airplane crash is also not ironic. It just means he was right to be friggin’ afraid. A fly in your friggin’ glass of wine? That’s not ironic, it’s friggin’ gross! And meeting some hot dude and then finding out he’s married? How is that shi-- ... uh ... stuff ironic? It isn’t! It’s just another bummer!”
Uncle Jake was laughing now, but not in a mean way. “Chase,” he told her, reaching over and patting her on the shoulder, “you are completely correct and years beyond your age in musical sophistication.”
She blushed again, both at his words and his touch. “You think so?” she asked.
“I know so,” he said. “And that makes me extremely glad that you enjoyed When I’m Not Home.”
“Why is that?” she asked, glowing at his praise.
“Because now I know it is going to sell like mad,” he told her.
“You know that just because I liked it?”
“Well, I already suspected that it was going to be a big hit—V-tach’s first of many—because that is my job, to find and produce good music. But there is always that little doubt in my mind before each new tune hits the airwaves. Am I wrong? Am I losing my touch? You are the first listener I have encountered who has actually heard the tune and you like it. My mind is now at ease, and for that, I thank you.”
“Uh ... you’re welcome,” she said, pleased. And then her mind went back to the lead singer. “When you say gay though, is he completely gay?”
“Completely and thoroughly,” Uncle Jake assured her.
“That really is a bummer,” she said.
“But not ironic,” Uncle Jake said, causing both of them to crack up.
When the laughter died down she looked meaningfully at her uncle. Something had occurred to her. “Did Aunt Laura used to walk around in her bra and panties in front of him?” she blurted. The thought of being able to walk around freely in your underwear in front of a guy without embarrassment was strangely intriguing to her.
Uncle Jake laughed again but did not answer the question. She got the feeling that he did not know the answer himself. Maybe she would ask Aunt Laura later—not in front of her parents, of course.
They arrived at the airport and Uncle Jake went about pulling his radical airplane out of its hangar and doing a bunch of the preflight stuff that needed to be done. She followed him around, keeping silent as he had requested, and he explained everything he was doing as he did it.
“Okay,” he said when the checks were finished. “You stay here and make sure no one flies off with my plane. I’m going to go file the flight plan. Shouldn’t take but five minutes or so.”
“You got it,” she promised.
He drove off in the Beemer and she wandered around the plane, looking at everything, paying particular attention to the strange front wings mounted just in front of the cockpit windows. She then read all the various warning stickers that were mounted near the sensors and the panel openings. After that, she examined the little doodads that stuck out here and there. She remembered Uncle Jake calling the little tubular doohickeys that were mounted on both sides of the cockpit and just below and in front of both main wings pitot static tubes and said they were what measured airspeed and angle of attack—which he further explained meant the angle the plane was going as it moved forward through the air. He had pulled little covers off of them during his walk-around. All of the covers had long red ribbons dangling from them with the words REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT written in large white letters. That made sense to her. Though Uncle Jake had not specifically said so, she intuited that the pitot static tubes worked by having air flow into them. If they were covered in flight, that air would not flow and they would not be able to tell the pilot how fast he was going and what angle he was flying up or down. If you did not know that information while in flight, that could probably cause all kinds of weird problems—some of which might end with you smashing into the ground or the ocean. But why would you have to cover them when you were not flying? Wouldn’t it be easier to just leave them uncovered all the time so you didn’t have to worry about whether or not you remembered to remove them? She decided she would ask Uncle Jake about this once they were up in the air and that sterile cockpit rule was no longer in effect.
Uncle Jake returned on foot and opened up the main door of the plane. They climbed inside and he actually let her sit in the copilot’s seat. Way cool! He started up the engines and went through another set of preflight checks, calling out things as he did them, one by one, though usually not stopping to explain what it was he was talking about this time. Soon, he declared his checklist complete and he spent a moment talking on his headset thingy to one of the controllers in the airport’s tower. Chase was not wearing a headset—Uncle Jake had offered her one but she did not want to mess up her hair before she met Celia Valdez—so she did not hear the tower guy’s responses to him. Jake pushed the two levers between the seats forward and they began to move. There were no other planes moving around right now so it did not take them long to get to the turn that led onto the runway. Uncle Jake went throughout another checklist—setting flaps, verifying something called trim (which made her giggle a little—trim meant doing it, something that she had never done before but which she and her girlfriends talked about endlessly) and a few numbers preceded by V’s. At last, he pushed the throttles up again and turned onto the runway so they were facing down it, directly on the centerline. He throttled back down and brought them to a stop.