“That would be the correct term,” she said.
“Grandnephew ... right,” Jake said. “And now, how about we find our way into the bedroom there and have ourselves a little...”
“Joey invited us to visit,” she interrupted.
He looked at her. “Did he now?” he asked carefully.
She nodded. “I told him that we’ll be here in Schweitzer for another two days but after that, we have no firm plans.”
“You told him that?”
“I did,” she said.
“Well ... I mean ... I thought that we were thinking about flying over to Jackson Hole and trying out the whole snowmobiling in Yellowstone Park thing.”
“We were just talking about that,” she said. “We haven’t actually booked anything.”
“That’s true,” Jake said, “but...”
“I’d like to go see him, sweetie,” she said quietly.
“You would?”
She nodded. “I would,” she said. “I’d like to see Brian and Sarah and Joey’s other kids. I’d like to meet my new grandnephew. Mostly, I’d like to reconnect with a part of my family. I don’t have any family right now, Jake. Can you appreciate what that is like?”
“No, not really,” Jake admitted. “But there’s a reason why you don’t have contact with your family, right? They’re intolerant and judgmental. It was they who broke contact with you, not the other way around.”
“I understand,” she said. “But now, Joey has reached out to me. I’d like to reach back and see where it goes.”
Jake suppressed a sigh. He had absolutely no desire to go to Pocatello, Idaho and meet members of Laura’s estranged Mormon family. On his scale of desirability, such a thing rated only slightly above traveling to Zaire during an Ebola outbreak. But ... his wife wanted to do it and she did not ask for much from him. “All right,” he said. “If you’d like to go, we’ll go.”
She smiled, clearly very happy about his decision. “Yay!” she said, clapping her hands a little. “I’ll call Joey back and let him know.”
“You do that,” he said, fighting (and generally succeeding) to keep the false enthusiasm in his tone. “I’m going to make a drink.”
“Make me one too,” she said, picking up the phone.
While she chatted excitedly with her brother, Jake mixed up a couple of rum and cokes at the bar. By the time he carried them back over, Laura had finished her conversation.
“He’s very excited to see us,” she told him.
“Uh huh,” Jake said. He was starting to wonder if this was about money. Maybe Joey II thought he could score himself a little “loan” from his now rich sister and her rich husband? This did not seem an unreasonable assumption at all. If it turned out to be the case, he decided right then and there, he would just give Laura’s brother whatever he asked for and write it off as gone. After all, the man drove a garbage truck for a living. How much would it even occur to him to ask for? Twenty grand, maybe? Fifty at the most?
“Thank you so much for this, sweetie,” Laura said, giving him a big kiss on the lips. “I told him we’ll be there sometime Thursday afternoon. Does that sound right? How long does it take to fly to Pocatello from here?”
“I haven’t looked into it yet,” Jake said. “I can’t imagine it’ll be more than two hours though.”
“So, if we check out of here around eleven, we should be able to get to Pocatello by three o’clock, right?”
“That sounds reasonable,” he allowed. “I’ll give you a more specific timeline when I look at the charts and run the numbers. In the meantime, I’ll get us a hotel room booked. I don’t suppose you know what they have in Pocatello for first-class accommodations?”
“We ... uh ... won’t need a hotel room,” Laura said, a little hesitantly.
Jake looked at her sharply. “We won’t?”
“No,” she said. “Joey wants us to stay with him while we’re there.”
“Stay with him?” Jake asked. “There is no reason to do that.”
“There is a reason,” she insisted. “We’re family. And in our family, family stays with family when visiting. To stay in a hotel room would be insulting.”
“Insulting?” Jake asked incredulously. “Who came up with that shit?”
“I don’t know who came up with it,” she said stubbornly, “but we’re going to do it. I will not be insulting to my brother and his family when they’ve reached out to me. He’s already told Grace and Chastity that we’ll be using their room while we’re there.”
“Who are Grace and Chastity?” Jake asked.
“My nieces,” she said. “They are fourteen and sixteen and they share a room. They will sleep on the couch while we’re there.”
“We’re going to sleep in a teenager’s room in a Mormon household and make the two teens in question sleep on a couch, just so we don’t insult your brother?”
“That’s right,” she said sternly. “That is exactly what we’re going to do.”
Jake sighed and nodded. “All right then,” he said, mentally putting the trip to Ebola-ravaged Zaire a little higher on the chart than Pocatello after all.
As it turned out, the flight from Sandpoint airport to Pocatello Regional Airport took ninety-four minutes from wheels-up to touchdown and it passed over some rather incredible scenery on the way. They bumped and bounced over a large expanse of snow-covered mountains that defined the terrain of northern Idaho and western Montana, mountains with steep canyons, breathtaking gorges, and lots of evergreen trees. As they got further into the main body of Idaho, they passed over the Snake River plain and could see the rugged waterway twisting and turning below, cutting deep gorges and canyons through the rock. Laura actually stayed awake for the entire flight, a rarity for her, though probably it was because of the impending meeting with her brother and not the scenery that kept her from her normal midair slumber.
The weather was clear and calm, though a frigid 28 degrees Fahrenheit, when Jake touched down on Runway 17 at 3:22 PM, local time. Snow berms could be seen off to the sides of the runway and taxiways as he made the journey to the general aviation terminal near the main airport entrance.
Three days, Jake thought sourly as he parked in front of the terminal and went through the engine shutdown checklist. I can put up with anything for three days, right? This thought did not give him much solace.
Jake left the aircraft locked but did not secure it to the tie-down rings. As had been the case in Sandpoint, he had rented a hangar to park the plane in during his stay so it would not be left out in the snow and sub-freezing temperatures. He and Laura walked into the terminal, which was virtually deserted except for the two people working the counter. While Laura worked on getting a shuttle to take her over to the passenger terminal and its rental car counter, Jake worked on securing the hangar and arranging for a couple of rampers to push the aircraft into the hangar for him. He was capable of performing this procedure himself, and he generally did so when home, but he did not have access to a tug here in Pocatello and their rules forbid him from simply borrowing or renting one.
Laura went off on her mission to secure the Jeep Cherokee that Jake had rented for the stay here (he always rented four-wheel drive vehicles in places where snow was a possibility). Jake went back out to the Avanti and fired up the engines once again. He taxied over to hangar row and stopped in front of number 27, positioning the plane so he was not blocking the access taxiway, but was aligned for easy, unpowered movement into the hangar. No sooner had he shut down than a Chevy pickup pulling a small trailer with the tug on it rolled in and parked just in front of him. The rampers had arrived.
Two young people got out of the Toyota. Both were dressed in jeans and thick beige sweaters with the name of the airport services department and their first names stenciled on them. Both wore fur hats that covered their ears. The tall skinny one had long hair that spilled out the bottom of his hat and a baby smooth face that was so effeminate in nature that Jake had to look at him carefully for a moment to determine that he was, in fact, a male and not a female. The short, chubby one, on the other hand, was unmistakably male. He had even longer hair but a full mustache and beard combo. He also had bad teeth. He was chewing on a large wad of tobacco and spitting the juice on the ground with disgusting frequency. Their names were Ron (the tall, skinny, effeminate one) and Dallas (the short, chubby, bearded one). They appraised Jake and his aircraft as he walked up to meet them.