ONE OF THESE DAYS Kylie Birmingham figured she’d slow down. But as she ran, gasping for breath, toward the maintenance hangar with a cell phone to her ear, a can of sealant in one hand, a wrench in the other and the radio at her hip squawking, she knew it wouldn’t be soon.
She lived her life running through her airport, or so it seemed. The crux of being her own boss, she supposed, and of being the boss of thirteen-and-a-half others, as well-the half being Patti the custodian because she was pregnant. Kylie didn’t count the baby as one half, she counted Patti that way, since she spent every afternoon sleeping in the storage closet while pretending to check supplies.
The radio squawked again. Dispatch needed her. Kylie’s extremely wealthy and extremely spoiled rotten client in the lobby needed her. Her head mechanic needed her. Her secretary needed her. Her accountant needed her.
Kylie’s head pounded, and she realized what she needed-a vacation.
Paris would do. Yes, Paris with its teeming crowds and bustling streets, Paris with the mind-boggling architecture and museums she could lose herself in, with the bakeries she could get happily fat in…oh yes, Paris, wild and romantic Paris, would do perfectly.
She’d never really take a vacation. Too frivolous, too time-consuming…and neither frivolous nor time-consuming were exactly part of her nature.
Her legs pumped the quarter mile distance between the front lobby and the third hangar of the small, private Orange County airport. The late-summer heat didn’t bother her, nor the fact that she hadn’t eaten since six that morning, but then again, stamina had never been a problem for Kylie.
Time, however…time was a problem, a big one. With so much work to do, there was no wild and romantic anything in her life, much less fantasizing about a trip to Paris.
“Kylie…are you listening to me?”
The voice came from the cell phone permanently planted to her ear. It was the sweet little voice of the biggest tyrant she’d ever met. “Yes, I’m listening,” Kylie said. “As my accountant, I always listen to you, Lou.”
“That’s Grandma Lou to you,” her grandmother said. “And I need your checkbook. I think I forgot to balance the thing last month…and maybe the month before…I don’t know. Anyway, the bank is calling, and…”
Kylie’s stomach fell to her toes. As she’d learned six months ago, it had been an incredibly stupid idea to hire her grandma after Grandpa had died. But the four foot four inch, eighty-going-on-sixteen Lou had blinked those rheumy baby blues, claiming poverty and boredom, and that she’d be dead in a week if someone, anyone, didn’t give her a job. And because Kylie, like her father before her, collected the needy, she’d folded like a cheap accordion on talent night.
The radio at her hip was still crackling with tension as the three people in her dispatch continued to argue over who was going to work the late shift tomorrow night. Their second richest client was coming through at midnight and required some tie-down assistance. Cocking her head, Kylie listened as the tiff upgraded to mutiny, which was nothing new. Bringing the radio to her mouth, she panted for air as she slowed down. “I’ll be there in two minutes. Fix this before I get there and heads won’t roll.” Empty threat, and they all knew it. She couldn’t have found another linesman, dispatch or mechanic in this puny, one-horse hellhole to save her life, but it was her hellhole and she’d make it work.
She always did.
“Well.” Her grandmother huffed a bit in her dainty little voice over Kylie’s cell phone. “No need to get your panties in a twist. Fine, then. I’ll handle this situation myself.”
“Grandma, I was talking to-”
“That’s Lou to you.”
Dial tone.
The cell rang again before Kylie could toss it in a ditch. Warily, she glanced at the caller I.D. and sighed.
“We have a situation in the front lobby,” Daisy, her secretary-and mother-reported.
A chip off Lou’s block as another sweet, little, dainty ex-socialite, Daisy had lost all her money dabbling in day trading. She couldn’t file, couldn’t answer a phone without disconnecting someone and couldn’t find the engine compartment of an airplane to save her life.
Yet another pity hire.
Funny though, the only person Kylie pitied at the moment was herself. “What’s the situation?” She pictured two planes coming in at the same time, or a computer failure. Maybe a plane hadn’t been tied down properly and was hurling itself down the slight hill toward the hangar designated as the lobby, because nothing, absolutely nothing, would have surprised her today. “Mom?”
“I’ve been answering the phone all morning and I need aspirin. Do you have any?”
Kylie stopped, leaned against hangar number two and thunked her head back against the metal wall. Eyes closed, head tipped up facing the sun, she decided she was the one who needed aspirin. She loved her mom with all her heart, she did, but for once, just once, she wanted her mother to be the mother.
“Maybe I should leave early.”
“But mom, the phones-”
“No problem, I figured that all out weeks ago. I just call line one with line two, then put them both on hold.” Daisy’s bubbly laughter tinkled in Kylie’s ear. “That way the phones are both busy and you don’t miss any calls! Ingenuous, huh?”
Kylie resisted the urge to slit her wrists. “How often do you do this?”
“Why, whenever I need to go home early. Just a couple days a week, I suppose. Oh, and guess what I just did, honey?”
Kylie was afraid to guess, honest to God she was.
“I picked up my favorite magazine this morning, and besides having that hunky Harrison Ford on the cover, it had a contest form for some Mother Of The Year award. You’ll never guess what I’m going to win.”
Kylie choked back a laugh because it would probably be a half-hysterical one. Mother Of The Year? Wouldn’t that be Kylie, who’d raised everyone around her?
“A trip to Paris!” Daisy laughed. “Isn’t it too perfect?”
Busy streets, lots of wine, no anxieties…no mother or grandmother to drive her off her rocker. “Perfect,” she agreed.
“I know! Everyone deserves their dream, honey, and I know yours is Paris. So when I win Mother Of The Year-which, of course, I will, as I’ve done a fabulous job with you, if I say so myself-I want you to come with me!”
The sun felt good on Kylie’s face. If only she could stand here all day instead of going inside and facing the chaos. “Mom, if I wanted a trip to Paris, I’d go.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Because ever since your father died you’ve taken it upon yourself to run this place just because it was his dream.”
It was Kylie’s dream, too, to kept the airport afloat, to see it prosper.
All she needed was a miracle.
Both she and her dad were practical, single-minded, goal-oriented, orderly, sane people, who had shared this weakness for the impractical, chaotic, unorderly, bankruptcy-bound airport. Maybe because in the air, they found true freedom, or because there was just something about walking through a hangar full of planes knowing you could hop in one and be anywhere you wanted to be. Whatever the reason, the airport had been her dad’s one passion, and she’d inherited both his love for the place…and the debts.
“You know, if you’d only get married, you’d feel more relaxed. Grandma said a nice boy just moved in across-”
“No,” Kylie said quickly. Relationships didn’t work for her. She only had room in her life for one problem area-the airport. Everything else had to be, well, easily managed, practical.
Men were not easily managed or practical, not for her.
Her mother and grandma shared the opposite approach. Men were like candy, to be gobbled up. They often tried to impose this lifestyle on the reluctant Kylie in the form of blind dates from hell. “I don’t need a date,” she reiterated.