“Love me?” Spencer asked.
“forever,” Jillian replied.
“Really?” said Spencer slyly, coyly, a grin on his face. “How come you love me?”
“Because you’re cute,” said Jillian.
“How cute?” Spencer demanded.
“Don’t push it,” Jillian replied, a touch of iron in her soft voice.
“As cute as a spaghetti-eatin’ dog?” he asked. Both of them were so engrossed in their little game that neither of them noticed that Sherman. Reese was watching them intently. And Reese was watching them so closely that he did not notice that Alex Streck was staring at Sherman Reese.
“Cute as a spaghetti-eating dog?” said Jillian laughing. “Let me think it over.”
“Come on, Jilly,” said Spencer. “Ain’t nothing cuter than a spaghetti-eatin’ dog…”
6
“Are you going to live in space?”
“No, Paula, we won’t be going to live in space.” Virtually every student in Jillian’s second grade class had asked her a similar question since the beginning of the goodbye party. No one looked like they were having a very good time, despite the tray of cupcakes and the brightly colored balloons anchored to chairs and table legs.
It was difficult for a bunch of kinds to lose a popular teacher in the middle of the year, and Jillian felt a certain amount of guilt for dropping such a bombshell on them. But she also knew that kids were resilient and that not too many weeks would pass before they had adapted to a new and probably beloved teacher. Mrs. Armacost would be nothing more than a dim, if pleasant, memory.
It turned out that Paula had a follow-up question. She wanted more information on this troubling subject. “But your husband lives in space,” she lisped, ”
and he’s taking you back with him, so aren’t you going to go and live in space?” It made perfect sense to her seven-year-old way of looking at things.
“My husband used to work in space,” Jillian explained patiently. “Now he and I are going to go live in a place called New York City. That’s up north.”
“Oh.” The little girl took this in, thinking about it for a moment. Then she asked, “Mrs. Armacost?”
“Yes, Paula?”
“When your husband is in space, does he ever see God up there?” she asked matter-of-factly.
It was, Jillian thought, a damn good question, but before she could answer, a little boy named Calvin ran up to her.
“What about aliens? Does he see aliens?” The words tumbled out of the boy’s wide red mouth. “Does your husband bring a laser gun in case there are aliens? If I were going into space and I saw aliens I’d make sure I brought two laser guns. A little one for my pocket and then a big laser rifle. Does your husband have a laser rifle? Does he bring it home from work with him? Does it work here on Earth or does it only work in space? Mrs. Armacost, does it?”
Calvin was panting now, as if he had just run up a couple of flights of steep stairs.
Jillian laughed. “You know what, Calvin?”
“What, Mrs. Armacost?”
“I’m going to miss you.” She looked around at the kids frolicking in the classroom and felt a lump in her throat. She knew she was going to miss all of them.
The “grown up” farewell party for Jillian and Spencer Armacost was childish in its own way, a childishness brought on largely by the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol.
The party was being held in a tent behind a NASA watering hole called Jack’s Tavern and by the time the party really got going, the tent was packed. There were the men with short hair who had worn crew cuts since the fifties and saw no reason for a change, there were healthy, middle-aged women in Bermuda shorts whose skin suggested that they spent more time than they should in the Florida sun. There was a gaggle of NASA geeks with black-rimmed eyeglasses and a pallor that suggested they did not spend enough time out of doors. Nan was there, making eyes at the bartender, but he didn’t have much time for her—he was working hard to slake the thirsts of the merrymakers. Parked on a table near the bar was a sheet cake shaped like a space shuttle with “Farewell Spence and Jill” unsteadily embroidered in frosting across the midships.
The entire crew of the Victory was there as well as Sherman Reese and the Director himself. Not even the appearance of the big bosses could dampen the high spirits of the party.
Someone was trying to make a speech through a blizzard of static and feedback. “They asked me to write a speech. A farewell for you, Commander—” There were interruptions from the audience, cries of “No!” and “Don’t go!”
But the man persisted, determined to give his speech. “But I’m a mission specialist and that specialty does not include speech giving. I tried to tell ya—”
A man called Tom Sullivan, one of the crew of the Victory, stepped out of the crowd. “You are absolutely right, Stan. You can’t give a speech. I will.”
To general applause Stan relinquished the microphone and Sullivan stepped up. He grinned drunkenly at the crowd.
“Spence,” he said, “you have been our commander lo these, many years…”
“Lo these many years…” the crowd roared back. Farewell speeches tended to follow a standard script.
“We figured that there must be some way to tell you how we truly feel…”
Jillian had been having a pretty good time, though she had been to plenty of farewell bashes just like this one, and was doing her best to get into the spirit of the thing until she looked through the crowd and saw Alex and Natalie Streck. In contrast to the general good humor that pervaded the gathering, the Strecks were not having a good time. In fact, though their words were drowned out by revelry, the Strecks were in the middle of a very nasty argument.
Alex was reaching for a plastic glass filled almost to the brim with a clear liquid—a very stiff gin or vodka, maybe—and she saw Natalie try tb stop him from taking it. A flash of anger crossed his face as he snatched at the drink, grabbing it so forcefully that a good deal of the liquid slopped over the brim, raising another furious look from Alex. No one else had seen the action and if the Strecks cared about being observed they were doing nothing to hide themselves. Most eyes were on the stage where Tom Sullivan had been joined by two more members of the crew of the Victory, Shelly Carter and Pat Elliot. The three of them were joined shoulder over shoulder and swaying to a music that only they seemed to be able to hear. It was plain that the three of them were going to sing whether the crowd wanted them to or not.
“Commander,” Tom Sullivan slurred into the microphone, “this one’s for you.” He looked over his shoulder at the bartender. “Maestro, if you please…”
The bartender hit something on a karaoke machine and the night was flooded with an extremely loud set of opening chords for “My Way.” The difference was, this wasn’t the “My Way” that had become the anthem of Frank Sinatra. This was the mocking, sarcastic, and rather funny version of the same song as performed by the late Sid Vicious. While it is widely held that astronauts and NASA types are generally square, the Sex Pistols had managed to penetrate to this part of the space program twenty years after their heyday.
As the intro for the song kicked into high gear, Jillian saw Alex Streck raise the glass to his lips and drink it down as if it contained nothing more powerful than a soft drink. Then she remembered: vodka… Vodka was Alex Streck’s beverage of choice. From across the room she winced as she seemed to feel the heavy belt of alcohol that Alex had just smacked himself with. Natalie too looked away in pain. In that moment she hated her husband. And in that moment she hated to see him hurt himself-like that.