Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [123]
I turned onto a side street, Winsford Avenue, and wound back through the neighborhood toward Lincoln. Winsford wasn’t as nice as Orange Street, my street. Nothing looked as nice anymore. The sky was gray and nobody had a green lawn and the goddamn planes kept going overhead.
Then I saw it. I had to turn on 80th to meet up with Lincoln, and there it was: the Collier School of Aviation Technology. Her school. It was right here and I was driving right past and I knew it was another moment of destiny. It was brown cinder block, about three stories high, just a box, but what more did a school need to be? I could see the fluorescent lights on in the upstairs classrooms. That’s where she was, sitting under that vibrating, humming, greening light, listening to a lecture or maybe practicing carrying a tray of coffee cups down a turbulent aisle. Bump. Bump. Her hip jostling against my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” she’d say. Then she’d turn and see me. “Oh, it’s you.”
“I wondered when you’d notice.”
I drove into the parking lot. I circled through until I found her Chevette. She really was there. All I had to do was wait. But I had the stupid case to deliver. It was quarter to 2. Her class was probably over at 2. I couldn’t get to the Ballona Wetlands and back in fifteen minutes. I could leave her a note if I had a piece of paper and a pencil, a note that would say, I was driving by on my way to an important meeting and saw your car. Hope you had fun at school. See you later. But she didn’t even know my name.
I sat in my mom’s car thinking about it, trying to decide what to do. She might remember me if I drew a picture of the coffee table, or of the birdbath with the plaster angel in my front yard. But again I’d need a piece of paper and a pencil. I must’ve sat for a while, because then I saw her. I saw a whole bunch of young stewardesses-to-be coming out of the building. They were walking together and talking and they were all so pretty, and then there she was. Prettiest of all. I saw those pink pants and that bright white white white top. She made me smile.
I got out of the car. “Hey,” I called to her.
Of course she looked startled. Who wouldn’t? She was not expecting me, her neighbor with the coffee table, her funny-guy neighbor all showered and shaved and standing by her car. She frowned.
“It’s me,” I said, “the guy from across the street.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You comin’ over here or what?”
She took a step toward me, then plucked at her girlfriend’s sleeve and pulled her over too. They stopped a little ways away. “What are you doing here?”
“I want to be a stewardess too.”
“We’re called flight attendants.”
“Lah dee dah. Well, I’m a goods-and-services transport technician.”
“What’s that?” It was the girlfriend who asked. Truth is, I can’t even remember what she looked like, I was so blinded by my girl’s shining radiance.
“I make deliveries.”
They both laughed.
“I was driving by on my way to an appointment—”
“A delivery, you mean.”
“And I saw your car. You wanna go with me?”
“On your delivery?”
It was a stroke of genius, thinking of that. I could see she wanted to. She was intrigued. What did I deliver? And where? I was in a service industry just like hers and we were interested in each other’s work. Sitting at the kitchen table at night, I’d ask