Perfect Fifths_ A Jessica Darling Novel - Megan McCafferty [12]
“His girlie knack for remembering such details,” replied Bridget in a playful tone, “is why I finally gave in and agreed to this whole wedding thing.”
Jessica tries to remember the particulars of that conversation. Had she gone uptown to visit Bridget and Percy’s West Harlem loft? Or had they made it out to her place in Brooklyn? Had they met somewhere in the middle, Hell’s Kitchen, maybe, for beers and burritos? She’s unable to piece together the details; she can remember only the words. All her memories are fuzzed over today, symptomatic of the disembodied disassociation of frequent air travel, but also the murky consequences of her mind’s slog through logical and illogical, fact versus fiction, what just happened, what’s happening now, and what could possibly happen next.
Jessica works harder at pinning down this memory of Bridget and Percy’s engagement as she stands on line at the Clear Sky customer ser vice center. This is not a happy place. If you’re there, you’re supposed to be in the air, but for some reason—be it a chaotic weather pattern, a missed connection, or some security line clusterfuckery involving a cactus plant derivative—you are not. The CSCSC is about as utilitarian and unadorned as a space can be. It has no inspirational artwork or vases of silk flowers on display, no smooth jazz or soothing aromatherapeutic scents piped in through the walls. Jessica appreciates and even respects that the CSCSC does not attempt to convince its customers that it is anything other than what it is: an unhappy place.
Thinking about Bridget and Percy as she stands on line is preferable to obsessing over the strange particulars of the line itself. Specifically, that she appears to be only one of two people who were not on the flight to Las Vegas canceled due to “unforeseeable mechanical complications,” and that the majority of these distressed passengers desperate to get the next flight out to Las Vegas are traveling together as a group consisting of the most devoted members of a fan club for a performer Jessica cannot think about if she’s going to make it through the day.
“Holding!” brays the woman behind Jessica to no one in particular and everyone in general. Never has a person so meticulously (“Holding …”) chronicled (“On hold …”) the (“Still on hold …”) drama (“Still holding …”) of (“Can ya believe I’m still on hold?”) being (“I can’t believe I’m still on hold …”) on (“Finally! A live person! What? You have to put me back on hold?”) hold. Jessica finally gives in to her curiosity and turns around to find a woman a few inches shorter than she is, but much wider, with a formidable bosom. Definitely middle-aged, if not chronologically, then sartorially, in her wrinkle-resistant zebra-trimmed-in-giraffe-print travel separates. But at least this woman in her grown-up Garanimals isn’t a member of the fan club. Her existence is Jessica’s only link to reality in an otherwise surreal situation, another witness that all this is, in fact, actually happening.
That is, unless Jessica is making her up, too.
“I’m holding,” Garanimals explains, gesturing with her cell phone.
“I had no idea,” Jessica deadpans before facing forward again.
Garanimals pokes her in the shoulder blade. “You got a better shot of solving your problem on the phone.”
“Really?”
“The phone number’s on your boarding pass.” Garanimals holds up a finger, listens for a moment. “Ooh! I think I’ve got somebody,” she says before frowning. “Nope. Still holding.” A sigh. “I have a friend who works for the airline. She says the phone is the faster, better way to go. Though she’s not such a good friend that she can get me the hell out of coach. The only Coach that makes me happy is a five-hundred-dollar purse, ya know what I’m saying?”
Jessica smiles weakly. “Then why do you bother with the line?”
Garanimals tips her head back and cackles, revealing silver fillings in her back molars. “I’m not taking any chances. ’Cause the one time I missed my connection and I didn’t get on this line, I was told that I could