Broken!”
“You never talk loud enough,” he grumbled. “Sally’s the only one who talks loud enough.”
Ernest hadn’t actually spoken directly to Sally in years, but arguing with the man was like betting against the house.
Never going to win.
“Can you fix the oven?” she yelled in his good ear.
“I’ll fix the damn oven soon as I fix the damn fuel pump!”
Mel’s stomach dropped. “What’s wrong with the gas pump?” Muffins they could live without. Getting fuel into their customers’ aircrafts, some of which landed here daily for the fuel alone, they could not.
“Nothing I can’t handle.” Ernest was already walking away, his pants slipping down because he had no hips to hold them on. He stopped, hitched them up, then kept moving.
The radio squawked with the announcement of an unscheduled plane arriving in twenty minutes. Mel waited for one of the linemen, Ritchie or Kellan, to respond to the news, but neither did. Once again she lifted the radio to her lips and called for her employees.
No response.
“Gotta love those brain-dead college students,” Char said.
Mel resisted the urge to smack her own forehead with the radio. “If those two are in the back hangar getting high again, I’m going to kill them.”
“We’re falling apart at the seams.” Charlene hugged Mel. “Look, honey, you’ve got your hands full. I’ll go see what I can wrangle up without the oven, ’kay?”
“I’ll get on it,” Mel promised her just as the Poison CD ended.
For one blessed moment silence reigned before a new CD clicked on. Journey. “I just wish we could give this place the makeover it needs,” Char yelled over the music.
Mel wished that, too. They were making ends meet, and they all had jobs, two really good things, but no one was getting rich, that was for sure.
Not that she wanted to be rich, but comfortable would be nice…
Al followed his wife into the kitchen, his hand sliding down her back to squeeze her ass.
“Albert Edward Stone!” Charlene said in her most Southern-genteel voice. “If you think that instead of cooking muffins, I’m going to ‘cook’ with you-”
“Come on, just a quickie-”
“That’s what you got just last night!”
“Hey, that wasn’t a quickie, that was some of my best work!”
Mel covered her ears and walked away. She didn’t need the reminder that everyone was getting quickies and she was not. So it’d been a long time for her, so what? People could live without sex.
Or so the rumor went.
“Mel? Mel, are you around here somewhere?”
At Dimi’s voice drifting through the lobby from the front receptionist desk, Mel changed direction and headed that way, wondering, what now?
Dimi Wilmington sat perched on the edge of her desk, head tilted as she studied the view out the window of sweeping coastlines bisected by the magnificent Santa Ynez Mountains and a typical low-lying morning fog. Willowy, with legs long past the legal limit, Dimi had a body and face that could launch a thousand ships, make the fat lady sing, and put grown men on their knees to worship at her altar.
She used them to her full advantage, too, rarely coming across a man she didn’t like-which probably explained the new whisker burn along her jaw.
Terrific. Everyone was getting lucky except Mel.
It was said she and Dimi were night and day, a modern-day odd couple. Mel being the anal one. The one who gathered worries and stress like moss on a tree. She also tended to gather the heartaches and responsibilities of others much like a fraught mother hen, bitching after all her little chicks, pecking at them until they did as she wanted them to.
Dimi was more a live-and-let-live type of soul. She cared, deeply, she’d just rather light incense and meditate than actually solve a problem. She was both a thorn in Mel’s side and her closest confidant.
She wore a multicolored, filmy, gauzy miniskirt and a snug, white cap-sleeved tee with a pink heart in the center that brought the eyes to immediate attention of her brand, spanking-new breasts. But the thing that never failed to amaze Mel about Dimi was that she could go all day and that bright, clean white tee would stay bright, clean white.
Mel didn’t even bother to look down at her coveralls, already filthy from just a quick maintenance check on the Cessna. “What’s the problem?”
Over the steam of her herbal tea and the faint smoke from the incense she’d lit, Dimi shot Mel a wry smile.
Right. What wasn’t a problem was a more likely question.
The two of them went back a long ways. As teens, Mel had swept and assisted in the maintenance department, and Dimi had answered phones. Each had been far more at home here than either of their decidedly not Leave It to Beaver homes.
Sally Wells, a woman with more dream than cash, had taken them under her wing-Sally, who’d lived as she wanted, wild and free with men and fun aplenty. As their first real role model, Mel and Dimi had both worshipped the ground Sally walked on; Mel appreciating Sally’s directness, the way she ran her own show and the world be damned, but for Dimi the worship had gone deeper. She’d wanted to be Sally.
Unfortunately, Sally had been unavailable to them for a long time now, and without her around, there was no one for Mel to share the stress of holding all this up with. No one except Dimi. “Tell me,” she said to Dimi now. “Believe me, the day can’t get worse.”
Dimi put her hand over Mel’s. “You look tired. You’re not drinking that tea I gave you.”
“I hate tea. And it’s just stress.”
“You only hate tea because I tell you it has healing abilities and you think that’s a crock of shit.” She sighed. “Money’s tight again.”
“You mean still. Money’s tight still.”
“That’s all right.” Dimi stood and, primping a little, played with the hem of her skirt, adjusted her top. “We have a couple of hot ones coming in today.”
“Hot ones” being Dimi-code for cute, rich customers.
“What we have is an unscheduled,” Mel said. “I’ve gotta get out there and do tie-down because God knows where Ritchie or Kellan is.”
Dimi pulled out a compact and checked her gloss, ran her tongue over her teeth. “I’ll do it.”
“Uh-huh.” Mel eyed the short, short skirt, which at every move flirted with revealing Dimi’s crotch. “You’re going to go get your hands dirty, risk that manicure, and tie down a plane? In that? ”
Dimi smiled. “Should get me a big tip, don’t you think?”
“That’s not even funny.”
“Hey, I’m going to hit on them anyway, might as well get something for it.”
“Stop it.” Mel knew Dimi was only kidding. Or half-kidding anyway. Dimi enjoyed men the way some women enjoy breathing. “I have enough to worry about.”
Dimi sighed and stroked a long, wayward strand of hair from Mel’s face. “We’ll be fine, hon. You’ll come up with something, you always do.”
Right. She’d just wave her magic wand and figure it all out. And while she was at it, she’d conjure up a happily ever after for all of them as well. “The oven’s down, the gas pump is acting up, and morale’s getting low.”
“They need a phone call from Sally.”
Their gazes met for a long beat.
“You do it this time,” Dimi whispered.
“Actually, I was hoping you could, from-” Mel broke off when Ernest appeared out of nowhere, shuffling past the desk, pulling his noisy cart stacked haphazardly with tools and the ever-present jar for liberating spiders.
Mel didn’t know how many times she’d asked him not to walk through the lobby like that, to instead go around the outside of the hangar, where customers wouldn’t have to see him, but he never listened. At least not to the
