Scissor Link by Georgette Kaplan (good books to read for adults .TXT) 📕

“Should I even be here? I’d hate to catch what you’ve got.”

Janet snatched the wine from her. “You know, if some man came in and tried to coddle me the way she did—”

Elizabeth affected abject shock at Janet’s effrontery as she let herself in. “It’s cute! And she didn’t mean anything by it. And honestly, you’re not going to have twentysomething hotties fawning over you forever. Not unless you’re secretly Sean Connery.” She glanced at Janet suspiciously. “Say something with an ‘s’ in it—but not an ‘h’ after the ‘s’.”

“The food’s getting cold,” Janet advised her, politely ignoring that Elizabeth had slipped out of her heels.

The meal was filling. The taste decent.

“You’re holding up well,” Elizabeth said, stepping in just before the silence could get unbearable.

“I am?” Janet replied absently.

“Yeah. No empty beer cans strewn around or anything.”

Janet got into the spirit of things. “I swept them under the rug,” she said, smiling in dim thanks to Elizabeth for trying to cheer her up.

Elizabeth laughed suddenly. “I just pictured you dying of consumption and Wendy Cedar nursing you back to health.”

“Consumption is fatal half the time,” Janet said.

Her salad was dry, she realized. She reached for the dressing and noticed it was out of reach just before Elizabeth passed it to her.

They drank Elizabeth’s wine and listened to Janet’s records. Karen O, Janet thought. At least Elizabeth couldn’t complain about her musical tastes being out of date. Although perhaps listening to Ms. O sing torch songs to her loneliness wasn’t the best way to reassure Elizabeth about her state of mind.

“Elizabeth?”

“Yeah, Jan?”

“What was I like with Roberta?”

Janet hadn’t seen such a quizzical expression on Elizabeth’s face in a long time. “What do you mean?”

“How did I seem? Compared to how I am now?”

“What, you mean did she rip your heart out, are you a shadow of the woman you once were, was she your better half—no, bullshit, you’re fine. You’re great.”

Janet nodded. “Because if I was happy then, I should be sad now. That stands to reason.”

“Oh, we’re reasoning now,” Elizabeth said, holding out her glass to have it filled. Janet did so and she slumped back in her seat. “It’s okay, Jan. I get it, you’re hurting. It’s not some big mystery that has to be solved.”

“But I don’t feel any different.” Janet couldn’t take the sympathetic concern that Elizabeth sent her way, so she stared at her pristine wineglass. The blood-red Barbera overlaid her reflection. “I feel exactly the way I did when she was here.”

“So you feel numb. Big deal. There’s no right way to get divorced. As long as you’re not hiring a hitman, who cares if you’re not throwing glasses of whiskey into a blazing fireplace?” Elizabeth sipped her wine. “We can try that, though, if you want. I’m not a whiskey girl.”

Janet almost could’ve smiled. Almost. “Do you think someone can be sad without realizing it?”

“I think there are a lot of things people cannot realize. I also think the way you’re feeling now can color everything. If I took you back a year and showed you us laughing together, would you say you were crying on the inside?”

Janet drained her glass instead of answering. When she looked at it again, her reflection was waning. Barely there at all.

“Would you like me to spend the night?” Elizabeth asked. “It’ll be fun, we can braid each other’s hair and talk about boys.”

“I think I’ll pass. I’d hate for you to show up at work tomorrow in yesterday’s clothes.”

“Well, if you think I don’t know how to look good in yesterday’s clothes, you are delusional.” Elizabeth got up, wineglass hooked on her finger, and took the bottle to give Janet a refill. “I’ll go put the cork back in.”

Janet waved her wineglass slow-motion in the air, picturing herself flinging it into a roaring fireplace with a dramatic burst of answering flames, cathartic and cleansing. She preferred to drink it, though.

“It would be interesting, wouldn’t it?” she called.

Elizabeth was putting her shoes back on. “What?”

“Someone nursing you back to health. That never happens after you’re a child, with your parents all over you. You go to hospitals, but it isn’t the same.” She shrugged. “I suppose it’d probably get irritating, being hovered over like that.”

“You never got sick?” Elizabeth asked. “Roberta never made you Jello or anything?”

“I got sick. I just didn’t want to bother her.”

Janet stayed at work late the next night, waiting for a memo from Testing. It would need her notes as soon as possible. As she waited—the office closing down around her, windows going dark one by one—she started on her new book.

She wasn’t four pages in when she read it; if it was a snake, it would’ve bitten her. She was struck by the same image the author, Carl Hoffman, had been: the Kee Bird lying on the frozen lake where it had crashed, silver as a dollar coin lying on the sidewalk, a grand old dame who hadn’t aged a day save for her bent props and missing rudder. Its dodo bird-like mascot straddling the nose beside her title in crooked yellow letters. The panes of glass still intact. The tail a bright red, like a bloody hand reaching up for help.

We banked hard to the left, and swung around for another look in stunned silence. “You know,” said the pilot finally over the intercom, as he swept eighty-five feet above the Kee Bird, “I heard that some guys came to the plane last summer and actually got an engine started.”

“No way,” I said, mesmerized by the ghost of an airplane I had worshiped for years and which, as far as I could remember, I had never seen in real life.

The pilot circled for another low pass. “Apparently they changed the spark plugs in one of the engines, connected it to a battery, and it fired right up. And they’re coming back this summer to fly it out.”

The Kee Bird touched a powerful nerve, like hearing a song