Good Family by Terry Gamble Read Free Book Online Page B

haven’t seen in more than a decade. Their questions, good-natured and wholehearted, inevitably gloss over their true opinions of my absence.
    It is raining, and the wipers barely make a dent. I take back-country roads, coasting past farmland and orchards separated by islands of deciduous woods. When I finally arrive at the airport—a cinderblock building andan asphalt strip in what would otherwise be a pasture—the rain has lifted, and my hair is curly with the humidity. I could spend hundreds of dollars in New York to get this look. The downside of all this humidity is the perspiration on my forehead, the little pimple forming next to my brow. Nearly forty, and I still break out.
    I get out of the car and search the sky, blooming with thunderheads, for Jessica’s plane. Pulling my mildewed foul-weather gear tight, I lean against the door—anything but go inside, where stubble-chinned teenage boys play Doom or Mortal Kombat in a haze of greasy hamburgers.
    “Maddie?”
    A figure is coming toward me, calling my name. I push back my hair and squint into the wind.
    “Jamie,” I say. “Wow.” My old boyfriend, whom I haven’t seen in twelve years, still looks the same. I, on the other hand, have frizzy hair and a zit.
    We awkwardly kiss at each other’s cheeks. It seems a perverse gesture for two people who have once been so intimate. Jamie has a Burberry raincoat slung over his shoulder and a briefcase, and his hair is slicked back, which, in my opinion, looks a little eighties, yet on Jamie, undeniably attractive. No gray in his blond. Darkly tanned. I smile inanely and try to expunge the image I have of him in my college dorm room, completely naked, his bath towel dangling from his erection like the white flag of surrender. The last I’d heard he’d become president of his family’s company. They’d made their money in plastic garbage bags, later expanding into a wider panoply: bags that zipped together, bags that withstood heat, bags that burped.
    Thank God for trash and leftovers , I used to say to him, but the forty-four-year-old man standing before me looks humorless compared to the boy of my college memories, and I doubt the old joke would amuse him.
    “I didn’t know the flight was in,” I say, noticing he still has that mole on his cheek. “I’m waiting for my niece.”
    Jamie scans the sky. “North-worst,” he says. “They’re always late.”
    I used to wish Jamie and I had met for the first time when we were in our thirties instead of when we were kids. If only we’d done some livingprior to meeting each other, our timing would have been perfect. But looking at him now, I suspect I was wrong. My life is leagues away from Jamie’s—like sailboats whose courses diverge by one degree and end up on separate continents. The last time I laid eyes on Jamie, it was from a distance. He was standing on a dock. He had slicked his hair straight back from his face, and was running his hands over it, back arched, his elbows splayed. It was an exquisite gesture—something out of F. Scott Fitzgerald or a Brylcreem ad. I felt I was seeing him through water, like a face on a boat you see as you slip below the surface and sink.
    “You heading out, then?” I ask him.
    “Just got in,” he says, jerking his head toward the tarmac where the private planes are parked. There used to be a line of single-engine prop planes, the occasional twin engine. Now there is a fleet of Learjets and Gulf Streams, one of which appears to be Jamie’s. Ever so faintly, I hear Aunt Pat’s voice saying, You didn’t try hard enough .
    Jamie cocks his head. “Haven’t seen you around here for a while. Why the honor?”
    Eleven years exactly. “My mother.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Well, you know,” I go on, doing something spastic with my hands, “Dana’s here. The cousins are arriving. The typical scene.”
    Jamie smiles. Again, I have that sensation of being submerged. For the first time, I notice his teeth are