Airports always have such a wind-swept, desolate look to them. It's accentuated when there aren't any people around, and you've just the industrial architecture to accompany you.

Andrew slouched in a vinyl chair, meditated on the decade-old cigarette burns. His Calvino novel sat beside him, unloved, requesting his attention. There is a certain threshhold of attention that books require, Calvino more than most, and this, combined with the impending arrival, put a barrier between Andrew and "Invisible Cities." The silence was not complete, but the woman typing away behind the desk took no meaningful notice of him, and vice versa, so her noise was background noise, and not interactive.

The door swung open, and a girl clattered in. She wore cowboy boots in a manner that indicated an early demise of their heels, smacking them against the decorated tiles on the floor, ("1908-1958 Fifty Years Of Air Safety FAA") with a kind of gay abandon. She didn't exactly galumph, Andrew decided, but she would have swaggered if she weighed about fifty pounds more. She was maybe thirteen, wearing faded blue jeans, with ominous brown splotches and speckles about the cuffs, and an oversize blue sweatshirt, bearing the faded insignia of the US Marines. She walked to the window, put her nose against it, walked back, looked at Andrew, sat down with her back to him facing the runway. Stood up, walked around the chairs, back to the window. Stared at a Cessna 172, turned, looked at Andrew again.

"What time is it?" Her voice was suited to hollering at horses.

He shrugged. "Bout half an hour till the plane lands, I think."

She nodded and sat down facing him.

"I'm waiting for my gramma." She tugged on a frizzled piece of brown hair, rolled it and twisted it between her fingers. "She's coming to stay with us for a while. My parents are both at work so they had me drive the truck here to take her home. I'm only fourteen but the truck's got farm license plates, so no one will bother me. We've got farm plates so we don't have to pass emissions tests. I'm a pretty good driver. We've got a Ford."

"Oh," said Andrew.

"I've always kinda wanted to fly a plane, too, but I don't think my parents want me to, and I guess it's expensive." She looked up at the wall, at the rental rates listed. "Thirty five dollars an hour? Geez. Mom only gets paid seven dollars an hour. I guess they won't go for that. I can drive cars, trucks, a tractor, a motorcycle, and ride my horse. Pretty good, huh?"

"Yeah," said Andrew. "What sort of motorcycle?"

"My brother's, a Kawasaki 125. It's bright green, except now it's all muddy. I got it stuck in a cow bog. Who are you waiting for?"

"My friend Scott," Andrew replied, and was rewarded with a subtle internal shiver at those words.

"My gramma's name is Ilene, she was born before World War II. She's really sick, I guess, and couldn't stay at home any more. She was in the hospital for a while, but I guess she must have gotten better. It'll be neat to see her again, she's from North Carolina and we never see her. Dad moved us to Cheyenne coz the Air Force wanted him here, and we just stayed."

Well, it was a distraction, Andrew thought to himself. He asked her about school, her name, ("Mary, but I hate it"), her horse, where she rode her motorcycle (her POTHER'S motorcycle, she reminded him) and thus primed, she rattled on at length. Mary discussed her potential boyfriends, with reasonable disgust, and her growing doubt of her parents' omniscience in matters political, moral, and scholastic. Andrew prodded her along that path with some sense of smug glee, asking casual questions about why her parents did the things they did. He didn't believe in missing an opportunity.

The Beech Super King had touched down and was approaching the end of the runway when Andrew noticed it; they both stood to watch. It taxied in, jouncing on soft tires across the weed-raised, rough tarmac, and came to a whirring, airy halt adjacent to the building, to the east, out of sight beyond the brick wall. Andrew and Mary walked forward a few steps, wanting to get close without being in the way.

The door opened, propelled by a stocky blond guy in a uniform sort of outfit, followed by an elderly woman that reminded Andrew of a spider who'd just bitten a lemon. Her arms and legs were stick-like, her dark orange blouse hanging to show the bulges of her elbows, while her abdomen was distended to the point of interfering with her walker. She had the most bitter expression Andrew could remember ever seeing.

Mary said, "Gramma?" tenatively, and the pale blue eyes of the old woman swiveled to Mary and the woman pursed her lips in a simulacrum of approval.

"Oh, wow," whispered Mary.

"I'll get her bags." The stocky bloke nodded at Mary and walked back out the door.

Then Scott walked in and Andrew felt as if he'd been hit in the face by a glass of cold water. Scott held a khaki dufflebag in his left hand, and a backpack was across his right shoulder, and when he reached out to touch Andrew's hand, Andrew felt as if the talons of Lachesis were clawing at him.

Scott grinned a sudden flash of twisted lips; "I know this is a shock, Andy," and collapsed into a chair. Andrew imagined that he could hear the clank of bone on the chair. Scott breathed heavily, raspingly. "What a flight." From across the room, Mary's grandmother stared at Andrew venomously, as the nameless blond guy walked in with two battered Samsonite suitcases and deposited them in front of Mary.

A slim woman with long brown hair and a blue uniform walked through the door from the tarmac, and disappeared into the back of the building.

Andrew quirked his lips into a quick and crooked smile; walked over to Mary. "I'll take your bags to the truck, ok?" He picked them up. "What's your Ford look like?"

Gramma coughed, and whispered, "Don't you touch those bags..." but her words got caught in wheezes and coughs. Mary looked really shaken and scared.

"Mary, what does your truck look like?" Andrew looked directly at her.

"It's blue... It's an F-150."

Andrew took the bags, walked over to Scott. "I'll be right back." Grinned at him, and walked outside. The Ford was parked diametrically from his car; the door was unlocked. He put the suitcases behind the seat, nestling them into the crumpled blue canvas that was already there. The upholstery was cracking where sunlight fell, and a broken plastic strip glued to the dashboard read, "Jesus is the light of the W..." There were a pair of mud-encrusted black rubber boots lying on the passenger's side of the bench seat.

He closed the door, didn't latch it the first time, pushing it with the force he'd use on his Toyota, so he slammed it the second time, and it closed like a vault door. The insignia on the front left fender said, "F-150 Custom" and he wondered what was custom about it.

Halfway back to the terminal, (such as it was) he met Scott, walking across the lot towards him.

"Let's get out of here." Scott said quietly. He licked at a cold sore on his upper lip.

Andrew nodded and led the way to his MR2, opened the door for Scott, who sat down and put his head back and looked like he was thoroughly exhausted. Andrew walked around the front of the car, ran his finger along the red hood, had to unlock the driver's side door.

"Oh, sorry, Andy" said Scott. "I'm not up to much. Why'd you help that evil old bitch?"

Andrew shrugged. "Her granddaughter and I talked before you landed."

"Perjorative old biddy. I don't know which of us looked worse, the other passengers musta thought that was the flying equivalent of a charnel house."

The key slid into the ignition with a ripply sound, lights flickered on, KBCO became liminal as the tachometer rose and wiggled to life.

"Guess that's what really gets me down more than anything else," Scott continued. "Don't you hate prejudiced, bigoted, unsypmathetic morons?"

Andrew sighed and smiled at Scott, and Scott grinned back.

"Including friends who are prejudiced, bigoted, and unsympathetic, like I've always been," Scott finished, and made a wry face. He put his hand on Andrew's arm, and the light touch of his fingers pressing against the hair was enough, and Andrew remembered those fingers shuffling tarot cards, with an assurance and strength and movement totally absent in the shaking digits now lightly brushing against his forearm. Andrew's breath caught in his throat and he closed his eyes against the past.

"I'm really sorry, Andy." Scott whispered. "You shouldn't have to go through this."

Andrew sighed again, "I'm sorry, too, Scott, but I'm glad you came back."

The bottle of Grand Marnier was half full. Quart of water in the hot pot, full can of hot cocoa mix, fire blazing, a copy of "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid" in the VCR. Andrew sat and listened to the house, somehow partly unwilling to start the movie, to disturb the quiet. Outside, a rumbly V-8 approached and then shut off, detonated for a second. "Carbon build-up," Andrew thought.

His doorbell rang. He sat, silent, thinking, "Oh, please, not now, of all times, please let me be alone." It rang again, and he sighed, and, forced by that social drive that marks humans as pack animals on the instinctual level, he rose, walked across the rug, and opened the door.

Mary stood there, in a long dark blue dress.

Andrew blinked at her owlishly, shook his hair back out of his face.

"May I come in?" she asked quietly.

He stepped aside and waved his hand somewhat aimlessly, as she entered, walked into the living room, looked around, walked over to the wall to look at a picture of Scott.

Andrew closed the door and followed her, stood beside her for a moment to recall that day, Scott lying on the ground laughing hysterically and Andrew caught in mid-leap, covered from his right shoulder downwards in flour. Andrew turned away abruptly and sat in the chair, staring at the static snowfall on the TV screen. Mary turned away, too, and picked up a copy of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" that lay on the table. She paged through it randomly and then sat down on the couch opposite Andrew.

They existed in exhausted silence, comfortable but tiring in its own right.

"I saw your car when I was at the mortuary." Mary finally said.

Andrew halfway smiled at the implications of that statement.

"Mary, I'm sorry for you."

She swallowed. "Yeah, well me too," her eyes flicked up to make quick contact with his and flicked back to the picture, "sometimes I really wonder who gets to go to Heaven."

Andrew exhaled explosively. "Well, I wonder if there IS a Heaven."

"That's what I was trying to say, I guess," Mary replied. She frowned, then, and looked tenative. "Wouldn't you rather, well, like women?"

"Wouldn't you rather be a beautiful blonde with a face like Sharon Stone?" Andrew replied.

"Well, yes, I would." Mary looked confused.

"Would you really? Wouldn't you prefer it if people thought you were beautiful like you are, rather than having to force yourself to fit their desires?"

Mary sat quietly for a while, then stood up to look at his bookshelf. She pulled out Tacitus, "The Annals of Imperial Rome," and flipped through it, as if looking for illustrations.

"Want some hot cocoa?" Andrew asked.

"I'd love some."