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Maggie O’Connell offered no preamble when she strode into Joel’s front office at nine o’clock on a sunny Tuesday morning. "Well?" she asked. "Are you coming or not?"
He glanced up from the pot of industrial sludge that was currently posing as coffee, furrowing his brow. "Uh, what?"
She gave him a disdainful look. "Don't tell me you don't remember."
He spread his free hand in confusion. "Remember what?"
"Fleischman, how could you forget? A year ago today, Soapy...you know."
"Oh." He swallowed, disturbed by the memory of the old man lying in his Sunday suit and polished shoes, a hole right in the middle of his... "What does that have to do with me going anywhere, much less with you?"
"Do you lack all sense of decency and decorum?" Her voice rose. Marilyn looked up from her knitting. "We were the closest thing Soapy had to family out here! He left us everything! The least we can do is visit his grave on the anniversary of his death."
Joel grew even more confused. "We scattered his ashes over some mountains. There is no grave to visit!"
She blew out an angry breath. "Just come on. I have a charter to Skagway this afternoon I need to be back on time for."
Thoroughly engaged in the argument now, he put the pot back on the burner and stepped out from behind Marilyn's desk. "Oh, that's nice. You can come in here with absolutely no regard for my schedule, but God forbid you be late for a charter. Well, sorry to break it to you, O'Connell, but some of us have jobs that actually keep us busy doing important work, and can't just go off at a moment's notice on some crazy jaunt to visit a grave that doesn't even exist."
O'Connell glared at him. Marilyn broke her usual code of silence to point out, "You don't have any appointments until two-thirty."
Before O'Connell could crow about that—not that she didn't already have a triumphant gleam in her eye—he jumped in, saying, "Maybe not, but I have plenty of other things I have to do."
"Like?" O'Connell asked acidly.
He cast about furiously for something that sounded important. "Paperwork, for one."
"There isn't any." If they gave out awards for Most Unhelpful Assistant, Marilyn would win hands down.
"There isn't?"
"Huh-uh."
He thought fast. Unfortunately, he came up with nothing, or at least not nothing O'Connell wouldn't immediately see through. "Doesn't matter. I'm still not coming. I didn't even know the man; why would I go up in your flying metal deathtrap to visit the place where we scattered his remains, all of which have surely been turned into worm food by now?"
* * *
Maggie rolled her eyes and banked to the right slightly harder than was necessary to align the plane with the mountain ridge. "Don’t worry, Fleischman. I gave the engine a full overhaul when we got back. She’s been running perfectly since then."
He made a derisive noise, which she considered herself very big for ignoring. Peering at the peaks below them, she looked for a likely valley to land in.
When they finally landed—no thanks to Fleischman, who freaked out so badly at a sudden crosswind she almost had to abort and try again so he would stop shouting—she hopped out of the plane and looked around at the place Soapy had chosen for his final rest. It would never be as impressive from the ground as it was from the air, but the snow-capped peaks and almost electric green moss that covered the valley put up a good show nonetheless. She inhaled the clean mountain air—it wasn't noticeably different from Cicely’s air, objectively, at least if one wasn’t standing next to the Brick’s trashcans or something like that, but one had to take the visual accompaniment into account. A rush of gratitude that she had the means and ability to visit places like this practically whenever she wanted flowed through her.
"With landings like that, I'm continually amazed you haven't yet become a statistic," Fleischman called as he stumbled out the passenger door. "Did you know the average bush pilot has a seven hundred percent greater chance of dying in an aviation accident than a commercial pilot? I looked it up."
The thought of Fleischman researching anything relating to aviation surprised her, though the fact that he'd used it to score a point against her did not. "So?"
He walked around the nose of her plane, fighting with his jacket. "So," he said, "doesn't that bother you?"
She shrugged. "Not really."
"It's so unpredictable. Uncontrollable. One sudden storm, or bad gust of wind on a landing, or engine failure—" he gave her a sharp look "—and pfft. It's all over."
"Lots of things in life are uncontrollable, Fleischman." She struck out east, because standing here listening to him gripe wasn't how she'd envisioned this going. Maybe walking fast would wind him too much to talk. "Even in medicine. People get sicker when you think they're on the mend, and they get better when it looks like they're dying." She glanced back at him. "You didn't know Soapy was going to kill himself."
She'd been aiming for a nerve, and her remark hit it, she saw, as he shifted his gaze to the ground and pursed his lips. "You got that right," he murmured.
Something in her twinged. She ignored it and kept walking.
They trudged on in silence for several minutes, heading vaguely in the direction of a large exposed slab of limestone on the valley floor. Just before they reached it, he pulled up next to her and asked, "Are we actually going somewhere? Or are we trying to cover all the ground Soapy's ashes might have landed on?"
Wordlessly, she stepped onto the flat rock and sat down. He followed, crossing his legs in front of him. He looked like a kid at camp, she thought, finding it almost...well. "Cute" stretched it, but it was close enough.
"I think we should both say a few words about Soapy. You know, something personal we remember about him."
"I barely knew him!" Fleischman protested. "Over the entire course of our relationship—if you could even call it that—I interacted with him for a sum total of maybe six hours."
"Fine, Fleischman, I'll go first." Maggie stared at the mountains for a moment, gathering her thoughts. "Soapy was one of the first people I delivered supplies to when I started flying. Here was this incredibly independent man, who hunted and gathered almost everything he ate, chopped all his own wood, even tanned his own leather, but he still depended on me for his books, and his yearly pack of underwear, and for any especially interesting news of the rest of the world. I'd never felt so necessary before."
Fleischman didn't say anything. Eventually, she turned to look at him. "Well?"
He threw up his hands. "I don't know what you want me to say, O'Connell. I set his leg when he fell and gave him some physical therapy. Sometimes we talked about the weather."
"You never had any sort of personal conversation with him? Nothing at all? Sometimes I wonder about you, Fleischman. You just don't seem human."
"It's called professional detachment, O'Connell. It ensures my medical decisions are not clouded by any personal relationship I might have with my patients."
"Because it's such a crime to care about someone."
"Actually, it is. Having certain kinds of relationships with patients can get your medical license taken away if something goes wrong." He paused. "Although I suppose in a town of 839 people that's snowbound six months out of the year, any investigative board would be inclined to be lenient."
Neither of them could think of what to say to that. Fleischman slouched back, resting on his palms, while Maggie picked a piece of grass from the tuft at her feet and started twisting it around her finger.
"Soapy did give me one piece of advice, actually," Fleischman eventually offered. "What was the term he used...oh, yeah. He said, 'Feisty women never get boring.'"
She absorbed that for a moment. "That's it?"
"I believe he was referring to you."
"Oh." She stared harder at the piece of grass between her fingers.
They lapsed into silence again for a while, until Fleischman once more broke it. "Do you think we've sufficiently remembered Soapy now?"
"I suppose." They stood up, dusted themselves off, and began walking back to the plane. When they were almost there, she cut her eyes over to him, noticing how he kept up perfectly, even though she was walking at her habitual quick pace. "Hey, Fleischman," she said. "Thanks for coming."
"I wasn't aware I had a choice," he shot back. "But you're welcome."
It had to be a figment of her imagination, or an effect of the engine noise, but as she tilted her plane into the sky, she could've sworn she heard a rough, delighted chuckle echo through the valley below.