“I’m getting smarter. I never was a complainer. I won’t get fat, either—I’ve been trying to promise myself that. Joe, when you call me later about what your partner has told you, don’t talk about anything else. I don’t want any more today. I really don’t.”

He thought that she would know that that would have the opposite effect on him, but he did not doubt that she had meant it sincerely. He had to stay one step ahead just to keep up with her—which was so promising that he had to be a little frightened. They said goodbye and he left the booth and rode the escalator again to the second floor.

He took a table by the window where he could look across the runways and the bay beyond to most of the city of Port Smith. When the wind was right it was possible to watch the airplanes complete their final turns over Bay Slope and come in straight across the water in long descents, sliding and correcting and growing larger all the way. The sun would flicker on the water and catch the metal and glass of the traffic moving up the narrow streets of the Slope; the airplanes would float into that line of sight with still a long way to come, sometimes rising, propellers shining. When the planes touched down you could see the landing-gear assemblies flex, tires flatten, rubber tailing off in smoke. Leland could see it—most people needed binoculars—when it was there; now he recaptured it as he sat by the plastic philodendron that trimmed the windows of the coffee shop. He could hear the clatter from the kitchen as things were being prepared for lunch. He felt himself drifting toward the conversation with Norma, but he could not face it seriously. He had what she had said about the two of them together in a nowhere-anywhere that did not account for her house on Collegeville Road or his business in Manitou or his family or her money. The coffee turned cold, and when the time came to leave, he paused to count the cigarettes in the ash tray. Four. Pretty good going for a man who had been at the table for thirty-five minutes.

Mike was the first passenger through the door of the venerable and now miniature DC-3. He had his topcoat over his arm and he blinked in the sunshine as if he had been flying all night. As he came across the asphalt he smiled and looked back at the old airplane.

“I could feel the wind,” he said. “It came right through the body plates.”

Leland laughed. “All part of the design, fella. You have to understand these things.”

Mike looked around. “We have a lot of talking to do. Where can we go where we won’t be heard?”

Leland told him that the coffee shop was empty.