“I was thinking about emergency landing procedures and flotation devices, but lunch would be nice. What have you got to read over there?”

He handed her a copy of the same airline magazine she’d just been looking at, and she flipped through the pages as if she’d never seen them before. She was nervous. At the airport, she’d stepped out of the taxi and dropped her purse onto the sidewalk and dropped her keys as she was stooping to pick up the purse and dropped her purse again as she was stooping to pick up the keys. If he had to put money on it, he’d guess that she, like the emaciated flight attendant, wouldn’t pass any drug tests with flying colors today. “Take care of Jane,” Thomas had told him yesterday morning. “She likes to boss people around, but underneath, she needs someone to watch out for her.” And then, with great tenderness, as if he were revealing to Desmond one of his wife’s most lovable traits, he said, “She wouldn’t admit it, but she hates to fly.”

A smile had lingered on Thomas’s face for a moment, and Desmond had felt as if a curtain had been pulled aside and he was being offered a glimpse into a hidden corner of their marriage. He’d assumed that Thomas was the one who needed to be coddled and babied—Thomas with his shiny, baby head and his overbearing wife and his mother in the carriage house and his monstrous child whom he adored—but now he saw that was Jane’s perception of things. In reality, it was Thomas, solid and steadfast and dull, who ended up protecting Jane from her own worst impulses. In preparation for this trip, she’d had her hair cut shorter and permed, and it made her look defenseless, the way people always look when their efforts at dressing up produce unflattering results and their desire for beauty is revealed while the beauty itself remains elusive. The way he looked, no doubt, in the overpriced gray Armani jersey he’d bought yesterday in a moment of shopping selfindulgence that instantly soured into self-loathing. The back of Jane’s neck was exposed and the perm was so recent, her hair appeared to fit her head badly, like a hat she’d bought for the color, despite the fact that it was the wrong size. She kept pulling at the curls in back, perhaps trying to loosen them up. She had on a gray flannel suit, just right for November in Boston, even this warm November, but a big mistake for Gulf City, Florida.