Different Circles

He dropped the phone into the pocket of his sweats and continued his trip to the bar. Only after he had a triple scotch on the rocks in hand and his butt on one of the deck chairs overlooking the dark beach did he flip the phone open again. He navigated the contacts list to Jill’s home number and pushed the send button. About twenty seconds later, the phone began to ring in his ear.

“This is Jill,” her voice said after the fourth ring.

“Hey, Jill. Jake. Just returning your call.”

“Hi, Jake,” she said, her voice neutral, as usual. “Thanks for calling back. Sorry it’s so late. Where are you?”

“In Malibu at Celia’s place,” he said. “We’re staying the night here and then flying to Oregon tomorrow morning to get settled in.”

“Oh...” she said slowly. “That’s right. I forgot you were leaving tomorrow.”

“What’s up?” he asked her. “We got some shit going down, or what?”

“Oh ... no, no shit going down,” she said. “It’s just that that prospective buyer for your old plane—the Chancellor—that I told you about a few weeks ago ... do you remember?”

“Yes, I remember,” Jake said. Jill had been trying to unload his Chancellor ever since he had closed the deal on the Avanti. Selling a high-end used plane, however, was not as easy as selling a car or a house. It was a perpetual buyer’s market since one had to wait for the person or entity who was interested in that particular aircraft to appear out of the ether. “The Korean dude, right?”

“That’s right,” she said. “Jae Luc. He’s a structural engineer from Reno. He specializes in casino construction. I’ve talked to him multiple times now and he is very interested in the Chancellor. He wants to fly out and have a look at it soon.”

“Well, have him come on out,” Jake said. “It’s just sitting there in the hangar at Oceano airport. I take it up once a month or so just to keep it from rotting.” And, though the Chancellor was quite tame and quite slow compared to the Avanti, Jake still enjoyed flying it. There was a lot of nostalgia connected to that plane.

“That’s just the thing,” Jill said slowly, her voice uncharacteristically hesitant. “I kind of told him that ... uh ... he would get to meet you when he came out to see it.”

“You told him that?” Jake asked. “Why would I need to do that? We just need to give Dave at the airport forty bucks and he will open up the hangar for him and can even pull the plane out so he can inspect it.”

“That is true,” Jill said, “but...”

“And I have copies of all of the maintenance records stored in the plane just so a buyer can look them over,” Jake added.

“I know that,” she said, “but he really would like to meet you. He’s a fan of yours.”

“He is?”

“He is,” she said. “He told me that he’s seen you in concert multiple times, both with Intemperance and when you performed with Gordon. He was also at the Tsunami Sound Festival for both nights. He is really interested in the aircraft, partially because it belongs to you, and I think that having you meet him and talk to him about the plane might help clinch the deal.”

Jake felt that Jill was being truthful about this, but he was also detecting something else in her tone, something she was not telling him. He smiled. “Do you have the hots for this dude, Jill?” he asked.

“What? No, of course not!” she said, perhaps a little too aggressively. “We’ve never even met before. I’ve only talked to him on the phone.”

“Is he married?” Jake asked.

“Divorced,” she said. “For more than eight years now. He has a ten-year-old son that he has joint custody of.”

Jake chuckled.

“What?” she asked, clearly exasperated.

“You talked about his marital status and child custody arrangements while discussing the sale of my aircraft with him?”

“It came up in conversation,” she said. “Are you going to be able to do this at some point, or not?”

He chuckled again. It was just so enjoyable to hear Jill flustered. “All right,” he said. “Laura has an OB appointment next Friday afternoon at two o’clock. We’re flying down for it and then staying through the weekend. Can your engineer make it out on Saturday?”

“I’ll have to check with him, but that shouldn’t be a problem,” Jill said. “He owns a Cessna 172 currently and told me he can fly directly to Oceano whenever is convenient for you.”

“Well, pencil it in then,” Jake said. “It’ll be sad to finally sell that old girl, but also happy since someone will be flying her regularly again.”

“It’s just an object, Jake,” she said, not for the first time. “It’s not a he or a she. It’s an asset that is currently costing you more than a thousand dollars a month in storage, maintenance, and insurance fees.”

“I suppose,” Jake said with a sigh. “Just give me a call when you have the time nailed down. Oh ... and not too early please. We’ll really want to sleep in on our Saturday after a week of getting up early.”

“Understood,” she said.