“You sure you don’t want anything, Mary Kate?”
“I’m sure.”
“Not even a jelly biscuit?”
“No, I had breakfast already.” The engine idled as they waited to approach the speaker. Out of consideration for the clerk on the other end, Bobby never pulled up until he was ready to give his whole order. It was hard to get mad at him when he usually had other people’s best interests at heart, though sometimes his quirks made her crazy.
“If your plane’s late, it might be a long time before you get anything else to eat.”
“I have some energy bars in my backpack. I’ll be fine.”
“You don’t want to eat all those up, Mary Kate. It’s not like they sell them at the corner Seven-Eleven in Africa.”
She wanted to point out that he didn’t know that for a fact, but that would have been petty. Bobby was persistent about everything, something she had learned to deal with. Still, she was on the verge of screaming at him just to get his fucking coffee so they could go. She usually saved the F-bomb, however, for when she was absolutely furious and wanted him to know it. “I really don’t want anything, thank you. Just get your coffee.”
He finally pulled forward and ordered a large coffee with four creams and four sugars. He didn’t like coffee much, but he appreciated its effects. She took the Styrofoam cup from him and stirred in the condiments as he collected and counted his change.
“This should keep you awake all day.”
“I hope so. I have a meeting at the superintendent’s office this afternoon.”
It was a big deal for him to take off half a day to drive her to the airport in Atlanta. As a school administrator, he wasn’t off all summer like she was. His only vacation was two weeks in the summer, and the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
“I really appreciate you doing this for me, Bobby. I know it’s going to make for a long day.”
“It’s all right. But we could have slept a whole extra half hour if you’d stayed at my place last night. Nobody would have seen us because we would have left before they were up.”
Appearances were important in Mooresville. If her car ever sat out in front of his apartment overnight, the whole school would have been whispering about it the next day. That made it hard for them to have much of a love life, but they had managed to spend a few nights together since last summer when they started dating. Most of those nights were before she started training for the climb, and all of them were at his place. He said he felt more comfortable there than at her apartment.
“It worked out better this way. I didn’t sleep much last night.”
“You worried about something?”
“No, just excited I guess. I got up in the night and went through all my stuff again just to make sure I had everything.” She wanted her words back as soon as they left her lips, because she knew he would ask about the—
“Are you wearing the money belt I gave you?”
Damn it. “No. It pinches my waist.”
“But you’re going to put it on when we get to the airport, right?”
“Bobby, I didn’t bring it.”
“Mary Kate!” That was his I’m-about-to-give-you-a-lecture voice. “You didn’t even bring it? I bought it special for you.”
“It isn’t comfortable. I tried it when Deb and I went to Rabun Bald. It gets in the way of the strap on my backpack.”
“I can’t believe you. Your things aren’t going to be safe in that backpack. What if somebody steals it, or…” By the look on his face, his mind was turning over all the sinister possibilities. “Or you drop it off a cliff or something? There goes your passport, your money, your plane ticket.”
She wasn’t about to tell him they weren’t taking those things along on the hike. Tom had explained the procedure at the hotel for safeguarding their things while they were gone, but she knew Bobby would go ballistic to find out she was entrusting a bunch of Africans to watch her belongings. “If the tour company thought we needed one, I’m sure they would have recommended it.”
He sighed, too indulgently for her taste, but she was used to it. He always thought he knew best. “Fine. But if you lose something important, you’re going to be mad at yourself for not wearing it.”
“I hope you wouldn’t wish something like that on me just to be able to say I told you so.”
“Now that’s just silly. You know I’m not wishing anything bad to happen. If I had my way, you wouldn’t even be going.”
She bit her tongue again. The next sixteen days were hers, and she didn’t want to have to spend them thinking about a big fight. “You know as well as I do that staying home is no guarantee something bad won’t happen. Look what happened to Paige Riley.” Paige was Carol Lee’s boyfriend’s cousin’s wife. “She went out to get her mail one day and got shot by a deer hunter. She never knew what hit her.”
“That’s just it. We don’t have any control over things like that so we have to be careful whenever we can. And that means not deliberately making reckless choices.”
Her patience nearly ended then and there. Even Bobby seemed to sense that he had stepped over a line.
“I’m not saying you’re being reckless, Mary Kate. But I love you, and I can’t help but worry about you doing this. I just wish you had agreed to let me come too.”
She sighed and felt as though six months of frustration came out with her breath. “Why? You said yourself you had no interest in seeing Africa or climbing Kilimanjaro. I’m not afraid to go by myself, and whether you believe it or not, I’m pretty sure I can manage to keep up with my things and get on the right bus, so you don’t have to worry the whole time I’m gone.”
He fixed his face in a pout, which set her off even more. She was tired of putting his feelings first, always being diplomatic to soften the blow to his ego.
“Really, Bobby. I’ve been looking forward to this trip since February. I’ve worked hard to get in shape for it, and I’ve planned every single detail all by myself. It may be nothing to you, but it’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done, and I haven’t even been able to talk to you about it because all you can think about is how it affects you. You haven’t encouraged me. You haven’t asked me any questions or shown any interest at all. All you’ve done is belittle the whole idea and try to make me feel like an idiot who can’t even cross the street by herself.”
She knew she had finally struck a nerve because the tips of his ears were turning red and his jaw was set like a brick. Her normal modus operandi was to bail him out after a disagreement by changing the subject just to take the sting away, but this time she wanted him to feel it.
Bobby waited a full minute before speaking. “I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted.” She knew she could have pressed him into groveling, but Bobby usually took criticism to heart, and when he apologized, it was genuine. It made her wish she had told him a few weeks ago that he was ruining her fun. Instead, she had concerned herself with his feelings.
They drove along in silence until veering south on Interstate 285 toward the airport. She already dreaded the awkward parting.
“Your plane leaves at eleven, right?”
“Five till.”
He chuckled. “I bet you’re not too excited about what happens after that.”
She recognized his joke about her mortal fear of flying as an attempt to lighten their collective mood, and she appreciated it. “Okay, that part I haven’t been looking forward to as much.”
“What time do you get there?”
She retrieved her travel documents from her backpack and thumbed through to the itinerary. “I left one of these with Mom if you want to make a copy and keep up with where I am. My plane gets into Johannesburg at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, which will be two a.m. for you. And then at eleven thirty, I board the Air Tanzania flight for Kilimanjaro. That’s two and a half hours, but there’s another time change.”
“So when I get up tomorrow at seven…”
“I should be landing at Kilimanjaro.”
He shook his head and laughed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I wish I was going just to see you drag your butt off that plane tomorrow.”
“I’ll be comatose.”
“You’ll be dragging your butt up the mountain too.”
“Maybe not. I have all day Sunday to rest. We don’t leave on our hike until Monday morning.”
“I remember…something about the plane schedule.”
“Right. This flight doesn’t go on Saturdays, so I had to go a day early. It should work out fine though. At least I’ll be rested up and acclimated a little to the time change by the time we leave.”
“And how many days is your hike?”
She would have given anything for him to have asked these questions back when she was dying to tell him about it. At least he was making an effort now, even though it had taken her getting angry to get him to do it. “It’s supposed to take us six and a half days to get to the top and one and a half to hike back down. And we summit in the middle of the night, so that means we get there Sunday morning.”
“How come they make you climb it at night?”
“Somebody said it was because the sun melts the ice and makes it too slick to walk on. If we go at night, it’s easier to walk.”
“Except you can’t see where you’re going. They ought to just give you those pickaxes so you can get a grip in the ice.”
To hear him talk, it was clear he hadn’t listened to a word she had said about the hike. “I picked this time to go because we’ll have a full moon. The tour company said we should be able to see everything, but we’ll have flashlights if we need them.”
“I hope you get good weather.”
“Me too.” Just because she had spent two hundred dollars on rain gear didn’t mean she wanted to use it.
“Do you know anything about the people in your group?”
“Not much. There are fourteen of us from all over the country, but I don’t know any more than that.”
“I hope they’re nice.”
“I’m sure they will be. And I bet we’ve all spent the last six months the same way, getting in shape and deciding what to take, so we’ll have that in common.”
They passed a directional sign for the airport, and Bobby moved into the exit lane. Mary Kate was glad they had smoothed things over. She could get on the plane now and push it out of her head, thinking only about Africa for the next two weeks.
“If you want to, you can let me out at the curb. Then you can get back to Mooresville and not miss too much work.”
“You know I’m not going to just dump you out on the sidewalk, Mary Kate. I can be a little late. It’s not like I don’t work nights and weekends at home.”
That much was true. The principal at their school was nearing retirement, and dependent on Bobby for things that required details or patience. There was little doubt Bobby would take over soon as principal, quite an accomplishment for a guy who was only twenty-nine years old.
They followed the signs for the parking garage, finally securing a space on the fourth level. Mary Kate’s only experience with this airport was a couple of times dropping people off, so she began to feel as if her adventure was already underway.
Bobby opened the trunk and reached for the yellow canvas bag. She grabbed the smaller bag and backpack.
“Mary Kate, how are you going to carry all these bags to the top of that mountain? They must weigh sixty pounds.”
“All I have to carry is my backpack. We have porters for everything else.”
“That’s all? Just your backpack?”
“Just the stuff I need during the day.”
“Wow, I don’t think you ever told me that part. You shouldn’t have any trouble at all getting to the top if you don’t have to carry all your stuff.”
“It still isn’t going to be easy, Bobby. It’s over nineteen thousand feet, and we have to do it in temperatures below zero. The last mile of that is like walking up stairs that don’t ever end, and the oxygen just gets thinner and thinner.”
“But all you have to do is keep walking.” He set down the Summit bag so he could put the parking ticket in his wallet and she picked it up, slinging it over the opposite shoulder from the lighter bag and backpack. “I’ll get that, Mary Kate.”
She was thoroughly annoyed again, and ignored him. “I can manage these. Why don’t you find a staircase and try to walk up it for seven hours? It should be a piece of cake for somebody like you.”
“Now don’t be like that.” He hurried to catch up with her, lifting the Summit bag from her shoulder. “I was trying to be encouraging, because I know you’re going to get to the top. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but so what? I will have accomplished something that’s no big deal to you. Won’t I be proud?”
“Man, I’m just stepping in it right and left. I’m not trying to—”
“You know what, Bobby? Talking about this is a bad idea. Why don’t we just forget it?” She didn’t want to leave this way. He wasn’t going to miraculously get it all of a sudden, and she decided on the spot that it no longer mattered. This was her trip, not their trip. “Let’s just get these bags checked.”
They found the ticket counter for the flight to Johannesburg and joined the line.
“What all are you going to do while I’m gone?” She listened half-heartedly as Bobby described his schedule for the next two weeks—work, Sunday dinners with her family and a couple of recreation league softball games. Her thoughts wandered to the advice her mother had given her back in high school when she first started dating, that guys liked to talk about themselves, so she should try to think of interesting questions. Since women had trained them to be this way for generations, it didn’t seem fair to complain now.
They finally made it to the front of the line, where Bobby had the good sense to stand quietly as she handled her own check-in. The agent said the flight was on time and would begin boarding about an hour before departure.
Then she watched her bags disappear through the X-ray machine, hoping they were headed where she was. There was plenty of time to kill, but she was eager to get her trip officially underway. In her mind, that didn’t happen until she was on her own. “So I guess I should head on toward the gate.”
“Yeah, and I need to get on back to work.”
They walked slowly toward the entrance to the winding security line where only ticketed passengers were allowed. Bobby took her hand and squeezed it, looping his fingers through hers.
“Look, Mary Kate, I’m proud of what you’re doing, no matter what stupid things I might have said. If you get to the top of that mountain, that’s fantastic. But if you don’t, that’s fantastic too. I’m going to love you either way. The biggest thing is for you to take care of yourself.”
She turned into his arms. He always gave good hugs, the kind that made her feel warm and safe. If she knew one thing for certain about Bobby, it was that he would never deliberately hurt her, no matter how clumsy his words or deeds.
“I know this is important to you, Mary Kate. But when you get back, we need to start thinking about the things that are important to both of us.”
Though she knew he hadn’t mean anything bad by that, it still rubbed her the wrong way, like so many other things he had said this morning. If it was important to her, it should be important to both of them.
“I want you to think about us while you’re gone. When you get this out of your system, we’ll go off to Myrtle Beach so we can talk about our future.”
Out of her system? Like an intestinal bug? She didn’t want to think about their miserable relationship for the next sixteen days, her first and probably only trip to Africa. She wanted to go and have a good time.
“I really love you, Mary Kate, and I think we ought to be engaged by the time school starts.”
She pushed back from his embrace to read his face. This was it, then. The second and last time he would ask—which meant she needed to answer this time. She would have preferred to see a loving or hopeful gaze…something sweet and maybe even intimate. What she got was earnest, the ever-practical Bobby Britton.
“I should go.” The growing security line appeared as her imminent salvation.
“I love you, sweetheart.”
“I love you too.” She hugged him again hard and kissed him quickly on the lips. Then she turned and walked away, resolved to break up with him once and for all as soon as she got home.