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boarding pass to the next customer in line and then glanced back at the man pleading with Captain Porter. She liked Captain Porter; all the girls did. The airline hired only military pilots; the younger ones thought they were such studs, always bragging on themselves and expecting every female employee to drop her skirt on command. The older ones, like Captain Porter, were different. They were respectful of the girls, probably because they had daughters the same age, and they never bragged on themselves or what they had done in the military. The younger pilots thought Captain Porter was some kind of god; they said he had been a real top gun in some war she barely remembered from history class in high school and had been held prisoner for like, three years. Karen shuddered at the thought: no MTV for three whole years!
    The man was now pointing up at the CNN monitor. Karen leaned around the counter to see the monitor. On the screen was the face of a little blonde girl under CHILD ABDUCTEDand above RANSOM SUSPECTED. She was cute. Karen looked back at Captain Porter, fully expecting him to send the man packing with a sympathetic expression and a routine shrug— What can I do, I just work here?— the universal response to any passenger complaint quickly mastered by all airline employees. But Karen stood slack-jawed and oblivious to the passengers waiting in line when Captain Porter dropped his flight bags and hugged the man like he was his long lost brother then released him, picked up his duffel bag, and carried it over to Karen.
    “Karen, stow the colonel’s gear,” Captain Porter said. “And bump someone in first class.”
    Karen could swear Captain Porter had tears in his eyes.

8:13 A.M.
    Over her mother’s objections, Gracie had come to visit him every few months and for a month each summer, for five years now. But for her visits, the morning Ben would not answer Buddy might have already arrived. He needed her and he knew why; she needed him but he did not know why. All he knew was that God had bonded them together in a way he neither understood nor questioned: his life was inextricably tied to hers, and somehow, hers to his.
    Ben now sat in the back seat of a yellow cab doing seventy on the Dallas North Tollway, a turbaned driver behind the wheel, the city noises beyond the windows, a ferocious pounding behind his eyes. Outside, a concrete world raced past; inside, his stomach stewed over the thought of never seeing Gracie again. He felt as if he might puke the peanuts-and-coffee breakfast he had on the plane; and if he continued to focus on the four little Dallas Cowboy dolls standing on the cab’s dashboard, their oversized helmet heads bobbling around, he surely would. So he leaned his head back and closed his eyes; his thoughts returned to Gracie’s last visit. They had sat in their rocking chairs on the porch and watched the sunset; after a period of silence, she had said, “Mom says you’re a drunk.”
    He had said, “She’s right.”
    “But you don’t drink from those whiskey bottles when I’m here.”
    “I don’t need to drink when you’re here.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t know. I guess I only think good thoughts when you’re here.”
    “Then that settles it: I need to be here all the time.”
    He had smiled. “That’s real nice of you to offer—”
    “No, Ben. I mean it. I want to live here with you.”
    “Honey, this is no place for a girl.”
    “Then you come live with us. It’s a really big house.”
    “That’s no place for me. Once you’ve lived in a jungle, you can’t live in a subdivision.”
    Gracie was quiet, then she said, “She still loves you.”
    When Ben opened his wet eyes, the cab was pulling up to the entrance guardhouse at BRIARWYCK FARMS, AN EXCLUSIVE GATED COMMUNITY, or so read the sign embedded in the tall brick wall. Black iron gates with TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED across the bars blocked their way. Ben recalled the front doormat at his childhood home in