Different Circles

“I know so,” he said. “And that makes me extremely glad that you enjoyed When I’m Not Home.”

“Why is that?” she asked, glowing at his praise.

“Because now I know it is going to sell like mad,” he told her.

“You know that just because I liked it?”

“Well, I already suspected that it was going to be a big hit—V-tach’s first of many—because that is my job, to find and produce good music. But there is always that little doubt in my mind before each new tune hits the airwaves. Am I wrong? Am I losing my touch? You are the first listener I have encountered who has actually heard the tune and you like it. My mind is now at ease, and for that, I thank you.”

“Uh ... you’re welcome,” she said, pleased. And then her mind went back to the lead singer. “When you say gay though, is he completely gay?”

“Completely and thoroughly,” Uncle Jake assured her.

“That really is a bummer,” she said.

“But not ironic,” Uncle Jake said, causing both of them to crack up.

When the laughter died down she looked meaningfully at her uncle. Something had occurred to her. “Did Aunt Laura used to walk around in her bra and panties in front of him?” she blurted. The thought of being able to walk around freely in your underwear in front of a guy without embarrassment was strangely intriguing to her.

Uncle Jake laughed again but did not answer the question. She got the feeling that he did not know the answer himself. Maybe she would ask Aunt Laura later—not in front of her parents, of course.

They arrived at the airport and Uncle Jake went about pulling his radical airplane out of its hangar and doing a bunch of the preflight stuff that needed to be done. She followed him around, keeping silent as he had requested, and he explained everything he was doing as he did it.

“Okay,” he said when the checks were finished. “You stay here and make sure no one flies off with my plane. I’m going to go file the flight plan. Shouldn’t take but five minutes or so.”

“You got it,” she promised.

He drove off in the Beemer and she wandered around the plane, looking at everything, paying particular attention to the strange front wings mounted just in front of the cockpit windows. She then read all the various warning stickers that were mounted near the sensors and the panel openings. After that, she examined the little doodads that stuck out here and there. She remembered Uncle Jake calling the little tubular doohickeys that were mounted on both sides of the cockpit and just below and in front of both main wings pitot static tubes and said they were what measured airspeed and angle of attack—which he further explained meant the angle the plane was going as it moved forward through the air. He had pulled little covers off of them during his walk-around. All of the covers had long red ribbons dangling from them with the words REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT written in large white letters. That made sense to her. Though Uncle Jake had not specifically said so, she intuited that the pitot static tubes worked by having air flow into them. If they were covered in flight, that air would not flow and they would not be able to tell the pilot how fast he was going and what angle he was flying up or down. If you did not know that information while in flight, that could probably cause all kinds of weird problems—some of which might end with you smashing into the ground or the ocean. But why would you have to cover them when you were not flying? Wouldn’t it be easier to just leave them uncovered all the time so you didn’t have to worry about whether or not you remembered to remove them? She decided she would ask Uncle Jake about this once they were up in the air and that sterile cockpit rule was no longer in effect.