Ronnie
For eleven years I have been the most famous astronaut in America, and the highest I have ever been off the ground is a bouncy castle in Mims.
Ignition, ladies and gentlemen, we have ignition. The birthday boy blows out seven candles with everything a seven-year-old has got, and the seven candles think about it for one second and light themselves back up. Twelve kids in paper helmets turn round and look at me. Like I did it.
It's four o'clock on a Monday in the birthday room at the back of the Countdown Diner in Titusville. The rain's coming down on the flat roof like somebody pouring rice on a snare drum. And I am Commander Mack Tolliver, for two hundred dollars an hour. Two-fifty with the jumpsuit. My name's Ronnie Lark, and I live over a tyre shop.
"They came back," the birthday boy says. He says it to me personally, the way you'd tell the police.
"They did come back, Cadet," I tell him, in the voice. Mack's voice is warm and slow and it starts laughing before it gets to the joke, so the joke can't fail. "That's what we call a relight. Happens to the best of us. Happened to me over the Indian Ocean once. Take a big breath."
His name's on the cake, but the cake's in cursive and the frosting ran, so he's been Cadet since three o'clock and he loves it. He takes a big breath. He blows. Out. Up. Back.
"Tolliver's taller," says the uncle.
There's always an uncle. This one's by the ketchup with his arms folded, a big pink man in a fishing shirt who has been waiting all afternoon to say that, and now he's said it, and twelve kids look from him to me like it's tennis.
"Sir," I say, still in the voice, "you're absolutely right. I've been on the Moon diet. Low gravity. You lose an inch a week. I've been training very hard."
The kids laugh. The uncle doesn't. "He's six-two."
"Six-one and a half, and he slouches in photographs. I'll tell him you said so." And here's the bit, folks, here's the thing they don't teach you: when a man heckles you, you don't fight him, you hire him. "Folks, every mission needs a flight director. A big serious man at a big serious desk who decides if we go or no go. And look at this. We've got one. By the ketchup. Sir, would you stand up?"
He doesn't stand up. Four kids grab his arms and he stands up.
"Flight," I say, "this is the commander. Are we go for candles?"
He looks at his sister. His sister is filming. He says, "You're short."
"Flight says we're short. Copy that, Flight. Short on breath, folks, that's what he means, everybody take a big breath for the Cadet. Flight, are we go?"
He holds out for longer than you'd think. Then, through his teeth: "Go."
Out. Up. Back.
By the fourth relight Flight is saying go without being asked. By the sixth he's leaning on the table with both fists like there's a rocket on it. By the eighth he says, in a deep, rough, very serious voice, "Commander, we have a candle anomaly," and the kids scream, and I swear to God this man has never been happier in his life. By the tenth relight he's doing the countdown himself, slow, gravel, ten, nine, eight, with the whole room on it, and on zero I pick the candles out of the cake, all seven, and drop them in his iced tea.
"Splashdown," I say.
And the crowd goes wild. A tiny wild. Twelve kids, a mom, and a man in a fishing shirt laughing at his own drink.
Through the arch, out in the main room, in booth six, there's a woman who hasn't laughed. Booth six is the one built like a capsule, a little round hood over the table and a porthole in the wall where the menu goes, and she's sitting in it in a blazer so wet it's gone two colours. She's watched the whole thing. Every relight. She hasn't ordered and she hasn't clapped. She's doing somebody waiting for a bus, and she's doing it badly, because nobody waits for a bus at the Countdown. She checks her phone every forty seconds, I can see the light on her chin, and then she checks me again, top to bottom, like the phone told her to.
The mom gives me an envelope. The uncle stops me at the door of the birthday room and puts a twenty in my hand, folded small, like it's a secret between pilots.
"Still short," he says.
"Thank you, Flight."
I've got my kit bag on my shoulder and I'm heading out to check the van. It's got Mack painted on the side, eight feet of grin, and a finance company in Melbourne would like it back.
I go past booth six. And Booth Six says, "Commander."
I stop. Of course I stop. Somebody says Commander, I stop.
"Sit down a minute," she says.
"Ma'am," I say, in the voice, "I'd love to, but I've got re-entry at five."
"Sit down, Mr Lark."
Nobody calls me Mr Lark. The repo man calls me Mr Lark, on the phone, like he's selling me a timeshare. I tell her so, and she says, "Then he and I have something in common. He's in a tow truck in the Waffle House lot across the road. I'd stay a minute."
I sit down. Across from her. In the capsule. My knees hit the underside of the table, and my elbow lands on the big red button in the middle of the plastic dashboard, and the booth says, from a speaker somewhere under my knees, in Mack Tolliver's voice, "T minus ten."
It's my voice. I recorded it for the owner six years ago for a year of free breakfasts. It does the whole countdown. You can't stop it.
"Della Quint," she says. "I do crisis work for Halyard."
Halyard. Halyard is Mack's company. Halyard is the Moon flight. Halyard is the banner on the front of the Publix that says Good Luck Mack in letters you can see from the highway. My heart does a thing. A gig thing. "Is this the dealership? Because I already told them Thursday. The Chevy place in Cocoa, he can't make it, they want the ribbon cut, I'm cutting the ribbon. As him. If Halyard's got a problem with the ribbon I can be very respectful with the scissors."
"Three," says the table. "Two. One. We have liftoff, folks."
"Mack Tolliver died last night," she says.
And I laugh. Okay? I'm not proud of it. I laugh because it's got the shape of a bit, it's a setup, there's a beat after it where the punchline goes. "Okay. Okay, that's good. Who sent you? Was it the guy who does Neil Armstrong at the visitor center? Because he's been sore at me since the county fair, and I said at the time, buddy, there's room on the Space Coast for two men in silver suits, and he said there's room for one."
She doesn't laugh. She doesn't do anything. She waits for me to run out, and I run out.
"At home," she says. "Last night. Nobody knows."
"How?"
"His heart."
I touch my wallet. It's in the zip pocket on the leg of the jumpsuit, over my knee. I don't take it out.
Here's where I'm supposed to say something, and the thing I've got, the thing I always have, is him. So I do him. I don't decide to. I say, "Well, shoot," in Mack Tolliver's voice, slow and warm, with the laugh starting under it, the exact sound the man made on the news when they asked him how it felt to be the first commander of anything, and it's perfect. It's the best I've ever done it. And there's nobody to do it for any more.
I cry. Not nicely. Not one tear down the cheek with the light on it. I cry like a kid on a bus. I've still got the paper helmet on, the Cadet put it on me during verse three, and it's sliding off over one ear. There's nothing to wipe my face with except the placemat, a map of the solar system, and so I blow my nose on Saturn. I say, "Sorry, Saturn," because I can't not.
She makes a noise. Through her nose. A laugh, a short one, out before she can stop it, and she looks furious about it. She looks out the window at the rain like the rain did it.
"I've got him Thursday," I say. "The Chevy place. They paid a deposit. Who's going to tell the Chevy place?"
"Nobody," says Della Quint. "That's the point. For eight days, nobody tells anybody anything."
She lets me go for a while. She's not unkind about it. She's not kind about it either. She looks at her phone, and she looks at me, and it isn't how people look at somebody crying. It's how you look at a used car. Walking round it. Checking the dents.
"Are you done?" she asks.
"No."
"Okay." She checks her phone. She gives it maybe ten seconds. "Okay so, are you done now?"
And I laugh, which is worse, because it comes out wet. "Yeah. Yeah. Mostly."
"Fine. Here it is." She puts both hands flat on the table. "Halyard's flight goes Tuesday week. Four passengers, around the Moon and home. Mack was the commander."
"I know. Everybody knows. It's on the Publix."
"It still goes."
"Without him?"
"With him." And she looks at my face. Not at me. At the face. My chin, my cheekbones, the grey I put in at the temples every second Sunday with a toothbrush.
"No," I say. "No, no. I can't fly. I can't fly a kite. I had a kite once, it's still in a tree."
"The ship flies itself. The seat's for the cameras and a licence clause."
"What's a licence clause?" I ask.
"My problem," she says.
"So push it back. Do it in the spring. Do it when there's a real astronaut lying around."
"Can't," she says.
"Why can't?"
"Because I'm not paying you to ask me why." She leans in. The hood of the booth makes her voice close, like we're in a phone box, like we're in an actual capsule. "Eight days. You put on his suit. You walk out in front of the cameras, you wave, you sit in his seat, you say nothing, you come home. Four hundred thousand dollars."
She gets as far as the four, and I say yes.
She stops. "Christ," she says. She looks at me like I've spilled something on her.
"I haven't finished," she says.
"I know," I say. "Yes."
"Four hundred thousand dollars," she says, all of it this time.
"Yes. I said yes before the money. Write that down."
"You said it during the money," says Della.
"During. Before. The money was barely in the room." And then my mouth, always a few seconds ahead of the rest of me, stops, and the rest of me catches up and stands there breathing on it. "Around the Moon."
"Around it. Not on it. Nobody's landing on anything."
"Around the Moon," I say again, and the Cadet goes past the end of the booth on his dad's shoulders with a helmet that says Mack Tolliver on it in my handwriting, and points at me, and I lift two fingers off the table, because the rest of my hand isn't working.
Outside, the rain's let up to the kind you can walk through if you've already given up. We go out past the cardboard Mack by the door, hand up in the wave. I don't look at him. The Countdown's sign is a neon rocket twenty feet high on a pole, buzzing in the wet.
The van's at the far end of the lot, nose out, with Mack on the side, wet, grinning at the Waffle House.
"Leave the damn van," says Della.
"It's got my whole life in it."
"Then your whole life can sit in a parking lot for a night." Her car's a grey rental with a dent in the passenger door. She opens the driver's side and her phone goes, and she looks at the screen, and she answers it standing in the rain with the door open, and she says, "Royce. Hi. Yes."
And her voice goes up. Half a step, about. And smooth. All the edges off it, all the Atlanta, all the corners that were in it in the booth. "Yes. He's perfect. No, very discreet. Absolutely. I'll have him with me first thing." She listens. She says, "I said I'll have him," and for one word the corners come back, and then they're gone again. "Of course. Bye now." She hangs up.
"That's your phone voice," I say.
She's halfway into the car. "My what?"
"Your phone voice. You go up a half step and somebody irons you. Your real one's lower. It's got Atlanta in it and it swears more. You flatten it out for him. Whoever Royce is, you flatten it right out for Royce."
She looks at me over the roof of the car for a long second. The neon rocket buzzes. She doesn't say I'm wrong.
"Don't do that," she says.
"Do what?"
"Listen to me."
"It's all I do. It's the job. You listen first, then you do the voice." And I do hers, just the "Royce. Hi. Yes," up the half step, and she laughs through her nose again, and she's angrier about this one than the first.
"Get in," she says. "I'll drive you home. Your van can sleep here. Tomorrow there's paperwork, and a doctor who's going to put a needle in your arm to make sure you're not on anything, and a suit fitting, and you're going to smile through all of it and say nothing."
"I'm very good at nothing."
"You are terrible at nothing. I've watched you for an hour. You did ten relights."
I get in. My knees hit the glovebox. It's that kind of car and I'm that kind of tall. Mack's kind, minus an inch and a half. I sit there in his jumpsuit, in the paper helmet, which I've forgotten about, with the uncle's twenty in my pocket and my nose still running, and she starts the engine and doesn't put it in gear.
"One more thing," she says. She's looking straight ahead through the windscreen at the rocket, in the real voice, the low one. "Sully Kessel. The flight director. He thinks this is insane. Mack's oldest friend. He'll hate you."
"Everybody hates me at first. It's a whole thing. I win them round. I won the uncle round."
"He's not the uncle." She puts it in gear. "He knew Mack better than anybody alive, and you're going to sit across a table and do Mack at him."