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“Okay, so you have the part, and please tell me you have the tools you’ll need to change out the broken piece and put in the right one,” Kenton said.
“You mean duct tape isn’t going to do the trick for me this time?” I asked.
Laurel gave me a look, but Kenton laughed on the other end of the line. She wasn’t able to hear the conversation with him, but I was okay with that. She would probably think I was crazy if she could. She didn’t know him as well as I did, so she wouldn’t know the way he liked to tease me or give me a hard time with what we were doing.
But, that was okay, too.
It was just a matter of knowing him and his sense of humor rather than getting caught up on the little things that didn’t matter. He might tease me in a way that made it sound like he wasn’t going to care if I put the piece on wrong, but I knew at the end of the day, he wasn’t going to let me fly the plane until he saw with his own eyes that things were how they ought to be.
So, I did my best to focus on his directions of getting it in properly, rather than watching Laurel giving me the looks she was. I would explain to her the way we were with each other when I was off the phone, but I couldn’t focus on what he was telling me to do when I was worried she was going to be offended over the things he was saying.
I carefully followed what he had to say step by step throughout the entire process, then when we were finally done, I told him I was going to hang up the phone and video chat with him to make sure it all looked right.
“Wait, you mean I could have been watching you fuck this up this entire time?” Kenton asked.
“Very funny,” I said. “No, I don’t mean you could have watched, you perv. But you can take a look now and make sure I have it how it should be put together. I know you have a tough time with anything modern, but still.”
“I don’t know why you’re not a comedian,” he told me. “Half the shit you say is so funny, I’m sure I can’t even come close to touching it. But okay. I’ll hang up and wait for you to make this magic video call to me so I can make sure you did it wrong.”
“Fuck you,” I said.
I hung up the phone, and Laurel gave me an uncertain smile.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I know what I’m doing, and so does he. He’s been a mechanic in the business for as long as I have been a pilot, and he has shown me how to do this before. I just want to make sure that it’s right before I put us up in the air.”
“Okay,” she said with a worried look on her face. “I just don’t want to get scared, you know?”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I promised her. “I’ll take care of you. I’m calling him right now to let him see what I did and make sure it’s how it should be. Okay?”
“Okay,” she said again.
I made the call, and Kenton paid attention to the video chat enough to be able to see what I had done with the plane.
“Is that what it’s supposed to look like?” I asked.
“I guess,” he said.
“Come on, you’re on speaker phone now, and you don’t want to scare my client,” I told him.
“Oh, sorry, it’s perfect,” Kenton replied, his tone quick and overly confident. “How’s that?”
“You know you’re not helping,” I told him.
He laughed, but then reassured me that it was how things were supposed to look on the plane. I knew I had a rough idea of how to do it before I asked him to walk me through it, and I was glad that I was doing it the same way he told me through the phone. It meant I had enough memory of how I had done it in the past to be able to fix it properly now, and when he saw it through the video chat, he was able to confirm with me that it was how things were supposed to be.
“Thanks for your help,” I said after he looked it over. “I owe you one.”
“I’ll send you the bill in the mail,” he said.
“Great,” I replied. “Later.”
I hung up the phone, and Laurel and I got inside the plane. I showed her how to start it up, and she sat up front with me when we hit the runway. She looked scared as I got the plane up to speed and we lifted off the ground, but then she relaxed when we were in the air.
“I just didn’t realize how intense it was when you were up front like this,” she said. “I felt it when I was in the back, but to be up here and seeing us go that fast is insane.”
“You get used to it,” I told her. “Really.”
She smiled.
