McCarthy smirks at me as Rainbow squishes his jaw. “She wishes.”
“Damn right she does.”
“You can’t let your mom steal this one from ya too,” Granny Mavis tells me in what I can only assume she believes is a conspiratorial tone, but really, she’s shouting to the whole yard.
“I don’t have to have eyes to smell how aroused she is.” Gardenia, another of the naked and elderly, nods to my mom.
“So your mom smells like sex, and you smell like failure.” McCarthy whispers in my ear.
I jerk away.
“Granny Mavis, please go take your seat over there.”
The old woman ignores me. She’s patting a hand down McCarthy’s broad chest. The billionaire grunts when Granny Mavis squeezes his crotch.
“It’s funny,” she drawls at him through the cigarette smoke. “When you’re one hundred and three, they let you do that.”
“Is this the part where I get locked in a shipping container for the next five years?” McCarthy murmurs toward my neck.
“Sorry, I know it seems like a cult…”
He huffs. “Not enough hungry children for that.”
“I’d like to say they mean well, but…”
“You get the hell up out of my seat, there, Gardenia!” Granny Mavis hollers, her cane flying.
Zephyr eases the elderly interloper off the tall wood bench he’d handcrafted.
“We’ll keep this short,” I tell McCarthy. “Granny Mavis used to be a test pilot for Aurora Pacifica Aerofreight, which your company bought. The post is going to be a fun throwback to history.”
“Show him my photo, Zephyr! Show him my glory days.”
McCarthy whistles appreciatively at the black-and-white photo of my great-grandmother posing like a pinup model with her plane and a giant bomb with a lipstick kiss on it.
Granny Mavis preens as I attach wireless microphones to her and McCarthy.
“I was smoking hot. I slept my way through half the airborne division. I can add you to the list, too, sonny.” She waggles her drawn-on eyebrows.
“No!” I shout as I hit Record on my camera.
McCarthy’s face lights up with pure delight. “I’m more impressed that you tested those weapons. You girls were insane. Those 1940s weapons were held together by prayers and chewing gum. You ladies had balls of steel.”
Zephyr has his phone camera out and shoots me a thumbs-up as he records their interaction from another angle.
McCarthy takes Mavis’s wrinkled hand and kisses it. “It’s an honor, ma’am.”
“That’s more like it. Finally, I’m treated with a little respect around here.” She thumps her cane on the ground.
Without me even having to beg, plead, threaten, or prod, McCarthy offers his arm and slowly leads my great-grandma over to the wooden bench on the porch.
Something in me warms toward him when he kneels right down on the pine-needle-strewn deck.
He looks up at Mavis with boyish delight as she answers his questions about her thoughts on various weapon-systems inventions during World War II, how much input they let her have, and what it was like flying one of those ancient planes.
“They were workhorses, let me tell you. Not like these flying Game Boys you young people have today with your satellites and shit. I took one of those birds all the way up to thirty-nine thousand feet.”
“Amazing.”
