Story 1- Airport

On a better day she might have been beautifull, today she was merely exausted. Her normally glossy brown hair was slowly easing out of its usual tight bun, and a few strands had escaped to hang limp and oily about her face. There were lines in her make-up, and she had black eyeliner smudges on both of her lower eye lids. Her blouse was wrinkled. Had she been a man she’d probably have had a tie hanging loosened around her neck. However, she was not a man, and since she’d felt no need to make a fashion statement at the business meeting she was currently supposed to be attending, she had avoided that cliché sign of fatigue. She wanted to take off her pricy uncomfortable shoes. She wanted to curl up into a ball and sleep for days. Unfortunatly she was sitting on an uncomfortable chair in a noisy airport, and sleep didn’t seem like it would be coming anytime soon.

Her phone rang again. She really ought to just turn the damn thing off, it was annoying everyone around her, but she took a strange sense of comfort from the ringing. Sure, he was only calling because he was pissed that she’d left again, but he was calling. Things had been too tense in their house lately, too quiet. She'd been going into work early and staying late, picking up bigger accounts, attending meetings in other cities. He'd been worried, he thought she was working herself too hard, they’d been fighting.

Maybe she should answer it. Maybe it would be fine. Maybe they would laugh about the unreliability of the airlines during the winter. Maybe she’d tell him that her meeting had been canceled due to the snow, and that as soon as the planes got up and running again, she would come home. Maybe that would be enough this time. Maybe not. It rang again.

“Hello?”

“Liz? Damn it. Where the hell are you?”

“ Sorry. I’m still in Chicago. The planes got stuck. It’s the storm. It’s letting up a little though, I might be home for dinner.”

“You could have at least picked up your frickin‘ phone. You might have been splattered on the side of 96 for all I knew. You didn’t even write this one on the calendar.”

“Sorry. It just came up. Vick was supposed to go, but his kid got sick and someone had to take it.”

“And that ‘someone’ had to be you? “

“I’m sorry.”

“God, I don’t want your apologies, I just want you to come home. You can’t make it better by working all the time Liz! It won’t bring your mom back.”

Water started to impede her view of the flight schedules.

“It wont bring the kids home. Things change. You have to come back and deal with it.”

There was a tap on her shoulder, she looked up into the concerned eyes of a flight attendant.

“Excuse me mam, your flights boarding.”

“Lizzie?”

“I…I have to go. I’ll see you later.”

She closed the phone. God she was exhausted.