It wasn't. “I didn't change my name when we married. But after Sam . . .” that loving smile again, “. . . died, I guess, Gwendolyn changed to Wendy, then our granddaughter, Jennifee's little girl, said it: ‘Gra'ma Dee.’ Everybody else agreed, while I was there.”
“While you were there?”
“Her granddaughter still does, and Jennifee.”
A few questions those words did raise. All of them personal, not the sort the pilot felt much comfortable asking.
“I read about him,” he said.
“Stage Entertainers?”
He nodded.
“Let me guess. You found it by coincidence.”
She found his story not surprising but delightful, the book squashed back behind the Aviation shelf of a usedbook store in a town he
never intended to land in, when he was absorbed with the question of hypnotism, on the day he met Gwendolyn Hallock Black after a lifetime not knowing she existed and hours before he was to meet her for the second time when meeting her was spectacularly impossible.
Their salads arrived, hers barely touched for his questions.
“What is it,” he asked, “with you and coincidence?”
“You haven't figured that out.”
“It's got something to do with hypnotism.”
“You have figured that out. Do you remember my hypothesis, which you've just today helped become my theory?”
“There's no such thing.” He felt like a monkey mystified by large kindergarten puzzle-pieces, dead simple to fit together, unable to make it work.
“Look at anybody meeting anybody significant in their lives, well along in the game. With your permission, may I ask . . . ?”
“Of course.”
“How did you meet your wife?”
He laughed. “That's not fair! Catherine took a leave of absence from NASA, drove from Florida to California with a detour through Seattle, stopped at the little airport where I had landed after a hailstorm . . .” He halted at the edge of a long story. “You're right. It was not possible for us to meet, but it happened.”
“That was . . . ?”
“Ten years ago.” It had been a lovely marriage, he thought. It still is.
“I say there's no such thing as coincidence, you say there's no such thing as destiny.”
“Coincidence is destiny.” He said it as a joke.
She set down her fork, crossed her arms in front of her. “Do you know what you just said?”
“No coincidence,” he said. “Sounds like you may not be as out-there as I thought you were.”
“Remember to put it together, please,” she said, no smile. “If it weren't for your miseducation, if it weren't for the suggestions you've accepted, if it weren't for your conditioned awareness by the culture you chose . . . you could walk through that wall.”
He rankled at the you. “What about Dee? Are you miseducated?”
“I was, indeed.”
“Not now?”