“Not today, Champ.”

“Not today? How ’bout another one? I got Miss June.”

“I’m good.”

His narrowed eyes told me he knew something was wrong, but he said nothing. He pinned a disposable sanitary strip around my neck and flapped the smock high into the air, letting it settle gently around my shoulders.

“So, how would you like your hair cut today?”

“Whatever you feel like, Champ.”

He paused from pumping up the chair’s pneumatic lift with his foot, wearing his usual spotless sky-blue Mexican wedding shirt, his own luxuriant black hair combed straight back, and looked at me hard.

“Every time you come in here, I give you a Playboy. Every time, I say, ‘How do you want your hair cut?’ You say, ‘In silence,’ cuz you want to catch up on your ‘reading.’ Every time. Today, no Playboy, no silence. What’s going on with you, brother?”

“It’s been a bad couple of weeks.”

Primo was an excellent barber. Not so much because of the way he cut hair, but because he knew when to talk and when not to. He shrugged, then turned me in the chair, facing the big wall mirror, and went to work. I closed my eyes, my head filled with the comfortingly distracting perfume of talc and bay rum, and slept.

“All set, boss,” Primo said after what seemed like no more than a couple of minutes.

He pivoted the chair and handed me a mirror so I could check the back.

“You do good work, Champ.”

Off came the smock and the sanitary strip. I stood, got out my wallet. A Primo haircut ran fifteen dollars. I realized I only had nine dollars. I offered him what cash I had.

“Looks like I still owe you six, plus a tip.”

“Keep it. You need it more than I do.”

“I’m good for it. You know that.”

He waved dismissively as if to say, “Don’t give it a second thought,” and walked me to the door.

“It’s about your lady, isn’t it?” Primo said.

I swallowed down the golf ball in my throat and nodded.

“You’re not gonna see her again, are you?”

“No.”

Primo rested a hand on my shoulder. “My wife passed three years ago. Cancer. We was married thirty-one years. Trying to forget that one woman is like trying to remember somebody you never met. You don’t never forget her, OK? But you move on, you know what I’m saying? You got no choice, brother. None of us ever do. You feel me?”

“I feel you, Primo.”

He smiled and struck a classic boxer’s pose — slight crouch, face guarded by raised fists, the left slightly ahead of the right. His two front teeth were whiter than the others. I wondered how many times they’d been punched out of his mouth when he was a younger man.

“Remember,” Primo said, “fists high, elbows low, and always, always, keep your head moving.”

“Thanks, Champ.”

We shook hands and I left, but his words of advice lingered long after. Savannah was gone. I could never forget her. I had to move on.

A big red digital “0” was flashing on my answering machine at the airport. No new messages. No new students. My flight school was dying. Truth be told, it had been for a long time. The pragmatic side of my brain screamed that it was long past time to fold the tent. Hell, I was no businessman. What was I thinking, trying to start a small business amid the nation’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and in a town that already had three other flight schools up and running? The quasi-optimistic side, the side that rarely weighs risk to reward, the side which made me a good fighter pilot and an even better special operator, told me to give it another week. Keep hope alive.

Larry had solved the Ruptured Duck’s electrical issues, refusing to charge me. An alternator wire had frayed. The repair, he said, had taken him twenty minutes.

“Not even worth my time, filling out a bill,” he said. “You owe me nothing.”

I knew that the real reason Larry didn’t bill me was because he felt sorry for me. He nodded, “Yeah, whatever,” when I promised to pay him back someday. He’d heard it before. Many times.

Mrs. Schmulowitz felt sorry for me, too, and insisted on giving me a few bucks. “Just to tide you over,” she said, “until you get on your feet.”

She’d made similar overtures in the past, which I’d always politely but firmly turned down. You have to be pretty desperate to start taking handouts from little old ladies. But with my bank balance approaching negative integers and a monthly retirement check from the government that barely covered my rent, I didn’t have much choice but to say, “Thank you.”

I went flying, if only to distract myself.

The air offshore at 3,000 feet was cool and smooth. The Duck may have been nearly as old as I was, but he took to the sky that morning as if he’d just come off of the assembly line in Wichita where he’d been born more than forty-five years earlier. No creaking. No groans. Every flight instrument functioning solidly in the green as we burned lazy eights in the sky.

We orbited surfers and wakeboarders and, farther out, sailboats running with the wind, their spinnakers puffed out over their bows, in full bloom. We spotted no whales, unless you count dolphins, and we saw hundreds of them, a huge pod all surfacing and diving as if one, churning the ocean into creamy foam.

Shimmering blue sea. Green mountains, seemingly soft as lambs’ ears. And, along the water’s edge, extending inland among sun-kissed hills and arroyos, the Spanish-tiled roofs of Rancho Bonita. For an hour, I allowed myself to forget everything but how to fly an airplane and what a privilege it was to see the planet from so rarefied a perch. Sometimes you forget how beautiful the world really is, if you allow it to be.

Whatever euphoria I felt lasted about as long as it took me to land.

By the end of the second quarter, Tampa Bay was trailing Carolina 24-3. The Buccaneers lined up for a twenty-nine-yard field goal attempt with no timeouts left and the clock about to expire. Good snap. Good hold. The kicker stepped into it, planted his right foot, swung his left leg… and missed.

“That ball was so far right,” Mrs. Schmulowitz remarked, “it nearly took Rush Limbaugh’s head off. More brisket?”

“No, thanks, Mrs. Schmulowitz. I’m beyond full.”

“How ’bout more green beans? I got enough in there to feed Patton’s army.”

“I couldn’t handle another bite. Everything was delicious, as always.”

We were sitting in her living room, on her blue mohair couch, in front of her old Magnavox that hummed like a transmission tower, watching Monday Night Football with the volume turned down and eating dinner off of TV trays, like we always did.

“I know you saved room for dessert,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said. “I made German chocolate cake. If you don’t eat some, we’re gonna be in big trouble.”

“Why is that, Mrs. Schmulowitz?”

“Because it’s a giant cake, that’s why. You remember that little guy from ‘Fantasy Island?’ Always running around, yelling, ‘Da plane, boss. Da plane’? This cake is so big, that little guy, he could hide in it, no problem.”

“How could I resist? I’ll take a small slice.”

“Now, you’re talking, bubby.”

Off the sofa she sprang like no octogenarian I’d ever seen, a wonder of nature and superior genetics.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Mrs. Schmulowitz said, “I got you something.” From behind a sofa cushion, she extracted a small box wrapped in blue foil paper with little stars of David. “Call it an early Hanukah present.”

It was a gold Cross pen with my name engraved on it.

“So you can write the next chapter of your life,” she said.

“You’re the greatest, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”

I tucked the pen in my shirt pocket as she padded into the kitchen and started telling me about her first husband, the one with the sweet tooth, and how she bought him a dozen Hershey bars for Hanukah one year, and how he ate them in a single sitting, which prompted innumerable cavities, along with an onset of adult acne that ravaged his face like a Biblical plague. Truthfully, though, I wasn’t listening. I was thinking about where I’d been, and wondering where I was going.