Honeymoon In
Vegas
by M. V.
Montgomery
We had booked our seat
assignment on a charter flight, which was about
to depart, but my new wife thought there still
would be time to hit the slots. I waited in alarm
as the hostess asked reserve passengers to board.
“I guess we’ll have to wait till later,”
I told her.
She looked at me in
disbelief. “Then you seat is not guaranteed,”
she informed me. “Standby seating is first-come,
first-serve.”
Dejectedly, I sat down in a
plastic bucket seat to wait. I didn’t know
my new wife very well, had been fooled a couple
of times when I scanned the crowd for her face.
She had short blond hair and a smile that could
imply just about anything. I’d met her just
the month before. Now it was already time to end
the honeymoon and return home.
She showed up an hour later.
“Did you lose all of our money?” I
asked her, point-blank. “Not all of it,”
she replied, looking startled.
I explained the situation
and we waited. Then, along with the other stand-by
candidates, we were told we would have to board
the plane out on the tarmac—in the rain.
There was a collective groan at the gate.
Outside, holding carry-on
bags over heads, everybody stampeded toward the
plane. We knew there were only a few stand-by
seats to go around. My wife and I were fairly
agile and did feel somewhat entitled—so we
made it to the front of the crowd.
But then the pilot,
playfully, taxied the plane away from us, and we
had to race after it. He did this a couple of
times, causing more passengers to drop out of
contention for a seat.
It also led to a parting of
ways for my wife and me. I doggedly kept up the
chase with the others while she went back to try
her luck again on the machines. I never saw her
again.
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