Excerpt
“What do you mean I missed my connecting flight?”

Never had I raised my voice to my parents—or to any other adult, for that matter—but I couldn’t have screamed much louder at that forty-something Skyfly Airline representative if I’d tried. She may have been joking, but I didn’t feel like laughing. I couldn’t have missed my flight.

“The plane was here and ready to leave at 1:19. Your baggage was aboard, but you weren’t.” Although her voice remained calm, she resembled a flashing danger signal and siren that screamed from head to toe, Kim Hartlinger, it’s not my fault you’re the most irresponsible eighteen-year-old I’ve ever met.

“So,” she said, “your flight left without you. We paged you a number of times first, but you never responded.”

“Is that what those announcements were?” Curiosity and defensiveness made me forget my initial irritation. I was too naive to know how concerned I should have been.

“I heard somebody paging a Kimmy Somebody-or-Other, but nobody calls me Kimmy—and nobody ever will. If that guy said Hartlinger, I misunderstood him. His accent was thick, like a TWI—talking while intoxicated—or maybe like someone who isn’t a native English speaker. Don’t tell me announcements like that are made somewhere off-shore.”
Telephone support for our home computer was, and I hated calling there for that very reason.

Oblivious to everything I’d just said, Millie Q—I’d glanced at her name tag a moment before—had the nerve to smile, revealing an excess of leathery wrinkles that wood filler would have smoothed out better than her rainbow of cheap and ill-applied makeup.

I could also see a mouthful of teeth that needed braces so badly I was tempted to refer her to my orthodontist. I doubted, however, that she could handle the commute from the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport to Georgia on a regular basis, even for something as important as making those fangs look friendlier.

Besides, I wasn’t in a mood to do her any favors. If she was teasing about missing my flight, her humor was sick and her attitude the ultimate in unprofessional. If she was serious—I was battling hard to reject the niggling possibility that she was—I needed to consider my alternatives. Normally, Scarlett O’Hara and I could put our worries on hold until tomorrow; but I had to reach San Diego early enough today to join the mission team to Mexico or turn around and go home again.

I could have panicked then, but I didn’t. Missing my flight would be a minor nuisance comparable to short periods of bumpiness due to mild turbulence. It couldn’t be a real problem like a major blizzard closing the San Diego airport in mid-July and preventing the plane from landing.