Love is the Key
"I'm Kara Mills for K. A. K. E. We are YOUR local station, and that's your weekend weather."
"Nice job, Kara!" the chief meteorologist for KAKE TV, usually pronounced 'cake', told her new hire.
"Was I really okay?" Kara asked hopefully.
"Okay? You were great!" her new boss told her.
"Thank you, Jill. Thank you so much! And thank you again for hiring me."
"My pleasure, and after watching your first forecast, I have this sense of...validation for having made a very good choice," the older woman told Kara with a laugh.
Jill Asbury was 43 and unfailingly pleasant. She'd been recognized as the "#1 weather forecaster" the last three years running. Not just the city of Wichita where she was born and raised but for the entire state. Jill was well known in the city not only for her TV job but because she was a very attractive woman who still caused many people, most of them men, to tune in just to see her.
She was tall, blonde, and an avid runner who participated in nearly all local 5k and 10k race events; event that were almost always covered by the station giving her even more exposure.
Even in a city of some 380,000 people, most longtime residents were aware Jill had lost her husband to cancer four years ago. Many also knew that for the last year she'd been dating a very successful attorney named Cliff Sullivan, who was a senior partner at a prestigious law firm that was located just a couple of blocks from the TV station where Jill worked.
She liked him well enough, but she just didn't feel the same way about him she'd felt about her late husband. That thought was often on her mind, but she told herself she was unlikely to ever feel that way about anyone ever again, and all lawyer jokes aside, Cliff was a good, decent man who seemed to be crazy about her. And just recently, Jill had made an accidental discovery that appeared to confirm her suspicions.
"So...any plans for the weekend?" Kara asked.
"Well, just between you, me, and the proverbial fence post, I think Cliff is going to propose."
"What? Oh, my God! Jill, that's amazing!" Kara told her. "May I ask what makes you think that?"
"Well, I wasn't snooping. I wasn't even looking. But Cliff left his laundry in the dryer, again, and when I came over for dinner a few days ago, I folded it and put it in his bedroom. I opened one of his dresser drawers and found a small, blue, fuzzy box from a jewelry store in there and nearly fainted."
"Oh, my God!" the younger woman said again as she gave her boss a hug. "I am SO happy for you!"
Jill wasn't about to say she wasn't quite as enthusiastic, but she still wasn't sure how felt, and saying 'yes' was a very, very big step. She'd known she was in love with her late husband after their second date, and he proposed to her just five months after they met. By the time they'd known each other for a year they were married, and Jill had never regretted a single day she'd spent with him.
Jill had no idea, nor did her husband, that he couldn't have children. She'd have married him regardless, but as time went by, Jill ended up burying herself in her work to compensate for the emptiness in her life. She didn't love her husband any less, but he was busy with his own career and time just kept slipping away.
They discussed adopting several times, but by the time they really got serious, they learned that the nagging pain in his lower back wasn't a pulled muscle or sciatica. It was due to Stage IV pancreatic cancer, the first sign of its presence being the dull ache that wouldn't go away.
Just eight months later he was gone, and at 39, Jill once again found herself a single woman. So she spent even more time at work, and as a result, she'd been promoted to chief meteorologist, a job she truly loved. But she knew that given a choice between her career and the chance at being a mother, she'd give up work in a New York minute. Ideally, she'd be able to do both, but were it an either/or kind of thing, being a mom would take precedence—case closed.
And because of that she was well aware that at least some of the reason she'd stayed with Cliff was that time once again seemed to be running out on her. Yes, women had babies in their mid-to-late 40s all the time now, but that didn't make Jill's sense of urgency any less...urgent.
"Oh, thank you, Kara," she replied, a little surprised by the hug. "He told me he's taking me out to dinner on Saturday, so that's when I expect he'll pop the question. But we're both going to the station party on Friday, so if you hear a lot of noise in our direction..."
"Well, trust me, Jill. My lips are sealed!" Kara told her.
Jill was finished for the day, but Kara would be staying for the 10 o'clock news, something she knew to expect for the foreseeable future. But just like Jill had been many years ago, Kara was willing to 'bear any burden' to get where she wanted to go, and that meant Jill also knew the place Kara wanted to go was where Jill was currently standing. But for now, the job was hers, and that was one of the few things in her life she felt was solid and secure.
With any luck, she might soon find herself engaged, and with a little more luck, a first-time mother before she turned 45, her kind of 'drop dead' date for ever having a baby.
******
"Hey! You must be Dan," a baritone voice boomed.
"Yes, sir."
"Knock off the 'sir' stuff. This isn't the Army, okay?"
"Sorry. Old habits."
"How long were you in?" the older man asked.
"Six years."
"So right out of college then?"
"Yes, s... Right."
"So you were what? A captain?"
"Yes."
"All right, Dan Summers. Welcome to KAKE. Let's get you checked out in our aircraft, shall we?"
"Lead the way," Dan told the senior pilot for the TV station he now worked for as their 'eye in the sky'.
Dan never intended to make a career out of the Army, but he'd stayed a year longer than required because his unit was deploying to Afghanistan, and he wasn't the type of soldier to let the guys he'd trained with bear the burdens of war alone.
So he did 10 months in the God-forsaken hell-hole of the Middle East flying the AH-64 Apache helicopter. Near all of his flight time was spent in close air support missions in support of ground troops in contact with the enemy who needed a little extra firepower in a big hurry.
He came home to Wichita without a scratch, and less than 30 days later had his DD-214 in hand, the paperwork needed to show he'd served honorably. And in a little less than three months after that, he had a job flying the Guimbal Cabri (or 'G2' for short) helicopter, a two-seat light helo made in France that sold for about $400,000 per copy.
He'd spent a month at the station's expense learning to fly it at another location where there was also a simulator, and this would be his first flight with the only other pilot on staff at the station.
Ron King was a 52-year old retired Marine Corps helicopter pilot who'd somehow managed to serve 25 years and never spend a single day in a combat zone. Of course, the military had been mostly out the business of war from the end of Vietnam until the invasion of Iraq, so there were plenty of 'cold warriors' like Ron who'd done what they were told to do and gone where they'd been ordered to go just like Dan had. They'd just never had to do it while knowing the 'thrill' of being shot at by an enemy determined to kill them.
Because of Dan's bona fides, Ron didn't try talking to him like he was some snot-nosed kid. He wasn't deferential by any means, but he treated the younger man with the respect he'd earned even though the older man had been a colonel and would now be his boss.
