Without breaking his pace, Grayson looked back over his shoulder at me and mouthed, Thank you. He turned around again without waiting for my answer.
A month later, back in Afghanistan, Jake would die in a jet crash. And Mr. Hall’s heart couldn’t take it. A month after that he would follow Jake to the grave. So in the end I was glad they had this one last family afternoon together, and I wasn’t loitering around the Hall Aviation hangar, polluting it.
The phone rang in my back pocket. Still watching the Halls walk away, I brought the phone to my ear. “Heaven Beach Airport.” My voice shook. I held the phone at arm’s length and took a deep, steadying breath. Then I started again. I said into the phone, evenly and all better now, “This is Leah. How may I help you?”
three
April
The Admiral’s dead calm voice came over the radio on loudspeaker, announcing to other pilots in the area that he was nearing the airport. The moan of his engine drifted to me on the breeze, but the plane was too far away to see.
I sat in one of the rocking chairs on the porch of the airport office, ready to run onto the tarmac and place chocks around the wheels of the plane after the Admiral landed. But mostly I was preoccupied with staring past my newspaper, past the gas pumps and the flagpole, way up the tarmac at the Hall Aviation hangar. This was the first day since Mr. Hall had died that I’d seen Grayson’s truck and Alec’s car parked there. They must be starting spring break of their high school senior year, like I was. They would spend their free week going through Mr. Hall’s things, his papers and gadgets and inventions and equipment and four airplanes, preparing to sell them off and pocket the dough. They didn’t need to work for him to earn college money anymore. They could take it all and run.
Which was unkind of me to assume. It must be hard for them to sift through their dad’s stuff, hard even to be in the hangar without him or Jake either. More than once during that long Saturday at work, I’d thought about ambling over and peeking in on them to see if there was anything I could do.
Memories of Mr. Hall’s funeral stopped me. The Admiral and his wife had taken me with them to the funeral home. The Admiral’s wife probably made the Admiral ask me whether I needed a ride. Much as I hated accepting obvious charity, if they hadn’t driven me, I wouldn’t have been able to go. Molly had a Valentine’s date. I wouldn’t have asked her to break it for me.
At the funeral home chapel, and later at the graveyard, I stayed close to the Admiral’s wife, like we were family. The Admiral sat up front because he and Mr. Hall had been such good friends, and he was the one who had found the body. So he was next to Alec and Grayson, and neither of the boys ever looked around at me.
They should have. They could have come and asked me earlier today about Mr. Hall’s ridiculous filing system. I would have saved them hours of work. But they wouldn’t ask, and I wouldn’t offer. I’d shared one glimmer of a friendly moment with Grayson four months before when he crashed the Piper. That didn’t matter now. I couldn’t shake the sound of him saying more than a year ago, Why else would that stingy bastard give away flying lessons for free? If I stepped inside the hangar, they would think I wanted something.
As I gazed across the tarmac, Grayson opened the door in the side of the hangar. Though he and Alec were twins, there was no mistaking them for each other. Alec was beautiful, smiling, easy. Grayson was tall, muscular, and a mess, an eighteen-year-old version of Mr. Hall.
By the time Mr. Hall died, he was fifty pounds overweight, his hair nearly pure white like the Admiral’s, his face lined with regret. But the whole three and a half years I’d worked at the airport, a photo of Mr. Hall as a slender fighter pilot had lived at the bottom corner of the bulletin board in his office. His hands were shoved in the pockets of his flight suit. One side of his mouth was cocked up in a lopsided grin. He leaned forward as if any second he would lose patience with the guy holding the camera and grab it away.
On this warm spring day, Grayson wore a T-shirt, cargo shorts, flip-flops, and his usual straw cowboy hat and mirrored aviator shades, but his air of quick impatience was the same as his dad’s. He managed to convey frustrated energy across the tarmac, though he was only banging the hangar door open and retrieving something from his truck. Or, after an hour of work, he was knocking off for the day. Later Alec would complain that he kept working doggedly while Grayson goofed off. The argument might escalate into a shouting match that I would witness from the porch. At least something in their family would still be normal.
Wrong. Grayson passed his truck and kept walking toward me. Or not toward me but toward the building I happened to be sitting in front of. He wanted hangar rental records or flight plans from the office. But he would have to pass me to get inside. He would have to say hello or pretend I wasn’t there, one or the other, on our first encounter since Mr. Hall’s funeral. My fingers ached from gripping the edges of the newspaper so hard out of a strange anger I hadn’t even realized I felt until today.
Grayson and Alec had not been here for their dad. Not to form a family with him for the past three and a half years, not to help him through Jake’s death at the end. I had been here when they weren’t. I had been here because they weren’t. Not in exchange for being Mr. Hall’s girlfriend, but maybe in exchange for filling in as his daughter, he had let me fly his planes. Since he died, I’d lost my free ride. It would have taken me twenty hours working at the airport to earn one hour’s rental in someone else’s plane. For the two months since his death, I’d been as grounded as the day my mom dragged me here to live in Heaven Beach. And now Grayson and Alec would sell Mr. Hall’s planes off.
The instant I had that idea, I was sorry, and my stomach twisted into a hard knot. I couldn’t guess at Mr. Hall’s motives, but I’d liked him because he was kind to me and funny, not because he gave me something I wanted. I felt guilty for putting the loss of him and the loss of my flight time into the same depressing thought. The guilt brought tears to my eyes.
Then I was self-conscious that Grayson, only twenty paces away now, would think I was pretending to mourn his dad. Casually I touched my fingertips to the inside corners of my eyes to remove the tears.
But I shouldn’t have worried what Grayson would see when he looked at me. My rocking chair was three feet from the airport office door, yet he didn’t glance in my direction. Somehow he made swinging the door open and stepping inside the building a huge commotion, as he always did, though he said nothing and carried nothing in his hands. The door automatically hissed shut behind him. The only noises left were the warm Atlantic breeze whispering in the long grass that lined the single airstrip, and the rope clanging against the flagpole.
I had wanted something from him. Even expected a confrontation. To be ignored was a sentence without a period. Like Mr. Hall’s death out of the blue.
Grayson burst out the door again, startling me. The newspaper ripped in my hands. I hoped he hadn’t heard.
But if he had, who cared? He would stomp back across the tarmac to the hangar without looking back, whether I watched him or not.
He surprised me again by sitting in the rocking chair beside mine and handing me a bottle of water from the machine in the break room. I was afraid he’d seen my worn bottle on the counter and was hinting I needed a new one—but through my paranoia about looking poor, at least I could still tell when I was being paranoid. He was paying me back for the bottle I’d given him the day he crashed. Or he was just being nice.
He settled back in his chair and folded his long legs to prop one ankle on the opposite knee, flip-flop hanging from his toes. With his elbows up and his hands behind his head, he looked like the Admiral and the other pilots who sat out here in the afternoons and watched planes take off and land and told dirty stories, stopping in midsentence when I walked by. I wondered whether he was imitating them consciously.
Over the loudspeaker, the Admiral announced his final approach.
Out of habit, Grayson and I gazed past the two-seater and four-seater planes parked on the tarmac, across the grass rippling white in the spring breeze, toward the end of the runway. The Admiral’s plane was visible now, sinking fast over the trailer park.
Grayson said, “So, Leah.”
Carefully I folded the newspaper. There was no way Grayson could know I felt self-conscious about it. I was overreacting. I tucked the pages under my thigh anyway, and I said, “So, Grayson.”
“I know my dad promised he would hire you to fly for him starting this week,” Grayson said. “Nothing’s changed since he died.”
I let my head fall back against my chair and watched him, looking as bored as I could behind my own mirrored aviator shades, while I puzzled through what he was saying. Everything had changed since Mr. Hall had died.
Then it dawned on me what Grayson meant. Shifting forward with my elbows on my knees, I asked, “You’re going to try to run the business? You want me to fly for you?”
“I’m not going to try,” Grayson drawled. “I am going to run the business. And yes. You had a business agreement with Hall Aviation. I expect you to honor it.”
The crack about honor got under my skin. I had no honor? I couldn’t be trusted?
But he didn’t seem spiteful. He met my gaze—I assumed, though I didn’t know for sure, since there were two pairs of aviator sunglasses between us. Slowly rocking in his chair, he watched me watching him. Without seeing his eyes, I couldn’t read a thing in his face. There was nothing to learn from his hard jaw dusted with a few days’ blond stubble, his straight nose, or the straw cowboy hat I’d seldom seen him without. I got the impression he was doing exactly what I was doing, remaining calm like a professional pilot, waiting for me to make a comment so he could size me up and redirect his argument.
For some reason, he really wanted me to fly for him.
I glanced toward the end of the runway, where the Admiral was landing just in time to save me from this uncomfortable conversation. As the white Beechcraft touched down and sped across the asphalt, waves of heat made the plane seem to ripple. I dismissed Grayson with, “I’ve already got a job. Not for this week, but starting in the summer.”
“No,” Grayson said. “You’re supposed to be working for me this week and in the summer.” His voice rose over the engine noise as the Admiral taxied closer.
“Working for your dad,” I corrected him. “I didn’t dream you’d reopen the business. I haven’t heard from you until now. What was I supposed to do, wait around for you just in case?”
“You could have looked up my number and called me,” he shouted above the racket.
“Even if you’d offered me a job, that wouldn’t have meant you’d come through,” I yelled back. “You’ll fly for a week, change your mind, and blow it off to go surfing. Just like you always did.”
The Admiral cut his engine. Just like you always did rang against the brick wall behind us. I cringed at the volume of my own ugly words.
Luckily, I had an escape. Leaving the torn newspaper in my seat as if I didn’t care about it and didn’t plan to steal it at the end of the day and take it home with me, I headed for the Admiral’s plane. I grabbed three heavy sets of chocks from a rack just beyond the porch.
“This time is different,” Grayson called after me.
My left arm could handle one set of chocks, but I’d taken two in my right hand so I wouldn’t have to go back to the rack and face Grayson again. My right arm might pull out of its socket with the weight. I hoped he’d give up on this ridiculous idea and go back to his hangar by the time I secured the Admiral’s plane. I knew Grayson was grieving and I didn’t want to upset him, but there was no way I could afford to give up the summer flying job I’d been promised in exchange for this job he’d made up.
I tried not to groan with relief as I dropped the first set of chocks at the front wheel of the plane and kicked the wooden blocks into place around the tire. The plane’s gyros whined, still winding down, as the Admiral opened his door.
“Nice flight?” I hollered in my friendly airport voice.
“Beautiful.” The Admiral stepped down from the plane and reached toward me for the second chock. “Perfect. Unlimited ceiling. Beautiful day to fly.”
I felt a pang of jealousy that he could fly and I’d been grounded for two months, followed swiftly by the ache of losing Mr. Hall, who loved to say, “Man, what a pretty day to fly.” But I just handed the chock to the Admiral and kept up the polite conversation like I didn’t hurt at all. “Where’d you go?”
“Touch-and-go’s in Darlington, then over in Orangeburg.”
I nodded, put chocks around the third wheel, and hooked a cable to the side of the plane to secure it to the tarmac. When I straightened, the Admiral was staring at Grayson, who still rocked on the porch.
“What’s Grayson doing here?” the Admiral asked me quietly.
“Reopening the banner-towing business, he claims.”
“Really.” The Admiral didn’t use the incredulous tone I expected. His tone sounded more like… admiration. He’d walked a few steps toward the porch before he turned around and called, “Thanks, Leah.”
I gave him a little wave of acknowledgment, then rounded the plane and bent to secure it to the tarmac on the other side. But I listened for what the Admiral said to Grayson, and I watched them from under the curls in my eyes. I expected Grayson would keep rocking in his chair, sullen, and the Admiral would lean over him and say a few soft words of encouragement I wouldn’t be able to hear. But Grayson stood with his hand extended to shake the Admiral’s hand before the Admiral even reached him.