Текст книги "Such a Rush"

Автор книги: Jennifer Echols

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

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.

The Admiral grasped Grayson’s hand and simultaneously slapped him on the opposite shoulder. “Good to see you back.”

“Thank you, sir,” Grayson said. He might even have been looking the Admiral in the eye. Like a business owner at the airport, not just the son of one.

The Admiral’s voice dropped lower, his words more private, and I felt almost guilty for overhearing the end of his speech: “… good men.”

“Thank you,” Grayson said again.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” The Admiral disappeared through the glass door into the office. After using the bathroom and buying a pack of M&M’s, which his wife did not allow in the house because of her weight struggles, he would get into his Infiniti parked on the street side of the building and drive home to their condo on the swanky end of Heaven Beach, where they would take an ocean-side stroll together before dinner. It seemed so foreign. I couldn’t imagine being retired. Or having enough money to do what I wanted.

Grayson rocked slowly in his chair again, waiting for me to finish tying down the plane.

There was just so long I could dawdle over a metal hook attached to a ring sticking through the asphalt. I stalked back toward Grayson, but if I had any idea of slipping past him into the office without continuing the argument, he ruled that out. “Who is your other job with?” he demanded, stepping into my path and towering over me.

This was none of his business, but I felt bad about the Just like you always did comment. I felt worse now that the Admiral had been so nice to Grayson. I was trying to get rid of Grayson as politely as possible. Without stopping, I walked around him and opened the door. “I’m flying a crop duster for Mr. Simon,” I said over my shoulder before I swung into the office. I hoped now Grayson would take no for an answer, and he wouldn’t follow me inside.

He was right behind me. “Leah.” He trailed me all the way across the lobby, down the short hallway, to the open doorway that led behind the reception counter.

Turning around at the threshold, I took off my sunglasses, tossed them on the counter, and eyed him. He seemed to get the message that the area beyond the doorway was my private territory. He walked back down the hallway, into the lobby.

But instead of leaving, he leaned over and rested his elbows on the counter like he was there for a long discussion. “Leah,” he said in a coaxing tone. “What do you want that job for? Every organic fruit you’ve ever bought and eaten will be negated times a thousand with each pass you make spreading chemical filth over a field.”

I’d never eaten an organic fruit as far as I knew, except maybe at Molly’s parents’ café. I wondered if they tasted different and whether I would be able to tell. I definitely hadn’t bought one. My mom would die twice if I paid that much for a banana. Grayson and I were from different worlds.

“You’ll spend all day every day breathing that crap,” he said. “Aren’t you worried about your health?”

I laughed. “Yeah. That’s why I’d rather spend my summer flying an airplane built this century.”

He gaped at me in mock disapproval. “We keep up the maintenance on our planes. We have to. You know the FAA says any plane has to fly like it did when it was built.”

“Yours were built in the 1950s.”

“It was a very good decade for airplanes. It never bothered you before. And you’re completely trained in banner towing. You didn’t pay anything to learn it. Isn’t Simon making you pay for training? A lot of those crop-dusting jackasses will charge to teach you how to do it. They’ll promise to hold a job for you. You drop thousands of dollars for training and then your job mysteriously disappears.”

I stared at him like he was an alien life-form. On what planet did an eighteen-year-old girl living in a trailer park have thousands of dollars to drop on anything, much less crop-duster training? I said, “No, I’m not paying for it.”

One of Grayson’s eyebrows tilted up sharply behind his sunglasses. “How’d you manage that arrangement?”

I thought I heard something ugly in his tone, but I didn’t want to call him on it without being sure. I asked innocently, “What do you mean? It’s not strange. I paid your dad for flying lessons and rented his airplane for a long time.” The rental and lessons had been cut-rate, but I had paid for them. Mr. Hall probably knew I wouldn’t have taken them otherwise. “He only let me use his plane for free after I agreed I’d fly banners for him. Pilots take care of each other.”

“No, my dad took care of you,” Grayson corrected me.

I’d thought so too. His dad had been kind to me because he’d missed the three sons who hadn’t lived with him fulltime for years and years. And I was not above turning this around and using it against Grayson if he wouldn’t leave me alone. I didn’t want to. I had more respect for his dad than that. But I absolutely was not going to let Grayson guilt me into working for him, only to close up shop and abandon me when it was too late for me to start over with another job flying this summer.

Exasperated, I asked, “Why do you want me to fly for you? There will be ten college guys hanging around at the beginning of the summer, begging you to hire them.”

“I can’t wait until then,” Grayson said. “We have contracts. My dad scheduled banners this week because he knew you and Alec and I would be on spring break. I need you tomorrow.”

I put my hands on my hips. “That is kind of short notice, Grayson.”

He opened both hands. For the first time he looked like the Grayson I’d known from a distance for three and a half years, the one who tried to talk himself out of trouble. “We only decided a few days ago that we were going to reopen the business.”

“Exactly,” I said. “You’re starting it on a whim, and that’s how you’ll end it. I can’t work for a whim. In case you hadn’t noticed, I need an actual job.”

“Right.” He folded his arms across his faded rock band T-shirt. He was tall and slim, and it wasn’t until moments like this that I noticed how muscular he was. His biceps strained against the sleeves of his T-shirt. But this was no time to admire his body. His body language told me he really was back to the Grayson I knew. He felt cornered, like his dad was shouting at him. Next came a counterattack.

“Tell me more about your actual job,” Grayson said. “You’ve talked to Mr. Simon about it, right?”

“No, I talked to Mark,” I said, suspicious. Grayson was driving at something. Granted, Mark was not the decision-making person in charge of Simon Air Agriculture, but he wouldn’t have told me I could fly for Mr. Simon this summer without checking it or okaying it. Would he?

Grayson nodded. “Mark told me this morning that he’s shacking up with you.”

I put several fingers to my mouth, something between shushing him with one finger and covering my mouth with my hand in horror.

A toilet flushed and then whooshed louder as the Admiral opened the bathroom door. I stood there with my hand to my mouth, watching Grayson fill the space in front of me with his own mouth in a hard line. I hoped the Admiral hadn’t heard what Grayson had said. The Admiral and I weren’t close, but I’d always assumed he thought I was a nice girl. Grayson thought I was not, I realized. I listened for the Admiral as I puzzled through it:

Mark was at the beach with his friends right now, but he’d flown a crop-dusting run that morning. (The Admiral’s footsteps sounded from the bathroom back to the break room.) Grayson’s truck had been at the Hall Aviation hangar early that morning too. (The Admiral fed coins into the vending machine.) Hall Aviation and Mr. Simon’s crop-dusting business used the same mechanic. (The Admiral’s M&M’s fell into the chute with a clank.) It was plausible Grayson and Mark had run into each other and talked.

“See you tomorrow, Leah,” the Admiral called in his normal voice, not the tone of someone who’d overheard what Grayson had said to me.

“Yes, sir,” I called back. As the front door of the office opened and shut behind me, I continued to watch Grayson and think. It was not plausible that Mark had walked up to Grayson and blurted that we were living together. “Did he say that?” I asked Grayson incredulously.

“Yes.”

“Did he phrase it that way?” After the initial shock of Grayson knowing more about me than I wanted him to know, I realized I didn’t need to ask. Of course Mark had phrased it this way, because Mark was turning out to be kind of an asshole.

I only hoped that’s all Grayson knew, because there was more to the story. For years I’d stuck to my policy of avoiding Mark and boys like him. That became easier when Mark turned sixteen and stopped riding the bus, and easier still when he graduated from high school last December, a semester late. He worked at the airport every day, but mostly in the mornings and early afternoons when I was still at school. I might hear him announce himself over the airport frequency and watch him land an ugly Air Tractor, but our paths rarely crossed.

Last week, he’d come into the office, hunting up some records for his uncle. I’d mentioned I was out of a job with Mr. Hall and wondered whether Mark’s uncle was hiring crop dusters. I didn’t want to deal with Mark at work every day, but I would suffer through it for a flying job. To my surprise, he’d said yes. I’d been so happy and never more relieved.

Then he’d asked me on a date. I’d hesitated at first, but after a few minutes of flirting, I’d said yes to that too. I’d had a boyfriend when I was fourteen, but I’d never been on a date. Though my relationship with Mr. Hall hadn’t been romantic at all, his absence left a hole in my heart that I was hungry to fill. And a somewhat greasy fifteen-year-old Mark had grown into a decidedly sexy nineteen-year-old with a nervous edge.

My mom had been home when he’d brought me back from dinner that night. Usually I was so happy to see her, right up until she took the TV or some food or a pile of clothes away with her, like she was using the trailer only for storage. This time I was terrified he would mention to her that I was a pilot, or that I was working the whole time I was at the airport, not hanging out with my fake boyfriend Grayson Hall. And I didn’t trust Mark enough to ask him to keep quiet.

So I was almost relieved at the turn the conversation took. Mark told my mom that his mother had kicked him out of the house. He hadn’t mentioned this to me before. My mom offered to let him stay with us—by which she meant he could stay with me—for a few days until he found another place to live, if he would help her with rent. I was already helping her with rent on top of paying the utilities. Basically she was arranging for us to take over the lease from her. He might not have agreed to this if he’d known she was leaving that night with the TV. She told me she was pawning it for cash to take to the Indian casino in North Carolina. That was the last I’d heard from her.

Technically, Mark and I were shacking up. But that implied we were doing it, when we weren’t. True, I had ached for him at first. I’d been staying away from boys for so many years, and the shift in how I saw him was new and exciting. But that night when my mom had left and Mark brought his stuff inside the trailer, he’d also brought beer. He’d drunk too much to go through with it. Each night after that he’d been too drunk or stayed out too late with his friends. And now that he’d lived with me for a week, the thought of him was vaguely nauseating.

But this was way none of Grayson’s business.

I still couldn’t read Grayson’s expression with his eyes hidden. He hadn’t taken off his shades when he came into the office. But when I asked him how Mark had phrased our living arrangement, Grayson arched one eyebrow again.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I said. “No, I haven’t talked to Mr. Simon about the job, because Mark is the one who’s taking me flying in the Stearman every day this week. He’s showing me the ropes and giving me a taste of what I’ll be doing by myself in the summer. I asked off work from the airport and everything.”

“In the Stearman?” Grayson’s eyebrow stayed up.

“Yes,” I said. “We can’t go in one of the Air Tractors. They’re one-seaters.”

“I’ve personally heard Mr. Simon tell my dad that he would never let Mark take anybody for a ride in the Stearman.”

I didn’t doubt it, since Mark was a live wire. But I said carefully, “Did you overhear this on the office porch? A lot of bullshit flies around on the porch.” Mr. Hall had said many negative things about Grayson on the porch too.

Grayson got my meaning. His eyebrow went down. Then he asked pointedly, “Mark’s taking you flying every day this week? But not today?”

“No,” I said impatiently. “Starting tomorrow.”

“What time tomorrow?” he pressed me. “Have you set a time?”

We hadn’t set a time, and frankly, I’d begun to worry. Mark had promised me when we first talked about it that we’d start flying together on Monday morning, but here it was Sunday afternoon and he hadn’t mentioned it again. He was getting drunk at the beach. And I’d been afraid to bring it up—afraid that if I said the wrong thing to Mark, the job would disappear.

Which was pretty much what Grayson was telling me. Mark had told me a lie so he could move in with me.

I was frightened. But I couldn’t show Grayson this, so I tried to be furious instead. “Why can’t this be a transaction between pilots? In your mind, why does it have to be dirty?”

“You tell me,” Grayson said bitterly, removing his elbows from the counter and straightening to his full height. “That’s how you work. I used to envy the rare people you smiled at when you pumped their gas, like they’d done something special and earned a reward. But now I realize you were smiling at them because they’d given you something you wanted. A big tip. Flight time. You wouldn’t smile at someone without good reason.”

I hadn’t thought he noticed whether I smiled at him or not.

There was a possibility here. A spark. I’d always viewed him as Mr. Hall’s black sheep son, impossibly cool and way too good for me, passing through. Finally, here was a hint of reciprocation of the crush I’d pretended not to have on him since I was fourteen.

No. Mark might have fooled me. I wouldn’t let Grayson fool me too. Cheeks burning, I said sternly, “Grayson Hall. The second you feel cornered, you fly off the handle and say anything that pops into your head. You’ve always gotten away with it, and maybe you still will, but that’s not a good interview technique for potential employees. If there was ever a chance I would fly for you, you blew it the instant your mind fell into the gutter.”

My anger drained away. My fingers hurt from gripping the countertop. Grayson’s mirrored shades still stared me down like nothing was behind them.

Then he bit his lip. “I need you,” he said in his nicest tone so far.

“Tough.”

He put his fist down on the counter. Not hard. Just there. He balled it tightly and relaxed it.

He took a long, deep breath. His broad shoulders rose and fell with it.

And then, without another word, he turned and left the office. He crossed the porch and disappeared in the direction of the Hall Aviation hangar, where I couldn’t see him out the lobby windows.

All the tension whooshed out of the room behind him. Without it, there was nothing left to hold me up standing. I collapsed into my desk chair and took a few deep breaths. I felt like I was going to lose it, but Grayson might be hanging around outside. Alec might. Mr. Simon might. I couldn’t lose it here at the airport. I had to get home.

I locked up for the day, shut off the connection between the radio and the outside loudspeaker, and put the cell phone in a drawer. When I’d first started working here, I’d stayed until eight some nights because being alone here was better than being alone at home. My supervisor from city hall made me stop because I was running up the light bill. He didn’t know I needed a handout, and I wasn’t going to tell him.

Locking the porch door from the outside, I couldn’t help one more glance at the Hall Aviation hangar. Grayson’s truck and Alec’s car were still parked outside, and they’d opened the wide door facing the runway as if they actually planned to bring an airplane out and power it up. I didn’t care. I would fly for Grayson Hall over my dead body.