Such a Rush(12)
Author: Jennifer Echols

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.