Such a Rush(78)
Author: Jennifer Echols

This fantasy, as delicious as the chocolate croissant, had only one drawback. Knowing my mother, she would show back up in a few weeks, dumped by Roger in Savannah. Or she would have stayed with him long enough to figure out he really wasn’t getting hired on at the backhoe plant, and she would get a ride back to Heaven Beach to mooch off me. She wouldn’t find me here at the trailer.

Thinking this made me feel a twinge of guilt. After all, she was my mother, the only relative I knew. But if she really wanted to find me, all she had to do was come to the airport. Maybe now that I wasn’t her responsibility, she’d find the strength to stand on her own. In that case, I would like to see her sometime. I just didn’t necessarily want her to know where I lived.

The trailer seemed to tremble with new energy. Looking around, I thought it seemed brighter than normal, with more sunlight filtering through the palm fronds and streaming into the tiny windows. Then I realized the vibration was from a plane overhead, a Piper. I jumped up and leaned out the door just in time to see Grayson in the red Piper flying through a small circle of blue sky in the treetops.

Then I looked out into the “yard,” which Grayson and Molly would be walking through later. One of the plastic chairs lay on its back where Molly had knocked it with her car Sunday night, and I was pretty sure the margarine tub still held cigarette butts. My mother didn’t live here now, but I did, at least for another two weeks, and this mess was my responsibility. I took a wet rag outside, wiped everything down, threw the margarine tub away, and even considered cutting back some of the underbrush around the trailer with the only garden tool I had, some craft scissors, before I got depressed and decided I wouldn’t live here long enough for yard maintenance to be worth my effort.

The inside of the trailer was worth the effort. I went back inside and looked around with new eyes—not the eyes of Grayson, but my own eyes, in my own home, not my mother’s home that I happened to be living in too. First I took down my sad school photos on the wall where the TV had been. I would keep the photos, but I separated them from their cheap frames, which I would give away.

That got me started packing. I didn’t box up my toiletries or my summer clothes, since I’d need those until the end of the month. But I cleared out every closet and put much of what I found in garbage bags to give away. I started to put what I wanted to keep in garbage bags too. But that reminded me of how Mark and my mother treated their worldly possessions. I took my belongings out of the garbage bags and put them in a pile, which I would transfer to an organic produce box I would snag from Molly’s parents’ café.

Finally I moved to my mother’s room. At first I just stood there in the dark space, unbearably hot because I’d had her door closed to save on air-conditioning since she left. I was afraid to touch anything. But she was gone, and I was leaving. I dragged her clothes out of her closet and her dresser. I started to put those in garbage bags to give away too. But she might show up at the airport and demand them back. She would be very angry that I’d given them away. I kept them in the garbage bags. I would store them in the cellar at the airport. There they would remind me of her only when I took a box of files down for storage, or I sought shelter there with Grayson.

I got so absorbed in the chore that I didn’t realize how much time had passed until a knock sounded on the aluminum door. The knocking wasn’t hard enough to make a noise like a gunshot and alarm me, but it did follow the beat of Molly’s favorite rock song.

I opened the door wide. Molly balanced there on top of the shaky cement-block staircase. In her face I saw relief that I was okay. Love for me. Anger and betrayal and loss and hurt. We had a lot to talk through and a lot of apologies to make to each other.

“I have never thought of you as my charity case,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I didn’t want to be friends with you just because you were an edgy girl with the guts to steal my boyfriend, either.”

“Okay.”

“But I can see why you would think that,” she wailed. “How did we get to this place where we had to be tough all the time and never said how much we loved each other?”

“Shhh.” I wrapped my arms around her and let her rest her chin on my shoulder. “I’m the one who had the plane crash today, but I will comfort you because I love you.”

As she straightened, laughing, her eyes were full of tears. “Can I come in?”

I pushed the metal door wide for her. “Yes, chick. Come in.”

twenty

The next Saturday, a few hours before the airport office was scheduled to close, I handed over the phone and the keys to Leon. In the restroom, I scrubbed my hands to make sure they didn’t smell like avgas, redid my hair and makeup carefully, and slipped on strappy sandals and the adorable sky-blue prom dress that Molly and I had found at the consignment store. The restroom didn’t have a full-length mirror. Standing on the porch of the office, I checked my look in the glass door. With the airplanes behind me in the reflection, I looked like a model from a fashion magazine spread that showed fine clothes against a gritty background of asphalt and machinery. A couple of guys whistled at me from several hangars down, and I waved to them.

By the time I crossed the tarmac to the Hall Aviation hangar, Molly’s car was parked outside. She stood by patiently in her heels and hot-pink dress while I rounded the Cessna slowly, running my hands over the wings. She didn’t comment when I climbed the stepladder to check the gas level. She only took pictures of me with her phone and probably posted them online.

But when I asked her to help me push the plane out of the hangar, she absolutely refused. She would trip in her heels. The rivets would snag her dress. The plane was too heavy. I could prove her last assumption wasn’t true by showing her how the plane rocked back and forth on its wheels when I shoved it. Still, I thought I was going to have to hunt up Leon or the Admiral or someone to help me when she finally relented. She pushed the strut while I hauled on the guide holding the wheel. The airplane was outside in the breeze scented with meadow flowers.

I closed her into the cabin and showed her how to put on her headphones. She didn’t protest. But when I taxied to the end of the runway and turned the plane around, I finally realized why she’d been so obstinate before. Her hands were shaking.

“Scared?” I asked her.

She looked over at me. Even her glittering eye shadow was unable to draw attention away from the panic in her wide blue eyes. “What do you think? But I said I would go with you.”