Such a Rush(57)
Author: Jennifer Echols

I laughed at Grayson’s dead-on British accent. Again, I thought he looked British, with the long nose and fingers and body of a 1960s rock star.

“Sometimes I think that’s what happened to my dad,” he said.

You think he became one with the Force? I almost asked. But I couldn’t joke about his father. And I remembered what Alec had said about Grayson, that there was something wrong with him. I asked very carefully and nonjudgmentally, “What happened to your dad?”

“All he used to say to me was, ‘You’re going to die young. You’re going to get fired from every job you ever land. You don’t plan ahead. You don’t pay attention. You’re going to get yourself killed.’ And maybe, in the end, he decided that nothing would convince me short of dying himself.”

Oh, Grayson, I nearly gasped. I looked over at him, but all I could see was his profile outlined against the dark beach. He looked out at the ocean like he was talking to himself, not to me. I wondered if he had ever said this to anybody.

I said conversationally, not letting any of my alarm come through in my pilot voice, “Your dad died because he wasn’t taking care of himself and he refused to go to the doctor, and he had a heart attack.”

Grayson didn’t nod or shake his head no. Keeping eerily still, he asked, “Were you the last person to see him alive?”

I winced, but he was watching the ocean and couldn’t see. I said, “I’ve wondered about that. I did have a lesson with him the day before the Admiral found him. But sometimes after he left my lesson, he’d stop at a restaurant for dinner on the way back to his condo. Actually he went to Molly’s parents’ café quite a bit because it’s on this end of town. But I didn’t ask around. He was gone, and I guess I thought it was best to let him go.” That’s how I liked to think of him, hunching his coat around him, ducking into the airport office to tell me goodbye, and driving off through the winter night in his truck.

“What was the last thing he said to you?” Grayson persisted.

I thought back. “He had acted down during the lesson. As I was leaving, I asked him why lately he hadn’t sat on the airport office porch with the Admiral in the afternoon like he usually did when I got to work.”

“What did he say?”

“He said it had been too cold.”

“That sounds prophetic, like he was willing his death to happen.”

The surfboard was getting hard, and I squirmed on the slick surface, uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, in which Grayson was going to point the finger at himself any way he could. “Well, I think he’d given up,” I said. “The last time he had a girlfriend, I’d just started working at the airport. She moved to Florida to take care of her mom. He wouldn’t move with her because he wanted to stay close to you guys. So they broke up.”

“What?” Grayson exclaimed. “I never heard of… What was her name?”

“Sofie.”

He tried the name out. “Sofie.” Then his tone turned darker. “How old was she?”

“His age. Early fifties. Or, back then, late forties.”

“Did they see each other a lot?”

“She came to the airport all the time.”

He frowned at me, perplexed. “How come I never knew about her?”

“You weren’t around. Y’all had started telling your dad you didn’t want to come stay with him, even when it was his weekend.”

“That’s because I was playing basketball,” Grayson protested, “and Alec was wrestling. We had games and meets, and he wouldn’t come see us.”

“He thought you didn’t want him to.”

Grayson’s lips parted. “Did he tell you that?”

“Yes.” I wasn’t going to lie to Grayson. He’d been agonizing over the details of Mr. Hall’s death, and he was trying to puzzle it out. But I didn’t want him to dwell on the rift between them. “I don’t think it does any good to go back and second-guess this stuff. I’m just saying, different people see things different ways, and that’s how he saw it. After Sofie left, you could say he let himself go. He gained more weight, and that made him more likely to have a heart attack, yes. Then Jake died, and that was hard on him.

“But Grayson.” I reached out and put my hand on his knee. His skin was cool to the touch. “Your dad wasn’t so cruel that he would want to die as a message to you. And if that’s what you honestly believe… you need to find a better way to deal with this.” I rubbed his knee, just one pass, and drew my hand away.

“You know so much about him,” Grayson murmured. “You knew him better than I did.”

“I saw him almost every day,” I explained. “Last December, whenever y’all weren’t here, every waking moment I wasn’t at school or at work, he was training me in the tow plane. It’s funny but I think a lot of people spend less time with their own families, especially if they don’t all live together, and more time with complete strangers.”

It was certainly true of my own so-called family. I knew who my mother had been spending her time with last week: her boyfriend Roger. But that could have changed by now. It often did. I wondered who my dad spent time with. Could have been anyone. Anyone at all.

Grayson turned to face me, bracing himself with one hand on the surfboard and tucking his long legs beneath him in the sand. “You and I have never talked like this before. But my dad kept telling me what I’m finding out about you now.”

I smiled. “You mean the chip on my shoulder?”

Grayson shook his head. “No, nothing could be more obvious than the chip on your shoulder. But my dad liked to tell this story about you. He said you were fourteen and you’d been working at the airport a few weeks. He knew you by sight from the airport office. One day you stomped into his hangar and said you wanted a flying lesson, sort of demanded it, and threw the money for the lesson down on his desk in front of him, plus tax, in cash with exact change.”

I hadn’t stomped. The rest was accurate. “I wanted a lesson,” I said, “and wanted to take away all his excuses not to give me one. If I paid him up front in cash, he couldn’t say no. Why did he tell you that story?”

“He said he knew from that moment that you had strong character and drive. You were everything I wasn’t. Whenever he got tired of comparing me with Jake or Alec, he would compare me with you.”