Such a Rush

I felt Grayson’s shadow return behind me. “I guess not,” I said.

All of them straightened and discussed the findings. Grayson stepped toward them without comment like he’d been hanging around the other end of the plane the whole time. The consensus was that the plane was hardly damaged at all, but they wanted to tow it back to the hangar where they could get a better look before the rain came. Without glancing at Grayson, I handed him my bottle of water. He took a swig while the rest of them were talking and spat it on the grass.

They all turned and sauntered back toward the hangar. Their laughter rolled back to me against the cold wind. It wasn’t like the boys had forgotten me, because I was never part of their family anyway. I was nothing to remember. But Mr. Hall had forgotten me completely, as if I hadn’t been standing next to him while we witnessed the wreck.

That was only fitting. All three of his sons were with him at once. That hardly ever happened anymore. It was Christmas. And Grayson was safe.

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, a

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 fu

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.