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I cackled so loud that my voice echoed against the Hall Aviation hangar and back to us. “The prom!”
“Yes!” He grinned.
“In Wilmington?”
“Yes, next Saturday.”
I looked over my shoulder at the airport office door. “I would have to ask off work.”
“It’s at night, when the airport is closed.”
I nodded slowly. “I would have to wear a prom garment.”
“It doesn’t matter what you wear. You could wear that bikini top you fly in, and every girl I ever dated would…” He grinned at me. “And all the guys… I know I’ve ribbed you for being beautiful and taking advantage of it, but you’ve got to give me my turn.”
“Well, if you frame it like a revenge plot from middle school, how could I refuse? I’ve never been to a prom before. Mine was a few weeks ago and I never thought about going.”
“We’ll make sure this one is good.”
Still thinking this through, I asked, “Would you drive down and get me? I would hate for you to come all that way and then bring me back. That’s a lot of driving.”
“I would come get you,” he said. “You would stay at my house, in the guest room, and my mom would make sure I didn’t touch you inappropriately. While she was looking. Or…” He held up his finger like he’d just gotten a bright idea. “You could fly up to Wilmington in your airplane.”
I stared at him for a moment without understanding what he was saying. And then realized he was talking about Mr. Hall’s Cessna. Which was now my Cessna. “Can I do that?” I asked. “It’s not technically my plane yet.”
“Right,” he said. “It belongs to Hall Aviation for a few more weeks, until I sign it over to you. But you’re insured to fly planes for Hall Aviation. It’s all good. You can go wherever you want.”
“Really.” I pictured flying to the prom in Wilmington. Flying anywhere I wanted, anytime. I pictured rising above the ground to a thousand feet, where I could see, and pointing the plane in every direction. The whole Atlantic coast, the whole country was suddenly mine.
Grayson chuckled. “I thought that would make you smile. It’s taking a few minutes to sink in, but now you see.”
“Yes,” I said. “Now I can see.”
“The only thing is, Alec’s asking Molly to the prom too, so it would be nice if you made up, and you could bring her with you.”
On cue, the yellow Piper dove low over the grassy strip and dropped a banner. The fabric sank straight down and settled on the grass. The wind was calm.
Watching the plane sail away, I said, “I hope things won’t be awkward between you and Alec because of all this.”
“Oh, it’ll be awkward all right,” Grayson said. “When we were so mad at each other this morning, before you went up, he called our mom and told on me.”
“Told on you!” I exclaimed. “He never tells on you. And I thought your mom knew you were running the business and trying to get him to stay.”
“She knew about that,” Grayson acknowledged. “She didn’t know about you, and what I made you do. On Sunday night when we get back to Wilmington, grief counselors are getting called in. And uncles.”
If he’d said all this bitterly, I would have worried about what he had in store. But he said it lightly, like he didn’t mind the idea too much.
“Maybe it will be good,” I said carefully.
“Maybe. But whatever happens, Alec and I are brothers. We’ve been through hell and back together. We can handle awkward.” His eyes followed the trajectory of Alec’s plane as he circled back around to land. “My dad would hate that you and I are together. He would think I’m bad for you.”
“He would be wrong,” I said. “I would tell him so. That day last December when you crashed… You had a handle on it at first, even in that high wind. You set that plane down and your dad said, ‘Perfect.’”
Grayson smiled. “And then I crashed, and he said something else.”
This was true. “Well. He thought you were perfect for a second. And you really were. I could hear in his voice how proud he was of you. Like you had conquered something, so he had conquered it himself.”
“Thank you, Leah.” Grayson leaned forward until his rocking chair tipped down. He kissed me on the mouth, putting one hand up to my cheek to hold me there gently while he caressed me.
With a deep breath, he backed away and motioned over his shoulder. “I’ve got to get to work.”
“Let me come with you,” I said. “I promise I won’t try to fly. I’ll just sweep the hangar or, Jesus, beat the dust out of the couch. Something.”
He gave me such a stern look that I backed out of the suggestion myself. “O-kay,” I said with my hands up.
He bent down and picked up the boxes and the cup from Molly’s parents’ café. “Here.” He nodded his head toward the airport office. “Go inside and steal your newspaper like you do. Go home. Relax. Molly’s coming over after work to talk to you. Don’t make that face. And then I’ll come pick you up and take you to dinner, to the grocery store, and wherever else you need to go.”
To buy a prom dress, I thought. But that’s something I could do one night next week with Molly.
If we were speaking by then.
He tried to hand me the boxes and the cup, probably thinking that if he just pressed them toward me, I would take them automatically. When I didn’t, he asked, “What is it? You’re resentful at being jerked around?”
I nodded, already feeling better because he understood where I was coming from.
“You’re not used to having a lot of family and friends,” he said, “giving you advice and telling you what to do and sticking their noses in your business. That’s what we do because we care about each other. Get used to it. You’ve joined the club.” He poked the boxes at me again. When I took them, he kissed me on the forehead, slid his shades back on, and turned for the Hall Aviation hangar.
With the stacked boxes in my hands, I did slip into the office. I called a hello to Leon. He called back from somewhere in the depths of the office. So it was safe to snag the newspaper from a side table in the waiting room. I also went back to the break room and grabbed an apartment finder magazine from the rack of brochures for local attractions. When I leaned against the glass door to open it because my arms were full, Grayson was just turning around to look for me at the door in the side of the Hall Aviation hangar. He waved. I moved my elbow in response. He went inside the hangar, and I turned for the trailer park.
On second thought, I paused. Looked up to the sky above the runway and the trees. An airplane motor buzzed up there somewhere, but I couldn’t see the plane.
I whispered, “Thank you. For everything.”
I continued on my way, my flip-flops slapping on the pavement until I reached the end of the tarmac and waded through the long grass. As I left the field and entered the forest, the pit bull lunged at me, as usual. This time his growl cut off short, though. He stood at the end of his chain, eyed me silently, and sniffed the air. He smelled the food.
Inside my trailer, standing at the kitchen counter and suddenly starving, I investigated the contents of the boxes. I ate the chocolate croissant first—not warm anymore but still Molly’s dad’s chocolate croissant—and then a big portion of the sandwich for lunch, and carefully packed the rest away in the refrigerator for another day.
Then I settled on the pitted sofa with the apartment finder magazine. I planned to borrow Grayson’s phone tomorrow, call the landlord, and find out exactly how many months my mother had been pocketing the money I gave her instead of paying the rent. Ever since Mr. Hall had let me fly for free, I’d stashed my salary for college. I didn’t want to part with it now, but I had plenty to cover the cheap rent for a few months.
Back rent was all I would pay the landlord, though. I was on my own now. I had choices, and I chose not to live in this trailer a second longer than I had to. Paging through the apartment finder magazine, I felt panicky, like I had last Sunday when Grayson told me Mark had made up my job with Mr. Simon. The cheapest apartments were twice as much as the trailer, and they were on this side of town, possibly in more dangerous neighborhoods. Because I’d been reading the newspaper for years, I knew exactly where all the shootings and stabbings had occurred.
The apartments on the nice end of town were, predictably, much more expensive. Now that I wasn’t supporting my mother, I could afford one. Then I couldn’t walk to the airport. I could ride the school bus to the airport, I supposed, and then ask the Admiral to take me to my apartment when he landed for the day, which was about the time I got off work. But like Grayson had said, I hated to rely on someone. And I had only six weeks of school bus left before I graduated. It was time I learned to drive. And bought a car.
The apartments on the nice end of town also required a credit check. I had no credit. I had a job, though. I’d held my job at the airport for three and a half years, and Grayson could vouch that he would employ me for a lot more money through the summer. Or I could find a roommate who’d rented apartments before, maybe one of the college kids Molly’s parents hired to work at the café during the summer. I could see this imaginary girl now. She would usually be hanging at the apartment when I got off work. She would almost always be there when I woke up in the morning, because she lived there too. We would go out together sometimes. She would be worldly and fun like Grayson and Alec and Molly. She would have a TV.
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?”
