Grayson rocked slowly in his chair again, waiting for me to finish tying down the plane.
There was just so long I could dawdle over a metal hook attached to a ring sticking through the asphalt. I stalked back toward Grayson, but if I had any idea of slipping past him into the office without continuing the argument, he ruled that out. “Who is your other job with?” he demanded, stepping into my path and towering over me.
This was none of his business, but I felt bad about the Just like you always did comment. I felt worse now that the Admiral had been so nice to Grayson. I was trying to get rid of Grayson as politely as possible. Without stopping, I walked around him and opened the door. “I’m flying a crop duster for Mr. Simon,” I said over my shoulder before I swung into the office. I hoped now Grayson would take no for an answer, and he wouldn’t follow me inside.
He was right behind me. “Leah.” He trailed me all the way across the lobby, down the short hallway, to the open doorway that led behind the reception counter.
Turning around at the threshold, I took off my sunglasses, tossed them on the counter, and eyed him. He seemed to get the message that the area beyond the doorway was my private territory. He walked back down the hallway, into the lobby.
But instead of leaving, he leaned over and rested his elbows on the counter like he was there for a long discussion. “Leah,” he said in a coaxing tone. “What do you want that job for? Every organic fruit you’ve ever bought and eaten will be negated times a thousand with each pass you make spreading chemical filth over a field.”
I’d never eaten an organic fruit as far as I knew, except maybe at Molly’s parents’ café. I wondered if they tasted different and whether I would be able to tell. I definitely hadn’t bought one. My mom would die twice if I paid that much for a banana. Grayson and I were from different worlds.
“You’ll spend all day every day breathing that crap,” he said. “Aren’t you worried about your health?”
I laughed. “Yeah. That’s why I’d rather spend my summer flying an airplane built this century.”
He gaped at me in mock disapproval. “We keep up the maintenance on our planes. We have to. You know the FAA says any plane has to fly like it did when it was built.”
“Yours were built in the 1950s.”
“It was a very good decade for airplanes. It never bothered you before. And you’re completely trained in banner towing. You didn’t pay anything to learn it. Isn’t Simon making you pay for training? A lot of those crop-dusting jackasses will charge to teach you how to do it. They’ll promise to hold a job for you. You drop thousands of dollars for training and then your job mysteriously disappears.”
I stared at him like he was an alien life-form. On what planet did an eighteen-year-old girl living in a trailer park have thousands of dollars to drop on anything, much less crop-duster training? I said, “No, I’m not paying for it.”
One of Grayson’s eyebrows tilted up sharply behind his sunglasses. “How’d you manage that arrangement?”
I thought I heard something ugly in his tone, but I didn’t want to call him on it without being sure. I asked innocently, “What do you mean? It’s not strange. I paid your dad for flying lessons and rented his airplane for a long time.” The rental and lessons had been cut-rate, but I had paid for them. Mr. Hall probably knew I wouldn’t have taken them otherwise. “He only let me use his plane for free after I agreed I’d fly banners for him. Pilots take care of each other.”
“No, my dad took care of you,” Grayson corrected me.
I’d thought so too. His dad had been kind to me because he’d missed the three sons who hadn’t lived with him fulltime for years and years. And I was not above turning this around and using it against Grayson if he wouldn’t leave me alone. I didn’t want to. I had more respect for his dad than that. But I absolutely was not going to let Grayson guilt me into working for him, only to close up shop and abandon me when it was too late for me to start over with another job flying this summer.
Exasperated, I asked, “Why do you want me to fly for you? There will be ten college guys hanging around at the beginning of the summer, begging you to hire them.”
“I can’t wait until then,” Grayson said. “We have contracts. My dad scheduled banners this week because he knew you and Alec and I would be on spring break. I need you tomorrow.”
I put my hands on my hips. “That is kind of short notice, Grayson.”
He opened both hands. For the first time he looked like the Grayson I’d known from a distance for three and a half years, the one who tried to talk himself out of trouble. “We only decided a few days ago that we were going to reopen the business.”
“Exactly,” I said. “You’re starting it on a whim, and that’s how you’ll end it. I can’t work for a whim. In case you hadn’t noticed, I need an actual job.”
“Right.” He folded his arms across his faded rock band T-shirt. He was tall and slim, and it wasn’t until moments like this that I noticed how muscular he was. His biceps strained against the sleeves of his T-shirt. But this was no time to admire his body. His body language told me he really was back to the Grayson I knew. He felt cornered, like his dad was shouting at him. Next came a counterattack.
“Tell me more about your actual job,” Grayson said. “You’ve talked to Mr. Simon about it, right?”
“No, I talked to Mark,” I said, suspicious. Grayson was driving at something. Granted, Mark was not the decision-making person in charge of Simon Air Agriculture, but he wouldn’t have told me I could fly for Mr. Simon this summer without checking it or okaying it. Would he?
Grayson nodded. “Mark told me this morning that he’s shacking up with you.”
I put several fingers to my mouth, something between shushing him with one finger and covering my mouth with my hand in horror.
A toilet flushed and then whooshed louder as the Admiral opened the bathroom door. I stood there with my hand to my mouth, watching Grayson fill the space in front of me with his own mouth in a hard line. I hoped the Admiral hadn’t heard what Grayson had said. The Admiral and I weren’t close, but I’d always assumed he thought I was a nice girl. Grayson thought I was not, I realized. I listened for the Admiral as I puzzled through it:
Mark was at the beach with his friends right now, but he’d flown a crop-dusting run that morning. (The Admiral’s footsteps sounded from the bathroom back to the break room.) Grayson’s truck had been at the Hall Aviation hangar early that morning too. (The Admiral fed coins into the vending machine.) Hall Aviation and Mr. Simon’s crop-dusting business used the same mechanic. (The Admiral’s M&M’s fell into the chute with a clank.) It was plausible Grayson and Mark had run into each other and talked.
“See you tomorrow, Leah,” the Admiral called in his normal voice, not the tone of someone who’d overheard what Grayson had said to me.
“Yes, sir,” I called back. As the front door of the office opened and shut behind me, I continued to watch Grayson and think. It was not plausible that Mark had walked up to Grayson and blurted that we were living together. “Did he say that?” I asked Grayson incredulously.
“Yes.”
“Did he phrase it that way?” After the initial shock of Grayson knowing more about me than I wanted him to know, I realized I didn’t need to ask. Of course Mark had phrased it this way, because Mark was turning out to be kind of an asshole.
I only hoped that’s all Grayson knew, because there was more to the story. For years I’d stuck to my policy of avoiding Mark and boys like him. That became easier when Mark turned sixteen and stopped riding the bus, and easier still when he graduated from high school last December, a semester late. He worked at the airport every day, but mostly in the mornings and early afternoons when I was still at school. I might hear him announce himself over the airport frequency and watch him land an ugly Air Tractor, but our paths rarely crossed.
Last week, he’d come into the office, hunting up some records for his uncle. I’d mentioned I was out of
a job with Mr. Hall and wondered whether Mark’s uncle was hiring crop dusters. I didn’t want to deal with Mark at work every day, but I would suffer through it for a flying job. To my surprise, he’d said yes. I’d been so happy and never more relieved.
Then he’d asked me on a date. I’d hesitated at first, but after a few minutes of flirting, I’d said yes to that too. I’d had a boyfriend when I was fourteen, but I’d never been on a date. Though my relationship with Mr. Hall hadn’t been romantic at all, his absence left a hole in my heart that I was hungry to fill. And a somewhat greasy fifteen-year-old Mark had grown into a decidedly sexy nineteen-year-old with a nervous edge.
My mom had been home when he’d brought me back from dinner that night. Usually I was so happy to see her, right up until she took the TV or some food or a pile of clothes away with her, like she was using the trailer only for storage. This time I was terrified he would mention to her that I was a pilot, or that I was working the whole time I was at the airport, not hanging out with my fake boyfriend Grayson Hall. And I didn’t trust Mark enough to ask him to keep quiet.
So I was almost relieved at the turn the conversation took. Mark told my mom that his mother had kicked him out of the house. He hadn’t mentioned this to me before. My mom offered to let him stay with us—by which she meant he could stay with me—for a few days until he found another place to live, if he would help her with rent. I was already helping her with rent on top of paying the utilities. Basically she was arranging for us to take over the lease from her. He might not have agreed to this if he’d known she was leaving that night with the TV. She told me she was pawning it for cash to take to the Indian casino in North Carolina. That was the last I’d heard from her.
Technically, Mark and I were shacking up. But that implied we were doing it, when we weren’t. True, I had ached for him at first. I’d been staying away from boys for so many years, and the shift in how I saw him was new and exciting. But that night when my mom had left and Mark brought his stuff inside the trailer, he’d also brought beer. He’d drunk too much to go through with it. Each night after that he’d been too drunk or stayed out too late with his friends. And now that he’d lived with me for a week, the thought of him was vaguely nauseating.
But this was way none of Grayson’s business.
I still couldn’t read Grayson’s expression with his eyes hidden. He hadn’t taken off his shades when he came into the office. But when I asked him how Mark had phrased our living arrangement, Grayson arched one eyebrow again.
“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” I said. “No, I haven’t talked to Mr. Simon about the job, because Mark is the one who’s taking me flying in the Stearman every day this week. He’s showing me the ropes and giving me a taste of what I’ll be doing by myself in the summer. I asked off work from the airport and everything.”
“In the Stearman?” Grayson’s eyebrow stayed up.
“Yes,” I said. “We can’t go in one of the Air Tractors. They’re one-seaters.”
“I’ve personally heard Mr. Simon tell my dad that he would never let Mark take anybody for a ride in the Stearman.”
I didn’t doubt it, since Mark was a live wire. But I said carefully, “Did you overhear this on the office porch? A lot of bullshit flies around on the porch.” Mr. Hall had said many negative things about Grayson on the porch too.
Grayson got my meaning. His eyebrow went down. Then he asked pointedly, “Mark’s taking you flying every day this week? But not today?”
“No,” I said impatiently. “Starting tomorrow.”
“What time tomorrow?” he pressed me. “Have you set a time?”
We hadn’t set a time, and frankly, I’d begun to worry. Mark had promised me when we first talked about it that we’d start flying together on Monday morning, but here it was Sunday afternoon and he hadn’t mentioned it again. He was getting drunk at the beach. And I’d been afraid to bring it up—afraid that if I said the wrong thing to Mark, the job would disappear.
Which was pretty much what Grayson was telling me. Mark had told me a lie so he could move in with me.
I was frightened. But I couldn’t show Grayson this, so I tried to be furious instead. “Why can’t this be a transaction between pilots? In your mind, why does it have to be dirty?”
“You tell me,” Grayson said bitterly, removing his elbows from the counter and straightening to his full height. “That’s how you work. I used to envy the rare people you smiled at when you pumped their gas, like they’d done something special and earned a reward. But now I realize you were smiling at them because they’d given you something you wanted. A big tip. Flight time. You wouldn’t smile at someone without good reason.”
I hadn’t thought he noticed whether I smiled at him or not.
There was a possibility here. A spark. I’d always viewed him as Mr. Hall’s black sheep son, impossibly cool and way too good for me, passing through. Finally, here was a hint of reciprocation of the crush I’d pretended not to have on him since I was fourteen.
No. Mark might have fooled me. I wouldn’t let Grayson fool me too. Cheeks burning, I said sternly, “Grayson Hall. The second you feel cornered, you fly off the handle and say anything that pops into your head. You’ve always gotten away with it, and maybe you still will, but that’s not a good interview technique for potential employees. If there was ever a chance I would fly for you, you blew it the instant your mind fell into the gutter.”
My anger drained away. My fingers hurt from gripping the countertop. Grayson’s mirrored shades still stared me down like nothing was behind them.
Then he bit his lip. “I need you,” he said in his nicest tone so far.
“Tough.”
He put his fist down on the counter. Not hard. Just there. He balled it tightly and relaxed it.
He took a long, deep breath. His broad shoulders rose and fell with it.
And then, without another word, he turned and left the office. He crossed the porch and disappeared in the direction of the Hall Aviation hangar, where I couldn’t see him out the lobby windows.
All the tension whooshed out of the room behind him. Without it, there was nothing left to hold me up standing. I collapsed into my desk chair and took a few deep breaths. I felt like I was going to lose it, but Grayson might be hanging around outside. Alec might. Mr. Simon might. I couldn’t lose it here at the airport. I had to get home.
I locked up for the day, shut off the connection between the radio and the outside loudspeaker, and put the cell phone in a drawer. When I’d first started working here, I’d stayed until eight some nights because being alone here was better than being alone at home. My supervisor from city hall made me stop because I was running up the light bill. He didn’t know I needed a handout, and I wasn’t going to tell him.
Locking the porch door from the outside, I couldn’t help one more glance at the Hall Aviation hangar. Grayson’s truck and Alec’s car were still parked outside, and they’d opened the wide door facing the runway as if they actually planned to bring an airplane out and power it up. I didn’t care. I would fly for Grayson Hall over my dead body.
four
I turned my back on Mr. Hall’s hangar, water bottle in my hand, newspaper under my arm. Carrying my treasure, I walked most of the length of the airport, into the grass at the end of the strip. Where the chain-link fence turned a corner, I lifted the loose end of the wall of links and ducked underneath, onto the trail through the trees.
Most neighborhoods would be busy this time of day with the bustle of parents pulling in from work and greeting their kids. The trailer park would be busy later, at a partying hour. Right now it was quiet. Not a lot of people here had a regular job. A few of them were still sleeping off last night’s binge. For once, drinking the world away didn’t sound like a bad idea.
I walked just out of reach of the lunging pit bull. At my own trailer, I balanced on the cement blocks while I unlocked the aluminum door that had been kicked in four times since we’d live
d here, three times by burglars, once by my mom’s ex-boyfriend Billy. After locking the door behind me, I walked through the creaking hall, slumping lower and lower like I was coming in for a landing, and crashed into my bed.
One of Mr. Hall’s Pipers roared overhead. Over the years I’d grown to love the sound of planes approaching the runway and just clearing the treetops above our trailer. I prided myself on listening closely enough that I could identify the type of plane without looking. Today I felt like my mom, cringing and cursing at the racket and burying my head underneath the pillows.
The newspaper crackled underneath me as I curled into a ball and hugged my knees. Maybe Grayson was right and I really didn’t have a job with Mr. Simon. When Mark had told me I could fly for his uncle, I’d felt like a heavy weight had been lifted from my chest. Mr. Simon could train me on the specifics of crop dusting. I didn’t want to fly a crop duster my whole life, but I could work my way through college by taking courses during the off-season and flying during the growing season—and I would rack up a huge portion of the flight hours I needed for my next certification. It had never occurred to me until Grayson brought it up that Mark was lying.
But of course he was lying. I heaved myself up from the bed and trudged back into the combination kitchen and den. A blanket lay rumpled anyhow on the sofa where Mark had slept last night. All his worldly possessions were piled in the corner where he’d dumped them when my mom first said he could stay: garbage bags full of clothes, several rifles, and a plant light for growing marijuana indoors. He had not told me he grew marijuana, but boys his age did not grow tomatoes. Mark had told me what I wanted to hear in exchange for the prospect of sex and a free place to stay. He hadn’t forked over any cash to help with the rent, and now I doubted this had ever been his plan.