I loved my job. It was the best thing I’d ever done. But I knew that would sound weird and overeager. Basically all I did was sit on my ass over there. I said, “It’s going okay.”
“The airport old-timers have a joke about you.”
He meant the men who talked on the porch. I stiffened, bracing to get made fun of even here at the airport, where I had felt relatively safe.
He rumbled on, “We’re remembering something that happened fifteen years ago, and somebody will say, ‘Ask Leah.’ Get it? You do such a good job and know everything that’s going on. We’ve never had anybody like you running the office before.”
“Oh, ha-ha,” I said. The joke wasn’t funny, but he was trying to pay me a compliment. Which was ridiculous, because anybody could have done the job I was doing if they’d cared. Though, come to think of it, maybe caring was the secret ingredient.
“Why do you want to be a pilot?”
I opened my mouth. This was a test, and I shouldn’t hesitate with an answer. The truth was, I didn’t understand the question. I was here for one lesson. One. Maybe in my fantasies over the last month, I had pictured myself with a job as an airline pilot, in a dark blue uniform, with my hair tucked and sprayed into submission under a neat brimmed hat, standing in the doorway to the cockpit and greeting passengers as they boarded, all of them looking me up and down and mistrusting a small woman, but deciding to give me their confidence because of the uniform and the vast airplane that was all mine to fly. At least, that’s how I pictured an airline flight starting. I’d never flown before. I’d only seen it on TV. Maybe my fantasy was stupid.
On a sigh I said, “I like airplanes.”
He raised his white-blond brows at me, not helping me at all, waiting for me to continue.
I swallowed. “I’ve always lived near the airport.”
“Really?” he asked, furrowing his brow now, confused.
“Not this airport,” I clarified. “Other airports. I move a lot. The last one was at the Air Force base, and I got closer than I’d ever been to an airplane. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
This he understood, nodding slowly.
“When I moved here, I got the job at the office. Now I’m not just hearing the airplanes and seeing a flash of them above me through the trees. I watch them take off and land. They look like they shouldn’t be able to fly.”
He laughed. Though he cut himself off quickly, pressing his lips together, I could tell he was trying not to grin. “Let me tell you something, Leah. Years ago, this place was crawling with kids wanting to be pilots. There were four folks doing your job, two in the office and two on the tarmac. That rabbit warren of empty rooms you’re in charge of was full of business. But since 9/11 and the bad publicity about airports and a couple of recessions, not as many people want to take flying lessons.”
I nodded. The office with all its nice furniture and no people did smack of more exciting days gone by.
“We old guys, not just here but across the country, talk about getting young people excited about flying again. What we say is this: Most people hear an airplane in the sky and think, ‘There’s an airplane,’ and go back to what they were doing. A few folks look around for the airplane, try to figure out what kind of plane it is, and watch it from the time they spot it to the time it disappears on the horizon, maybe after that. Those kids are the ones who will be pilots.” He pointed at me. “I knew that about you. I’ve just been waiting for you to show up.” He reached for my form.
He was telling me I was some kind of Chosen One. Yet he expressed this opinion with a self-satisfied, know-it-all air that ticked me off. I suddenly understood why, when he’d yelled at Grayson for handling the banners wrong last month, Grayson had yelled back.
Mr. Hall eyed me over the top of the paper, then looked at the form again. I forgot my annoyance. Panic took over as I realized he was examining the forgery.
He set the form almost all the way down on the desk. It drifted the rest of the distance to lie on piles of other paperwork. He said, “I’ll give you a lesson on one condition.”
That I go back and get the form signed by my mother for real this time? This would be better than having me arrested for forgery, yet neither was the answer I wanted. My stomach turned over as I waited for him to finish.
“Quit smoking,” he said.
I sucked in a breath, surprised that he would care whether I smoked, and that he would even know—though I probably reeked of it. My mother certainly did after she’d lit up.
Then I was relieved that he hadn’t mentioned my mother’s signature. Then annoyed that he was getting in my business. “I am paying you,” I pointed out. “You can’t make me quit smoking.”
“You can’t make me take you flying.” He grinned at me, rubbing it in.
Then he leaned forward like he was letting me in on a secret. “I’m doing you a favor. It took me thirty years to quit. Okay?”
I nodded. I didn’t have any choice.
“Then let’s go.” He jumped up from his chair like a kid. Maybe he really had been waiting for me to come in.
I followed him as he wound between and under the planes packed into the hangar like puzzle pieces. Finally we reached a white plane, larger than the others, a four-seater. We circled it as he pointed out things that could go wrong with it and that I should be looking for before I flew. He sent me up on a stepladder to stick a glass rod into the wing to check the fuel level.
“This seems awfully low-tech,” I said, resistant to these chores if they were busywork, like everything in my definitely-not-college-track classes at school. “Don’t airplanes have a gas gauge in the cockpit?”
“They do,” he said. “I’ve just showed you a bunch of things on this aircraft that can break. Don’t you think a gas gauge can break?”
“I guess.”
“‘I guess’ will get you killed.”
I recognized the tone he used to reprimand Grayson. He didn’t have to use it on me. I turned around on the stepladder and looked down at him.
Seeming to realize he’d mistakenly snapped at me like someone he loved, he held up both hands, explaining himself. “If the gas gauge were broken on your car and you unexpectedly ran out of fuel, what would you do?”
“Pull over.” I didn’t know, really. I could get my learner’s permit when I turned fifteen in a month and a half. But with my mom gone all the time, I doubted I would ever learn to drive.