That led me back to my conversation with Alec right before we took off. He’d asked me what I thought of his plan to go into the military. I’d told him. I realized now that what I’d said was all wrong. That’s why he’d been frowning at me. If I had fallen for him, I would have hugged him and cried and begged him not to join up, and he knew it.
I’d blown that part of Grayson’s scheme without even meaning to.
There was no help for it now. As soon as I landed, I was going to have a long talk with Grayson and convince him that if he wanted to change his brother’s mind, no matter how important the issue, this was not the way.
That was my plan until I came in for my final approach. I should have been focusing on the runway, but my eyes drifted to the Hall Aviation hangar, where Grayson’s and Alec’s planes were already parked. Then to the lot beside the airport office, where my mother was stepping out of her boyfriend Roger’s ancient Trans-Am, the door a different color from the body.
As I landed, taxied over to the hangar, and stepped out of the plane, I didn’t see my mom anywhere outside. I scanned the hangar as I walked inside, but she wasn’t there, either. Grayson, Alec, and Molly were talking in front of Mr. Hall’s Cessna, all of them looking grim. Probably this was a very important discussion of the Chinook and the lieutenant and what Grayson had said to him, but none of that mattered right now.
I walked up and put my hand on Grayson’s chest. He stopped talking and looked down at me in surprise over the top of his shades.
“My mother is here,” I told him, “and you’re my boyfriend. You’ve been my boyfriend for three and a half years, except for my week with Mark.”
“What?” he yelped, panic in his eyes that I’d ruined my fake relationship with Alec.
“I can’t explain it right now,” I said impatiently. He wasn’t the only one engineering fake relationships around here. Couldn’t he see that? “I actually don’t work that many hours at the airport office, and when I’m not working there, I’m spending time with you.”
“But—”
I cut him off, turning to Alec. “You and I aren’t dating. Okay? Just for right now.”
“Okay,” Alec said dubiously.
I turned to Molly. “You… haven’t met my mother. Just keep your mouth shut.”
I turned to the side door of the hangar, which my mother would come through any second. “She’s at the airport office,” I said, keeping my eyes on the door. “Leon is telling her I’m working here instead this week. If he tells her I’m flying, I’m screwed. If he doesn’t offer that detail, I’m just your secretary, do you understand?”
I slipped my arm around Grayson’s waist and stared at the Cessna for two seconds until, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the hangar door open.
I was astonished at how she looked. She seemed the same as always, and it had only been ten days since I’d seen her—the night she told Mark he could move in. What surprised me was how much she looked like that girl in Mark’s truck, the one he’d taken to the beach, except that my mom was fifteen years older.
I walked over to her, calling, “Hey, Mama!” I hugged her. “Hey, Roger,” I said over her shoulder as he came in the door.
She beamed at me. “Baby, I’ve got some news.”
Since she’d just come back from the Indian casino, the first idea popping into my head was that she’d won fifty thousand dollars. But if she had, she would have spent it all on the way home. She and Roger would have rolled up to the hangar in a sparkling new club cab pickup instead of his Trans-Am.
“What is it?” I breathed.
“We’re moving to Savannah!” my mom announced. “Roger’s cousin says he may be able to get him on at the backhoe plant.”
I went cold in the broiling hangar. My brain tried to process this information. It did not compute. The backhoe plant, or for that matter any factory in the United States, would require three things of its employees that Roger did not have and could not get: a clean drug test, references, and the ability to drag his ass into work more than two days in a row. But in my heart I knew it would take a couple of weeks for my mother to figure this out, if she even cared. By that time we would be living in Savannah.
In a trailer park next to the airport.
And I would have to start over.
seventeen
“It’s beautiful in Savannah.” My mom made a vague waving motion that seemed to indicate Grayson, Alec, and Molly. “Your friends can come and visit,” she told me, as if she was feeling very generous, and this would make up for everything. “So come on back home, Leah, and get your stuff together. We’re leaving tonight.”
“Tonight?” Grayson asked sharply, sending a cold chill down my neck.
I turned to them. Alec and Molly whispered with their heads bent. Grayson watched my mom in disbelief. In his world, families didn’t move to a different town on the spur of the moment. They didn’t need to. And that’s when I realized what must be going on.
“What’s wrong?” I asked my mom suspiciously. “Why were you suddenly hell-bent on driving to the Indian casino last week?” Usually it took at least a couple of days for her to hatch that plan. A sudden turnaround reeked of desperation. Like, she needed a lot of money fast.
“Nothing’s wrong!” she exclaimed, her cheeks two spots of pink, and not from a day at the beach. “I just wanted to have a little fun. It’s spring break!”
Spring break was for students like me, not unemployed waitresses like her. I wondered whether she still qualified as an unemployed waitress. She’d gone so long without working that at some point she’d stopped being an unemployed waitress and became just plain unemployed.
I put my hands on my hips. “How far behind are you on rent?”
“That’s not why we’re moving,” she snapped. “Roger’s cousin says—”
“That’s why we moved from Golden to Equality,” I said. “That’s why we lived in every shithole in Equality at least twice. That’s why we moved from Equality to the Army base, and from the Army base to the Air Force base, and from there to Heaven Beach.”
“That is not why we moved here,” my mother yelled back at me. “Billy told me he was going to get a job for me. He didn’t do it, but that’s what he told me.”
Grayson was speaking soothingly in my ear. I didn’t care what he said. I wasn’t done.