As the door was opening, I couldn’t see them, but I recognized Alec’s voice. “Do you think he’s doing her?”
“Good God, no,” Jake said.
“Of course he is,” Grayson said. “Why else would that stingy bastard give away flying lessons for free?”
The door swung all the way open and banged against the metal wall like a gunshot. All three of them jumped and then turned to stare at me: Alec sprawled in a lawn chair, Jake leaning against the nose of the red Piper, Grayson with both hands in the engine.
I stood there for a moment more, processing, trying not to jump to conclusions. Maybe they hadn’t meant what I thought they’d meant. Maybe they hadn’t meant Mr. Hall. Maybe they hadn’t meant me.
Yes, they had, I saw in the next instant. Jake looked at the cement floor and shook his head like it was a damn shame I’d heard them, but he didn’t really care. Alec, wide eyes on me, started to get up from his chair. Grayson kept staring at me across the airplane engine, gaze cold, daring me to deny it.
I had not denied it. I’d turned away from the open door, never looking back even when I reached the airport office. I’d told Leon that he could go back to his regular job because I didn’t have a flying lesson that day after all.
In the year since then, I’d never skipped another lesson. Flying was too precious. But I’d avoided Mr. Hall’s sons every other way I could. They hadn’t acted differently toward me. Jake had been in Afghanistan. Alec and Grayson had given me a polite hello when they absolutely had to, and had held open the door of the airport office for me when I was carrying a box of files, like southern gentlemen, or southern boys whose father had threatened them within an inch of their lives if they didn’t act like gentlemen, same as always. Maybe they had wanted to apologize but had missed the moment, and now bringing it up would be even more awkward than letting it lie. It didn’t matter, anyway, when we didn’t matter to each other.
But they mattered to me, I realized as Jake and Alec scanned the sky. They viewed me as a stranger, but I viewed them as my heroes in a one-sided relationship, like a television drama I looked forward to every week and pined for when my mom pawned the TV.
My heart pounded at the thought that one of them was about to attempt a very ugly landing.
“I can’t believe this,” Mr. Hall muttered beside me.
“I know,” I said.
“I’ve been checking the weather all day. I wouldn’t have sent him up if I’d seen this coming in so fast.”
“We’re on the ocean in the winter,” I reminded him. “Storms are going to blow in that you don’t see coming.” Whatever happened to Grayson—my stomach twisted—I didn’t want Mr. Hall to blame himself. Though he would.
“That’s right, Leah.” Mr. Hall nodded. “That’s good. You have to be better than me.”
You have to be better than me was one of his favorite lines and the most often repeated by his sons when they imitated him behind his back. I hoped Grayson really was better than his dad, and better than me too. I doubted I could have landed in that wind.
Static sounded over the loudspeaker, then Grayson’s dead calm voice, unflappable as Chuck Yeager, announcing his intention to drop his banner.
Mr. Hall must be so proud of Grayson right now, but he didn’t show it. He just crossed his arms and scanned the sky.
“There he is.” Alec pointed. Now we could see the plane, a tiny dot above the trees, and hear it, a low buzz underneath the wind.
Mr. Hall’s handheld radio crackled down by his side. Then came Grayson’s smooth voice again. “Is the crosswind still bad?” Even though this wasn’t the airport’s frequency but the one Hall Aviation used to communicate with its pilots, it was still public, and Grayson still had to stay calm. In his natural state, he was nothing like Alec and Jake, not calm at all. I imagined every curse word that filled the cockpit when he turned the radio off.
Either that, or he enjoyed the danger, the rush. Grayson was like that.
Mr. Hall glanced at the wind sock, then brought the radio to his mouth. “Affirmative, it’s still bad.”
Long minutes passed while we watched the dot make its way down the length of the runway, the banner now visible as a streak behind the dot. He reached the base of the runway and announced himself smoothly over the loudspeaker, then turned to make his final approach and announced himself again, exactly as Mr. Hall had taught us. The plane descended, roaring closer.
After three years of watching countless banner pickups and drops from the airport office, I still found the sight shocking: how tiny the plane was, how long the banner, how tall and vivid the red letters. The banner he was towing, which he and Alec and I had been taking turns towing all week, was left over from the summer: SUNSET SPECIAL 2 FOR 1 BEACHCOMBERS. I’d been worried Beachcomber’s would blame us when customers asked for a special that the restaurant hadn’t run since last September. But there were no customers in December, at least none who would see the banner from the deserted beach on a blustery day.
SUNSET SPECIAL 2 FOR 1 BEACHCOMBERS came closer and closer to us, dwarfing the plane. Grayson didn’t have to land. He only needed to get near enough to the ground to drop the banner safely, but he was having trouble even with that. The nose of the plane pointed diagonally toward us, rather than straight down the runway, to combat the wind. The left wing rolled up suddenly as Grayson lost control. All four of us watching made a noise.
He straightened the plane as it roared even with us. He was close enough that I could make out the straw cowboy hat he always wore, but nothing else through the windows reflecting the clouds.
“Drop drop drop,” Mr. Hall shouted, not into his radio but into the wind.
On cue, the plane pitched up, climbing to a safer altitude. The banner hung in midair for a moment, then drifted slowly toward Earth. At least, that’s what it looked like at first. The four of us realized at the same time that it was coming toward us, just as Grayson commented over Mr. Hall’s radio, “Maybe y’all should move.”
Alec and Jake dashed one way around the airport office. I ran and Mr. Hall jogged the other way. The seven-foot-tall banner rippled toward us like a snake, impossibly fast for its size, and smack, the metal pole at one end hit the office’s glass door.
Wincing, I rounded the building to the front again and examined the glass. Amazingly, the pole hadn’t broken it. Now the pole scraped along the concrete floor of the porch, dragged by the banner going wild in the wind. Alec and Jake were rolling up the banner from the other end, which had wrapped itself around the far side of the building.