Such a Rush by Jennifer Echols Page A

around at me.
    They should have. They could have come and asked me earlier today about Mr. Hall’s ridiculous filing system. I would have saved them hours of work. But they wouldn’t ask, and I wouldn’t offer. I’d shared one glimmer of a friendly moment with Grayson four months before when he crashed the Piper. That didn’t matter now. I couldn’t shake the sound of him saying more than a year ago, Why else would that stingy bastard give away flying lessons for free? If I stepped inside the hangar, they would think I wanted something.
    As I gazed across the tarmac, Grayson opened the door in the side of the hangar. Though he and Alec were twins, there was no mistaking them for each other. Alec was beautiful,smiling, easy. Grayson was tall, muscular, and a mess, an eighteen-year-old version of Mr. Hall.
    By the time Mr. Hall died, he was fifty pounds overweight, his hair nearly pure white like the Admiral’s, his face lined with regret. But the whole three and a half years I’d worked at the airport, a photo of Mr. Hall as a slender fighter pilot had lived at the bottom corner of the bulletin board in his office. His hands were shoved in the pockets of his flight suit. One side of his mouth was cocked up in a lopsided grin. He leaned forward as if any second he would lose patience with the guy holding the camera and grab it away.
    On this warm spring day, Grayson wore a T-shirt, cargo shorts, flip-flops, and his usual straw cowboy hat and mirrored aviator shades, but his air of quick impatience was the same as his dad’s. He managed to convey frustrated energy across the tarmac, though he was only banging the hangar door open and retrieving something from his truck. Or, after an hour of work, he was knocking off for the day. Later Alec would complain that he kept working doggedly while Grayson goofed off. The argument might escalate into a shouting match that I would witness from the porch. At least something in their family would still be normal.
    Wrong. Grayson passed his truck and kept walking toward me. Or not toward me but toward the building I happened to be sitting in front of. He wanted hangar rental records or flight plans from the office. But he would have to pass me to get inside. He would have to say hello or pretend I wasn’t there, one or the other, on our first encounter since Mr. Hall’s funeral. My fingers ached from gripping the edges of the newspaper so hard out of a strange anger I hadn’t even realized I felt until today.
    Grayson and Alec had not been here for their dad. Notto form a family with him for the past three and a half years, not to help him through Jake’s death at the end. I had been here when they weren’t. I had been here because they weren’t. Not in exchange for being Mr. Hall’s girlfriend, but maybe in exchange for filling in as his daughter, he had let me fly his planes. Since he died, I’d lost my free ride. It would have taken me twenty hours working at the airport to earn one hour’s rental in someone else’s plane. For the two months since his death, I’d been as grounded as the day my mom dragged me here to live in Heaven Beach. And now Grayson and Alec would sell Mr. Hall’s planes off.
    The instant I had that idea, I was sorry, and my stomach twisted into a hard knot. I couldn’t guess at Mr. Hall’s motives, but I’d liked him because he was kind to me and funny, not because he gave me something I wanted. I felt guilty for putting the loss of him and the loss of my flight time into the same depressing thought. The guilt brought tears to my eyes.
    Then I was self-conscious that Grayson, only twenty paces away now, would think I was pretending to mourn his dad. Casually I touched my fingertips to the inside corners of my eyes to remove the tears.
    But I shouldn’t have worried what Grayson would see when he looked at me. My rocking chair was three feet from the airport office door, yet he didn’t glance in my direction. Somehow he made swinging the door