by Liv Leighton
Mac opened her mouth to continue but snapped it shut. She let out a very loud sigh and then turned back to the immaculate view outside of her window.
An hour and forty minutes to go, I thought. This is going to be a long trip.
Five minutes passed before I decided to break the silence again. The hum of the engines was soothing but in tandem with the hostility between us, it was sort of foreboding. To the left, the coast had basically disappeared. There was nothing but the ocean beneath us. There was a string of small islands up ahead that I was expecting to creep into view at any moment.
“My turn to ask a question,” I said.
She said nothing, and I took that as a ‘sure… go ahead’.
“Why do you hate me?” I asked. “Are we really going to try to pretend that we weren’t into each other the first two times we saw one another?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. But the slight redness in her cheeks indicated otherwise.
“If you say so,” I said, turning back to the control panel.
“And besides… not that it matters,” she said. “But I don’t hate you.”
I chuckled. “That’s pretty hard to believe.”
“I don’t. It’s just that… I don’t know… I get so tired of people coming form out of town and buying out these businesses that I have seen blossom and grow ever since I was a child. These big companies or hot shot millionaires come into town and just buy them up. I’m not saying you’re one of those people, but what you’re doing is pretty much the same.”
“Uh… no. Not really. Not at all.” I actually thought it was a stupid comment and took great offense to it. But I wouldn’t let her know that.
“I could have had this plane if you hadn’t have moved in up on Moose Hill and took it from me.”
“So what you’re saying,” I said sarcastically, “is that no one should ever move to Sitka without making sure they won’t be purchasing something ahead of you. Is that correct? If so, you should call the city council and ask them to include it in their literature.”
“Smart ass.”
“Sometimes,” I agreed. “But I also tend to get defensive when I am accused of something and am not in the wrong.”
“I wanted this plane.”
“And I had no idea, Mac. Besides… by signing that contract, the plane is sort of yours.”
She crossed her arms over her chest stubbornly. “You know what I mean.”
“I do. But I think it’s foolish. Hell, you don’t even have your license.”
“How hard can it be? I planned to get one. If you can fly, it can’t be but so hard.”
“It’s really not,” I said. I then took my hands off of the yoke, raising them in the air. “Go ahead and take over.”
Her eyes grew wide and for just a moment, I saw excitement in them. But that was quickly flushed out by anger and fear.
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “Put your hands back on that!”
“You sure?”
“Yes!”
I shrugged. “Okay. But don’t say I never offered.”
I regained my grip on the yolk. Ahead, I saw one of the islands pop into view. I was unfamiliar with this region and had no idea what it was called. All I knew that was that we were headed for the Queen Charlotte Islands.
And as far as I was concerned, those miles couldn’t blaze by fast enough.
Mac sat back in the passenger seat, her arms folded over her chest. She was cute as hell, looking like a sad little girl. But I didn’t care. She had managed to piss me off and all I could do not to yell at her was to keep my eyes ahead, on the horizon and the sky as it unfolded itself in front of us.
13—Mac
I did my very best to hide the fact that I was impressed at how well Jack flew the plane. I hated it… it was as if he had always meant to own the damn plane. Even when he took it in for a landing just behind Grandfather’s store (also on the water, as was The Pine Way), he did so as if he had been flying professionally for years.
But I kept my scowl on, my arms crossed. Yes, I did feel a bit like a child giving their mom or dad the silent treatment, but I didn’t know how else to act. The hell of it was that I could feel the edges of my anger softening. I still resented him like nobody’s business, but I also knew that staying mad at him after signing a contract to go into business with him was not only counterproductive¸ it was also just downright stupid.
After securing the plane, Jack climbed out and opened up the plane’s side door. He unfolded a small metal ramp that clanged down on the sturdy pier that led to the small dusty lot that sat behind my grandfather’s shop, The Outdoorsman.
Jack and I both looked up, seeing the quaint town all around the store. The store was located in Graham Island, one of the many little islands that made up the Queen Charlotte islands. It was idyllic, like something out of an island-based TV show that drew low ratings due to a low budget and a not-too charismatic cast. It was a cute little town, but every time I visited, I had no idea how my grandfather lived here without going a little stir crazy.
“Come on,” I said, without much enthusiasm. “I guess I should introduce the two of you first.”
As we walked up the pier and towards the store, a harrowing thought occurred to me: Grandfather was going to give me hell for this. He was going to rib and joke about how Jack and I would make a nice couple. Actually, I fully expected him to ask how long we had been together when I introduced him to Jack—although the old fart knew I wasn’t dating anyone.
We walked up the pier and to a small side street that ran alongside Grandfather’s store. The streets weren’t busy, but not dead either. There were a few scattered tourists mingling with the locals and a very mild flow of traffic. The sails and top decks of ships could be seen behind the primary row of businesses, preparing to head out onto the water.
We entered The Outdoorsman and I was not surprised to find the place dead. I also found it in dire need of a good dusting. I’ll give Grandfather one thing…he had the smell down. The scent of the store made you instantly think of being outside. It smelled stale and slightly dirty.
“Mac!”
I heard his voice from the front of the store and followed it. It was thick and gruff from the thirty-five years of his life he had spent smoking. When grandma had died of lung cancer, a direct result of her own smoking, Grandfather had dropped the habit cold turkey. If he was to be trusted (and I believed that he was), he hadn’t put a cigarette to his lips in just about ten years.
I walked to the front and found him hunkered down in the floor, restocking a shelf of trail mix. It hurt my heart to see how much he seemed to have aged in the five months that had passed since I had last seen him. Right down to the lack of any sort of real luster in his eyes, he looked to have aged five years. I was happy to see the slight glimmer of happiness in those eyes when he saw me come around the corner.
He stood up and gave me a hug. I was relieved to see that he wasn’t as frail as he looked; he still had some heft to him, particularly around the gut. His long hair was almost all gray now, except for the few strands of black just in front of his ears.
“It’s so good to see you,” he said.
“You, too,” I said.
Grandfather was the only family I had left. With my mother having died when I was a teen and my dad basically walking out after I had started college (he’d never been the same after mom died), Grandfather was all I had.
Once the hug was broken, Jack stepped up and offered his hand.
“De… sorry, excuse me, Jack Keith.”
I wondered if Jack was actually nervous to be meeting someone that was so close to me. He seemed to be tripping over his words a bit. I watched as they shook hands and felt as if two totally separate sides of my world were being thrown together at high speeds.
“Smitty Lowery,” Grandfather said. “Nice to meet you. Mac told me about the plane and your willingness to help. I sure do thank you.”
“Not a problem at all, sir. If you can let me know where the supplies need to go, I can start unloading it all for you.”
“Here, I’ll show you,” Grandfather said. “And I’ll lend a hand as I can.”
“Me, too,” I said, not wanting my grandfather to blow his back by trying to lift anything heavy.
Grandfather got two dollies from the back of the shop and we rolled them around to the back. Pushing them down the pier, I wondered if Jack had always been this polite and helpful—but I had just missed it due to the awkward situation and my insistence on hating him.
I’m not being fair to him, I thought.
It came out of nowhere, and it stung. It was true. When you boiled the situation down to its core, I was sort of being a bitch. I was acting spoiled and taking it out on Jack. So what that he had beaten me to the punch when it came to buying the plane? What did he owe me? Nothing. It was business…plain and simple.
I watched him as he started to unload some of the heavier boxes, sliding them to the edge of the pane’s hatch. Once he had a few of them out of the way, he then did his best to angle the two crates to the edge of the hatch; the crates contained kayaks and the two snowmobiles which were the pivotal part of Grandfather’s order.
I stood without moving, watching Jack move the boxes and crates. He shifted them like a man that was used to shifting around heavy things. I watched his muscles flexing under his shirt and the look of stern determination as he moved things around. I felt myself getting what my mother had called “twitterpated,” a stupid phrase she had lifted from Bambi. It also brought to mind a hilarious sexual phrase I had picked up from Sophie, my room mate in college. If she had seen me then, watching Jack move the boxes and crates around, she would have asked me, plain and simple: “Is that making your girl parts thump?”
I snickered at the remembrance of that silly phrase and was also very aware that I was feeling a slight stirring in some places that usually remained calm and inactive.
I went awkwardly to the edge of the hatch and offered my help. I felt myself getting giddy and slightly turned on and it made me severely uncomfortable. I tried to deflect it with conversation with Grandfather but it was only marginally effective. I did everything I could to avoid Jack but it was hard, as he was all over the place. He was doing the bulk of the work and genuinely didn’t seem to mind.
It took fifteen minutes to get all of the goods off of the plane. As Jack continued to slide and lift boxes and crates off, I rolled some of it up to the shop on one of the dollies. All in all, it took about forty-five minutes to get it all unloaded and put away in the back of The Outdoorsman. The hardest part, of course, was getting the crates with the kayaks and snowmobiles up the pier. It took some slogging with both dollies (and some impressive lifting skills by Jack) but we managed to get it all inside without event.
In the back room, where Grandfather proudly went over his inventory list, he clapped Jack on the back. “My God, son…you’re a beast!”
“Nah…I just try to stay fit.”
“Whatever it is, I appreciate the hell out of it. The least I can do is feed you.”
“Not necessary.” Jack said wiped his brow with his wrist and stretched his back.
Grandfather turned to me and shook his head. “He doesn’t understand, does he?”
“No,” I said with a chuckle. Then, turning to Jack, I added, “You can’t win an argument with him. So just smile and nod. Let him buy you lunch.”
“You, too,” Grandfather said. “Right now. Come on. I’m starved.”
Without waiting for either of us, he headed through the stock room door and into the store.
“I like him,” Jack said with a smile.
“Yeah, he’s pretty great,” I agreed.
We followed him into the store, Jack leading. I saw a slight sweat stain on Jack’s back and it made me once again appreciate what he had done for Grandfather and myself. And beyond that, it made me appreciate the body under the shirt.
I heard Sophie in my head again and shut her out immediately. I rolled my eyes and followed Jack into The Outdoorsman.
****
Grandfather chose a small sandwich shop for lunch. It looked like a Subway but was locally owned and had specialty sandwiches. It was a cute little shop, echoing the other quaint businesses all around it. Despite the air having a slight nip to it, we sat out on the restaurant’s patio and ate our lunch together.
Jack listened idly as I caught up with my grandfather. He told me about how he had been spending his last five months and, as usual, there were things he described about spending his time along that bothered me. He’d always had a bad habit of sugar-coating things and I had long ago learned to look past that and to the truth of what was really going on. And what I gathered about his last five months was essentially much of the same.
He was drinking more than usual, which was obviously not good. But he was also spending more time with his friends, which was great. From time to time, Grandfather would slip into depressed states and hold up in his house for days on end, often not even bothering to open The Outdoorsman. He spent most of his time watching hockey or fishing—only his idea of fishing was casting a line into the water, thinking about grandma, and killing a six pack or so.
I knew deep down that he only had another ten years or so to live. He was only seventy-one but I had gone back through our family history a few years back and saw that there were absolutely no men at all on my mother’s side of the family that lived past eighty. I also knew that the drinking was probably going to expedite the process, but I didn’t have the guts to mention it to him. Whenever I would offhandedly mention his excessive drinking to him, he simply brushed it off and changed the subject.
So we ate our lunch as he told us about his daily routines. About halfway through the meal, he attacked me with the almost-joking question that I had been expecting.
“So how long have you two been seeing each other?” he asked.
Jack laughed. I blushed and looked to the ground.
“We aren’t,” Jack and I said at the same time.
“We are in business together, though,” Jack said.
“Yes, in a sense,” I added.
“Any big plans for it so far?” Grandfather asked.
I jumped in and told him about my desire to fly people out to remote locations for camping, hunting, fishing and hiking. To my surprise, Jack also contributed to the explanation, even making sure that he let Grandfather get the impression that it was my idea.
“So how did you two meet, then?” Grandfather asked.
“I stole her plane from here. We didn’t know that we were vying for the same plane and I managed to buy it a day before her.”
“Oooh,” Grandfather said. “I bet she didn’t like that! I know her moods… she doesn’t handle defeat well.”
“I’m learning that,” Jack said, only half-sarcastically.
A brief silence fell over the table and I think Grandfather felt the tension and awkwardness in it right away. He cleared his throat and turned to Jack as if the last ten seconds of conversation had never happened.
“So when did you learn to fly?” he asked.
“When I was in college. It had nothing to do with my career path; it was just something that I had always wanted to learn to do.”
“What did you study in college?” Grandfather asked.
“Not much,” Jack said. “I dropped out after three semesters and joined the Army.”
“Oh, yeah? See any combat?”
I noticed a hesitation in Jack’s answer and, unless I was just imagining it, a flicker of doubt in his usually cool exterior.
“I did. In Afghanistan.”
My heart dropped. My brother had been killed in combat in Afghanistan. To hear Jack mention the place was almost like a slap to the face. I saw that Grandfather was looking sympathetically at me. He reached over and took my hand.
****
After lunch, we walked back to The Outdoorsman where Grandfather
gave Jack a tour of the place. He invited us to stay for dinner as well, but I didn’t want to be too late getting back home and Jack claimed to not be entirely comfortable flying at night.
I manned the store—not a huge task, as only as single customer came in for the hour we remained there—while Jack and Grandfather cracked open the crates in the back. I listened to them work as I thought about David and how devastated I had been when I’d gotten the phone call about his death. Back then, I’d still had a husband to rely on for support and, oddly enough, I had felt as if David had died again after my husband had walked out.
Jack and Grandfather came back into the store, slightly sweaty. We started saying our awkward goodbyes, Jack and Grandfather shaking hands again and exchanging phone numbers. Jack apparently sensed that we needed some privacy to say our goodbyes, so he stepped out, heading down the pier to start the plane.
Grandfather smiled at me once we heard the engine start up. He sighed and shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
“So what’s wrong with that one?”
“That one?”
“Yes. Him. What’s wrong with him? I can sense that he irritates you.”
“He does most of the time. It’s stupid, though. A spoiled brat sort of thing.”
“Mad that he bought the plane before you?”
I gave my own sigh then. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Fair enough. He seems nice, though. Would you maybe give him a chance?”
“Grandfather… really,” I said.
He held up his hands in a mock gesture of surrender. “I know, I know. But hey, I liked him. If you ever head out this way again, it wouldn’t be so bad if he tagged along.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I also saw how shocked you were when he mentioned Afghanistan. You been thinking about David lately?”
“Daily, no, not enough. Not as much as he deserves.”
“It’s okay to move on,” Grandfather said. “It’s remembering respectfully that counts… even if it isn’t as frequently as it used to be. I’m the same way about your grandma, you know.”
