Better That Way

Delaney

Nine days out of high school and I had already run out of things to do with my hands.

That’s the part nobody warns you about. You’ve got thirteen years of somewhere to be at 7:40 in the morning, then one Saturday in a cap and gown, and it’s all over. The only thing left on my calendar was a move-in date in August. It sat there, eleven weeks out, like a lit window on the far side of a field.

I told my mother I was going to Becca’s. Instead I drove to the Gas-N-Go on Route 9 and parked under the light that buzzed. I ended up sitting there for four full minutes with the engine off before I went in. I watched the June bugs hit that light and drop. The pumps were empty. Through the window I could see the cashier on a stool, phone in hand, looking like she’d rather be anywhere else, and the whole store lit up white and humming like an aquarium. I sat out there in the dark working up to a thing I couldn’t have named.

And standing at the coffee station with his back to me, filling a thermos at almost eleven at night: Wes Cutler.

The bell over the door chimed when I came in, but he didn’t turn around. My shoes peeled off the sticky floor by the coolers with every step, the only sound in the place besides the cashier’s radio going low behind the counter. The whole store smelled like burnt coffee and the pine stuff they mop with.

Which gave me a good long look at him while his back was turned.

Wes had on the county maintenance shirt with the sleeves cut off clean at the shoulder seams. That cannot possibly be within dress code, I thought, and had to look at the floor for a second. It left a lot of arm and the better part of his back out in the open, and I noticed the biceps and the delts the way you notice a stair that isn’t where you expected it: all at once, with a small swoop in my stomach.

He’s tall, with broad shoulders that tapered down to a trim waist. It’s the kind of build you can’t replicate in a gym, the kind you only get doing manual labor since the age of fifteen. It’s a back you could read a job history off of. He never carried himself like he knew about it. That was the part that always got me. Boys our age who look like that? They know it, and they strut around like peacocks making sure everybody else knows it too. And here he stood, hands quiet, weight even, like a man who had never once considered being looked at.

Speaking of those hands. They were what I kept coming back to. They were doing something careful with the lid even though they were not careful-looking hands. Big, with rough knuckles, and black under the nails. That kind doesn’t come out. I’d find that out later. I noticed a shiny patch on his right forearm the size of a quarter, where something hot in his uncle’s garage had bit him and won. I spent more time studying that scar than I’d like to admit, mostly thinking, I hope somebody looked at that when it happened. Then I thought about how I had no business having an opinion about his forearm at all. Especially not in a gas station this late at night.

That’s one of my quirks, I guess. I notice. I’ve always noticed. The color of people’s shoelaces, what they order and whether they change their mind, which parent they check with before they answer a question. My mother talks about it like it’s a gift. My father talks about it like it’s a job qualification. Neither one has ever bothered to ask me what it’s like.

I knew Wes Cutler the way you know anybody in a town of forty-one hundred. His uncle put the new brakes on my Corolla sophomore year. He sat two rows over in my American Government class and probably said ten words to me the whole time. And once, at a bonfire I hadn’t even wanted to be at, he walked me to my car without making a whole thing out of it.

“Evenin’, Delaney. You done staring a hole in my back?”

I swear I could hear the smile in his voice.

I wanted to deny it. “You’re drinking coffee at eleven,” was what came out instead.

He finished capping his thermos and finally turned to face me. He looked me over with the unhurried attention of somebody who has never once in his life been in a rush to fill a silence.

“It’s for later,” he said. “This place shuts down at midnight and I’ve got to be on a mower at four.”

“Four in the morning?”

“Yeah. Out at the airfield. Got to get it done before it gets hot and before anybody’s up flying.”

I cocked my head at him. “That’s a real job?”

“Somebody’s got to.” He tipped his head toward the register. “You buying something, or are you just hanging out?”

“I’m … just here.”

It came out of my mouth like a confession, and the heat came straight up my throat into my face. I couldn’t help but be shocked at my own honesty. I was not the girl who went places just to be there. No, I had a laminated four-year plan at home and a full ride to a school six hundred miles away. And I had a father who said my daughter the way he’d talk about an investment that was finally about to pay off.

I still had my keys in my hand, thumb absently clicking the carabiner clip on my key ring. I had no idea how long I’d been doing that, and made myself stop.

Wes stood there considering me a moment, one hand leaning on the counter and the other still wrapped around that thermos. Then, slow, one side of his mouth went up and a dimple popped that had no partner on the other cheek. It nearly stole my breath, and I remember thinking it was unfair that a face could be built like that and then just be allowed to walk around.

“You ever seen a plane land from underneath?” he said.

The hole in the fence was down at the low corner where the drainage cut ran through, where the county’s chain-link had given up on the ground and the ground had given up right back. He crouched and held the wire up for me, hooking two fingers through it and lifting maybe eight inches. I went under on my hands and knees with the damp grass soaking through my jeans. The dirt here was cold and wet, since the sun never really gets a chance in this section. It occurred to me, halfway under a fence, that this was the first genuinely illegal thing I had ever done.

It felt amazing. It felt like nothing at all. It felt like both.

When I finally made it through to the other side, I turned to watch him come after me. He passed the thermos through to me first, then started working on getting himself under.

I was standing, looking down, while he worked his shoulders under the chain-link. From up there I got a free look at the top of his head. Dark hair, cut short and cut cheap, with a cowlick set in a whorl that he has clearly been fighting his whole life and losing to. I had an unreasonable urge to smooth it out. I held back. Barely.

The whole airfield was two runways, a windsock, and a hangar with one light on a pole. Past that, the field stretched on into the dark until it hit the ridgeline that cut the stars off. Wes walked out across that field without once looking down at his feet, the same way a person crosses a familiar room in the dark. I guess that’s what mowing a place that often does to you. He stopped where the mowed line met the rough and then sat down, setting the thermos in the grass beside him. Like he’d done this hundreds of times before.

“Eleven-forty,” he said. “Charter out of Charlotte. Comes in over the ridge.”

I looked down at him, hands on my hips. “You know the schedule?”

“I know the schedule,” he said with a smile.

I finally gave in to gravity and sat down. The ground was still warm, even though the sun had long since gone down, and I could feel it soaking through my jeans and into the backs of my legs. The air smelled like cut grass with something sweet underneath. He’d tell me later that I was smelling the avgas.

It was so quiet out there that I swore I could hear the wind move through the grass. The crickets and the tree frogs were doing their thing, filling the air with a chorus that will forever sound like home to me. Beyond where we were sitting, the runway lights ran out in two straight lines toward the end of the field before they came to an abrupt stop. Just ended in the dark, like they had dropped right off a ledge. I had driven past this place at least four hundred times and had never once bothered to really look at it.

“Can I ask you something,” I said, without looking at him.

“You’re going to.”

“Why’d you bring me out here?” I wasn’t sure why, but I found myself holding my breath, nervous about what his answer would be.

He just sat there, feet flat on the ground and his arms wrapped loose around his knees. He was quiet long enough that I started regretting the question and trying to work out a way to take it back without embarrassing myself any further.

Then he turned to look at me, and the hangar light caught his face. It was the first time I ever let myself actually study his eyes. I had known since about the tenth grade that they were a pretty gray-green. What I had never known was how much they resembled the backside of a poplar leaf — that shade you get a look at right before a storm hits and the wind flips them all over, showing you a side of a tree you normally don’t get to see. I had a feeling I was seeing a side of Wes Cutler the same way.

“You came into the Gas-N-Go this late to stand near somebody,” he said. “Figured I might as well be somewhere worth standing.”

I opened my mouth and found I didn’t have one thing to put in it.

At 11:38 the ground started shaking.

You feel it before you hear it. It hit my palms first, where they were flat on the grass, a low shudder with no sound attached to it yet. Some primitive part of my brain was firing off warning shots to my nervous system, telling me something monumental was about to happen whether I was ready or not. Then the noise took over every cell in my body in one tearing roar. The plane came in over the ridge with its lights blazing and passed maybe two hundred feet above us, close enough that the wash of it whipped my hair around my face like a category four hurricane.

The scream tore out of me before I had a chance to register it. I grabbed his arm and was treated to a whole handful of muscle. If my hand lingered there longer than necessary, well. We’ll never know.

He didn’t move an inch. I, on the other hand, was laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe, falling flat back into the damp grass with my hands over my face while the sound rolled off down the runway and everything gradually went still around me again. When I finally got myself composed enough to take my hands off my face, he was looking down at me.

He wasn’t laughing. He’d gone soft around the eyes instead, with a small warm smile, and his face held a look I couldn’t yet put a name to. Whatever it was, it went through me worse than that plane had.

He looked back out over the runway. “There’s another one at twelve-ten,” he said into the darkness. Like a man reading off a departure board he had no personal stake in.

“Okay.”

“And a mail run at one.”

And there was the dimple. He already had his okay. He’d gone and found a second reason anyway.

“Okay,” I said, and it came out about an octave higher than I meant it to.

We stayed for all three flights, counting the one that had already flattened me. In about three hours he was going to have to cut the grass right where we’d been sitting, but neither one of us said a word about it.

Somewhere between the second and the third I stopped pretending I was there for the planes. He told me his father had been in Ohio for the past six years, and that he was lucky if he heard from him twice a year: his birthday, and Christmas if the man got around to it. He said it matter-of-factly, the way you’d report the mileage on a truck.

I told him about the folder. The four-year plan, laminated. And for the first time, standing in a dew-covered field in the middle of the night, I heard exactly how that plan sounded out loud. I waited for him to laugh at me, or tell me how stupid it was. He didn’t do either of those things.

“That’s not a plan, Delaney,” he said. “That’s a schedule.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Of course. A plan’s got you in it.”

My mind was still reeling from that one when the headlights swung across the grass.

One vehicle, coming down the service road at about ten miles an hour. No siren, which was somehow worse than a siren would have been. As it drew closer we had to shield our eyes against the headlights, and that was when I noticed the bar on the roof.

Wes was on his feet before I’d fully registered what I was looking at. He put a hand back toward me, not grabbing, just steadying. In the same breath, his stance shifted to put himself partly between me and the road.

“Whatever you do, don’t run,” he said.

“Hadn’t planned on it.”

“No one ever does.” His voice had changed. It had lost that lazy, honeyed drawl and gone flat and careful instead. That was when I started getting the impression this was not Wes Cutler’s first rodeo. “Just … let me do the talking, alright?”

He put both hands out where they could be seen and left them there. I wasn’t sure why it needed to be done, but I followed his lead anyway.

That was when the light bar on the roof came on, washing the whole field in flashes of red and blue. I wasn’t sure there was anywhere left to stand that wasn’t lit up. The driver’s side door opened to a radio crackling with numbers and words I couldn’t quite make out, and gravel crunched under boots. And there I stood, in the middle of a county airfield at one in the morning, grass in my hair and my heart thrashing like a bird in a box.

And then the thought hit me with a startling amount of clarity:

I have never been this awake in my entire life.