“Fixing engines and whatnot?”
“And whatnot.”
“What about flying?”
“I’m grounded,” he said. “They don’t let me fly.”
“Not ever?”
“Not ever,” he confirmed. “Administrator in the licensing office knows my family is Catholic, and he doesn’t like Catholics, see, so every time I go in to apply, he finds a new way to give me the runaround with the paperwork. And my boss at the airfield won’t let me fly with an American license, so... I’m grounded.”
This made me sad. Back when we were all still together, Father gave Huck a little yellow biplane named Trixie for his sixteenth birthday, along with flying lessons over the wide field near our house in the Hudson Valley. HucklovedTrixie. He used to take it up do aerobatics. Spins and stall turns... silly tricks to show off, until Father shouted at him over the radio, threatening to set fire to the yellow biplane.
Now it sat in a shed at the back of our property.
“You should be flying,” I said. “You’re a good pilot. You used to love it.”
“Know that, don’t I?”
“You must miss it.”
“Of course I do. You don’t have something be a part of your life every day and then not miss it when it’s taken away from you.”
My heart squeezed. I struggled to keep my emotions in check as I stared at the back of his long wool coat. “No, you do not.”
He gave me a quick glance over his shoulder. “Fox said you’d been volunteering at Vassar’s collegiate library across the river.”
“That was only during the summer. They received an extensive donation from a private book collection, and I was helping catalog it.”
“And you got fired?”
He said this with a little amusement behind the lilt in his voice, and that made me think he and Father had been having a laugh about it when they were off on their little males-only jaunt in Tokat.
“I didn’t get fired,” I said as my cheeks heated. It was only that I’d gotten into a very small fight with another volunteer who didn’t know Latin and was filing everything wrong. But the thing about that particular library is that your voice really carries, and maybe I used a few choice and mildly profane words that caused one of the less-sturdy librarians to have a fit... which in turn causedmeto be politely but firmly dismissed. But I wasn’t getting paid anyway, so technically you can’t be fired.
“Not what I heard,” he said as though he was trying to provoke me.
“Well, you heard wrong. It wasn’t a real job.”
“Was it not?”
“It was only temporary,” I told Huck as frustration and embarrassment mounted. “Much like everything else in my life.”
His shoulders tensed beneath the wool of his peacoat. He glanced over his shoulder but didn’t look me in the eye. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means never count on people to be there when you need them. They only disappoint you.”
Huck swung around. “What are you trying to say, Theo?”
Old anger and hurt welled up to the surface as if they’d been slinking in the dark corners of my broken heart, head down, tail swishing back and forth, waiting for a chance to pounce.
“You know damn well what I’m trying to say. Youleft, Huck. I woke up the next morning and you were gone. You didn’t even say goodbye. You just dropped off the face of the planet!”
“I didn’t leave by my own accord, banshee. I was thrown out of the damn house like a bum.”
I stilled, caught between the old hurt I’d been eagerly unearthing and a shiny new doubt that stood in its way.
Huck had been thrown out of the house?
