Too Late to Win Me Back, Mr. Billionaire novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: Thanksgiving

Kit had her first lesson on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.

Not in the Hen. The Hen was for mail and medevacs and grown-ups, the mechanic said.

He rolled out a plane I'd never seen in the back of the hangar, under a tarp.

A yellow Piper Cub, older than both of us put together, with a tail wheel and two seats, one behind the other.

"Mine," the mechanic said. "Bought her in 1979. Kid can learn in her."

"You have a plane?" Sawyer said. "I've lived here three years."

"You never asked, kid."

Kit sat in the front seat with a headset on over her wool hat.

I sat behind her with my hands in my lap and my heart in my mouth.

"Okay," Kit said. "Which one's the gas?"

"Throttle."

"Which one's the throttle?"

"The one I told you about for an hour this morning."

"I was nervous. I didn't listen."

We took off with my hands on the controls and hers resting on top of mine.

Over the harbor I let go.

"Your airplane," I said.

"My airplane," Kit said, and the Cub wobbled, and she shrieked, and then she held it.

She held it straight and level over Thatch Island for four whole minutes, with her tongue between her teeth.

The island was white with the first frost.

The boats were out.

The new villas that would never be built were a field of brown grass.

"Darce," she said on the intercom, very quietly. "I'm flying."

"You're flying."

"I'm breathing and flying at the same time."

I didn't answer, because I couldn't.

Thanksgiving was in the hangar.

It had always been in the hangar, Sawyer's grandmother said, since 1971, for anybody on the island with nowhere better to go.

This year that was forty people.

We pushed the Hen out onto the ramp and set up four long tables where she usually lived, under the strings of work lights.

Three turkeys. A ham the co-op president brought. Eleven pies.

Lobster stew, because it was Maine.

The old man in the wool cap and his wife.

The harbormaster, his son, his daughter-in-law and the new baby, who slept through all of it in a car seat on the workbench.

The two feuding brothers, at the same table, by accident. They passed each other the gravy without speaking.

The co-op bookkeeper. The minister, who said grace and kept it short because Sawyer's grandmother was staring at him.

Kit sat between Sawyer's grandmother and the mechanic and fed the mechanic's dog green beans under the table.

Halfway through dinner, she stood up and tapped her water glass with a fork.

"I have an announcement," she said. "About a boat."

The hangar went quiet.

"Pierce put my name on Dad's boat," Kit said. "I thought about it for a week. I could sell her. I could sink her. I could take her to Boston and park her on his roof."

People laughed.

"But she's a lobster boat. She should catch lobsters." Kit turned to the old man. "Your grandson needs a boat, right? He's been sterning for you for six years?"

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