Chapter 7
“So, what do you do?” I asked from my seat high above the clouds. We’d been in the sky long enough to allow me to conveniently forget the endlessly vast ocean beneath us that could swallow our plane whole without even creating so much as a ripple effect. “Like, besides write?”
He considered the question for longer than I expected he would. “I’m an environmental sentry for the state,” he said.
I narrowed my eyes. “Sounds fancy, but I don’t really understand what that means,” I admitted.
He laughed. “Yeah, I tried to make it seem important. I’m a park ranger.”
“Oh,” I replied. “Well, why didn’t you just say that?”
“Because most people think it’s boring.”
“No way. I love parks. Where do you work?”
“Long Island. Jones Beach.”
“That’s a park?”
“Mm hmm,” he nodded.
“It’s not what I would have thought of. I thought parks were all, like, trees and grass and walking trails and stuff like that.”
“Yeah. Jones Beach is a state park. But instead of protecting the forest, we’re protecting the coastline.”
“So, what does a job like that entail?”
“Depends on the day. In the winter, I do a lot of paperwork. Processing permits for business for the spring and summer, budgets, hiring for the busy season, that sort of behind-the-scenes stuff. But I also do some environmental workshops for kids and families, community presentations about various wildlife, climate change, protecting the dunes, that type of thing. Oh! And seal walks.”
“I’ve never seen a seal out in the wild. I mean, maybe once at the aquarium? But not locally. There are seals on Long Island?”
He nodded. “Absolutely. You just have to know where to look.”
“Well, that sounds much more interesting than you’re giving it credit for,” I said. “Did you study this in college?”
“Yeah. Well, kind of. I majored in earth science originally. But then I began to study climatology and decided to switch over to atmospheric sciences.”
“So, you’re a science nerd?”
“I guess.”
“And also a writer?”
He smiled. “Uh huh.”
“Wow.”
I’m not a hundred percent sure if I was struck more by Beckett’s obvious intelligence or by his facial features.
Watching him talk, some mental camera inside my brain began snapping bursts of photos of him, analyzing the angles of his jaw, noticing the deep dimple on just his right cheek, wanting to touch my fingertips to the scar that traversed the bridge of his nose.
His hairline was crooked, rising a little higher on the left side than on the right.
One earlobe was also dimpled, as if in some other life it might have been pierced but the hole closed up long ago.
When he swallowed, his Adam’s apple rose and fell, and watching it elicited a response in my body that I had never before experienced when looking at a man’s neck.
“You okay?” he asked, snapping me out of my personal staring contest.
“Yeah. Sorry. I was just wondering, um, what school you went to.”
“Stony Brook University. It’s—”
“On Long Island. Yep. I’ve heard of it,” I interrupted.
“How about you? Where’d you go to school?”
“Queens College, unsurprisingly.” I shrugged. “It was local and cheap and had a good teaching program.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” he said with a grin. “So, you said ‘local.’ Are you from Queens?”
“Indeed I am. I was born in Manhattan, but we moved to Queens when I was a baby.”
“What part of Queens?”
“Forest Hills?” I asked, because very often people outside of Queens really didn’t know the intricacies of the different neighborhoods.
“Nice,” he said. “Did you always want to be a teacher?”
“Well,” I replied, considering. No harm in being honest with an airplane stranger, I supposed, even a particularly handsome one. “That’s kind of a loaded question,” I said. “I learned early on that a woman should always make enough money to support herself and one child.”
“Hm.” He paused. “I think that’s a pretty loaded answer. Your theory sounds kind of true for anyone though, right? Even if it is a little pessimistic.”
“I know. But it’s true. I was raised by a single mom. She went into teaching because she wanted to have good health insurance, the same schedule as me, summers off, and a pension. So I did the same.”
“I thought you said your mom was a songwriter?”
“She was. Until she got pregnant.”
“Ah. I see.”
“She was really struggling until “Love Is a Melody” took off. Then she got some money, moved to New York, and decided to pursue her master’s degree in music education while she continued writing songs for a record label in the city.
The master’s degree was her backup plan.
She always taught me that nothing’s more important than a good education. ”
“Can’t argue with that,” he said.
“Anyway, sure enough, she got pregnant and then decided she wanted to stay home with me. My dad was out of the picture, but she’d saved up some money and figured she could write freelance from home to make ends meet,” I explained.
“Obviously, this was a long time ago, so working remotely wasn’t exactly a common thing. ”
“Right.”
“She moved us to Queens because it was cheaper and safer than where we were in Manhattan, but she still blew through her savings pretty quickly. She didn’t want to commute back to the city or have to put me in some kind of all-day day care situation.
But the local high school was hiring a part-time music teacher, and because of her master’s degree, she was able to apply for it.
Eventually, that turned into a full-time thing, and she just retired after twenty-five years in the system. ”
“So, is this trip like her retirement celebration?”
I thought about that. “I guess. Kind of.”
He looked at me like he wanted to say more, but nothing else came.
I decided to fill the empty air with a subject change. “How about you? Are you a Long Island boy?”
“Technically, yes. I’m from Floral Park. It’s on the Queens border.”
I nodded. “I’ve heard of it.”
“And, like I mentioned, I went to school on Long Island too. Don’t hold it against me.”
“Long Island’s okay,” I offered.
“Eh. I guess. It’s not the city,” he said.
“I don’t really like the city,” I admitted.
“No?”
“Especially now. It’s crowded and dirty and everything smells like weed.” Beckett laughed. “It wasn’t always like that, you know. I mean, crowded and dirty, yes. But the weed thing is still pretty new.”
“All true. But there’s culture and art and the literary scene. I mean, New York City is the publishing capital of the world, is it not?”
“I suppose. But you can be a writer anywhere.”
“Amen to that,” he said. “You can even write from your parents’ basement.”
“Is that where you live?”
He laughed. “Not anymore, thank goodness. I used to, though. I got my own place a few years ago.”
“Expensive, Long Island, no?”
Beckett nodded. “Hence the day job.”
“What town are you in?”
“Oceanside. Major upgrade. I went from living in my parents’ basement for free to living in someone else’s basement for money.”
“Adulting is fun,” I laughed. “How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“I’m twenty-seven. I know, too old to be slumming it in a basement. But I’ve got big plans.” His eyes sparkled when he said this, and I felt it in the goose bumps that formed on my arms.
“Do tell,” I urged him.
“Well, first I’m going to finish this novel,” he began. “Then I’m going to find an agent, and the agent’s going to sell it for, like, a hundred thousand dollars. I’ll use my advance money to move into the city and before you know it, I’ll become crazy famous.”
“Just like that, huh?” I asked. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that those expectations might have been a touch, um, lofty.
His grin was electric. “Easy peasy.”