Free Coast to Coast by Betsy Byars Page A

descent. The airspeed indicator moved slowly from 75 miles per hour to 85.
    Birch pulled her seat belt tighter. Please, please let us make it.
    Pop lined up parallel to the taxiway. He pulled on the carburetor heat. He throttled back and slowed to sixty miles per hour. He made a left turn, then another. Now he was on final.
    He came in low and slow, as if he had been practicing for this all his life. Then he settled the Cub gently on the taxiway beyond the tires. He stopped well short of the bales of hay.
    “Pop! Wonderful!” Birch turned to grin at him. “Wonderful!”
    Pop allowed himself to smile before shrugging off her praise. “Now, let’s taxi to the hangar and see if we can scare up some gas.”

CHAPTER 14
Two Bags Full
    “T HIS IS WHAT’S KNOWN as high noon out here,” Birch said. She and Ace were sitting under the wing of the J-3. Birch’s long legs were crossed under her, out of the brutal Texas sun. Ace was panting with the heat.
    “There isn’t a shade tree within fifty miles.” Birch and Ace were alone.
    After Pop had taxied around the bales of hay, across an old runway and through a gate, and stopped in front of the hangar, the three of them had gotten out of the plane. Ace shook himself while Birch and Pop stood in absolute silence. They took in the locked, abandoned hangar, the weeds growing up through the cracked pavement. There was not a person in sight.
    “Pop,” Birch said.
    “Now don’t start worrying. Somebody’ll turn up.”
    “But what if they don’t?”
    Pop turned on his heels and walked off, whistling through his teeth. Birch moved into the shade of the wing shoulders sagging. She poured a cup of warm water from the thermos and gave some to Ace.
    She heard Pop call, “Anybody home?” again and again, but there was never an answer.
    He came back shaking his head. “I can’t raise anybody.” He reached under the seat for the folded gas bags. “I’m going for gas. You stay with the plane.”
    “By myself?”
    “You and Ace.”
    Birch looked around at the deserted rusty buildings. The old metal doors on the hangar rattled in a dry breeze. “Deserted airports are as creepy as haunted houses,” she said.
    “We’re lucky the J-3 can use car gas. All I have to do is find a filling station.”
    “Can’t I come? I really don’t want to be by myself.”
    “Keep her company, Ace!”
    He was at the chain link fence, tossing the gas bags over, climbing. He jumped, landed on the hard dry dirt, picked up the bags and moved on down the road. He was whistling again.
    Pop was one of that hard, stringy breed of men who crossed the country in the first place, Birch thought. Men that cut down forests and plowed land and scaled mountains and then looked around for something else to do. “He’s not made of flesh, Ace, like you and me. He’s pure gristle.” And with a sigh, she settled under the wing for a long wait.
    Now Birch reached out and scratched Ace behind the ear. The dog rolled his eyes gratefully in her direction. “And you’re probably hotter than I am,” she said, “because you’ve got all this black fur.” She sighed.
    “I really thought we were going to crash, Ace. And when something like that happens to a person, like almost crashing, well, your whole life is supposed to pass in front of your eyes. You know what passed in front of my eyes? A poem that my grandmother wrote.
    “It was about a baby that died, Ace, on my birthday. And all of a sudden I knew that poem meant one of two things. Either my mom’s natural baby died—or lived just a little while. Five breadths is a very little while. And so maybe—this is probably not what happened exactly, but maybe someone else in the hospital had had a baby and was going to put her up for adoption, and that was me. And my mom and dad adopted me.” She trailed off, shaking her head.
    “The reason I don’t think that happened is because my mom would tell me that right off. ‘You are adopted.’ But, then, she