“Actually, it’s you I came to see,” Mr. Kliber said.

Puzzled, I said, “Yes, sir?”

“It’s like this, Moss,” he said, and commenced beating around the bush so bad I couldn’t get what he was telling me. Then he finally said it straight out.

“You’re firing me?” I asked. My voice sounded like it was coming out of somebody else’s throat.

“I have to let you go,” he said. “You can understand, Moss. The man we’re hiring—I’ll be honest, he’s a cousin of mine—has a wife and children to take care of.”

I nodded, feeling numb. I did understand. With Texas and the rest of the country deep in the Depression, a body had to understand favoring a family man over a teenager on his own.

It was just that I hadn’t thought anybody else would want my part-time job, being the airport’s janitor, mechanic’s assistant, night watchman, and general gofer. I’d patched it together by pitching in wherever I’d seen a need. I got twelve dollars a week for doing it, and the room upstairs. Enough to live on, send some home to help my family, and save a bit.

I dragged my attention back to Mr. Kliber, who seemed bound to explain why his cousin had to have my job, now that he’d lost his own in a machine shop up in Oklahoma.

I broke in. “You needn’t explain,” I said. “I know how it is.”

“You can have a couple days more,” Mr. Kliber said. “I wish I didn’t have to spring it on you this fast, but Orville’s already on his way.”

I went after a gum wrapper and dropped it into my dustpan, buying time to get control of the panic welling up. “I guess if I’m going, I best think about when to start,” I said.

Maybe, I thought, as the train crossed a trestle, that was where I went wrong. For certain, I shouldn’t have been so hasty to leave, shouldn’t have let my pride get so wounded over being fired that I couldn’t stay to face my friends.

I shouldn’t have taken off without even leaving them a good-bye, telling myself I’d write when I had something proud to say.

But then there was that other letter, the one from my ma, in Spanish Creek, Louisiana.

Up in my bedroom above the terminal lobby, I’d read it. Now I took it out and read it again, the flimsy paper rattling in the wind.