Irene didn’t remember how her father answered this, or whether she even really heard his response through the walls of the house. Possibly the conversation never even happened, she admitted to Sam, sipping her coffee, and this was only the way she remembered her parents’ reactions to her ambitions, like a composite drawing, a convenience of memory. Either way, she did study hard. She took all the difficult classes, algebra and trigonometry, chemistry and physics, and graduated at the top of the class of well-bred girls in the private school her grandparents had paid for. She had just finished her first year of premedical studies at Berkeley when her grandfather died, and his estate went into probate where it was entangled by lawsuits, and there was no more money for such frivolities as college. They ended up in Los Angeles instead, she and her father, because it seemed like a fresh start. That was a year and a half ago. Her father was still looking around for steady work, which was why he was away. As soon as they could afford it, she was going to start that nursing course.

She sat back. Her coffee cup was empty. Sam had also finished his breakfast and his coffee, and he leaned on the arm of his chair and stared at her in a peculiar way, made all the more peculiar because Sandy had fallen asleep on his shoulder, sort of wrapped around the base of his neck and held there by static, possibly.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” Sam said at last. “You were just a kid.”

“She was sick a long time. It wasn’t a shock or anything.”

“Was that when your dad started drinking?”

“No,” Irene said. “He drank before. But after Mama died, he couldn’t stop.”

Sam nodded. “So everything was up to you.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Well,” Sam said, stroking the cat on his shoulder, staring gravely at Irene, “I guess I don’t have to ask why you go out surfing in the morning.”

Then they were back in the hangar, readying the Jenny for her flight. Already people were arriving for the exhibition, people in their dozens, men and also women in their shingled hair and dark lipstick, small hats nearly worthless against the sun, but that was fashion for you. Sam explained about the engine and the controls, ailerons and elevators, throttle and rudder. “It’s an old plane now,” he said. “I’m saving up to buy something newer. Faster. Rofrano’s designed this bird with aluminum skin and a pair of six-hundred-horsepower engines. If I had that ship I could fly anywhere.”

“How much does it cost?”

“She, Irene. An airplane’s not an it.”

“But why female?”

“Aw, now. I’m not walking into that one, believe me. Let’s just say it’s because a pilot falls a little in love with his airplane, after a while.”

They had stopped working and stood facing each other. Sam propped one elbow on the edge of the cockpit. Sandy was inside, wandering dangerously near the rudder pedal.

“What if the pilot’s a she?” asked Irene.

“Now that’s a good question. I’ll have to ask around.”

“Do you get any around here? Women pilots?”

“Course we do. I’ve taught a dozen women how to fly.”

“Any good ones?”

“A few. If they stick with it. Just like anybody, man or woman. You have to keep flying. The only thing that keeps you alive up there is experience. At all cost, you have to fly.”

Irene turned to lean her elbows on the fuselage so she could stare into the cockpit, the simple controls, the wood that Sam kept spotlessly varnished. Sandy leapt into the seat and stretched her paws against the side.

“When did you learn to fly?” she asked.

“Ten years ago. No, eleven.”

“You mean the war?”

“Joined the Army Air Service in the summer of 1917. Then—well, I guess you know the rest.”

By now, Irene had turned on her elbow to face him. Their arms were inches apart on the edge of the cockpit. Irene thought he didn’t look at all like the press photographs, the newsreels, where he grinned at the camera like the handsome daredevil he was supposed to be. Now he looked serious. He looked grim, like he was looking back on this career of his, as an inspiration to American manhood, and didn’t like what he found there.

“I’m glad you survived, anyway,” Irene said.

“Yes.” He turned away and lifted Sandy from the pilot’s seat. “I’m damned lucky to be alive.”

In the next scene, Irene stood near the lookout tower with the other spectators, the women in their short, fashionable dresses and the men in their pale suits. Sam was about to take off in his Curtis Jenny. She knew it was him because the name was painted on the side of the fuselage, Papillon. It meant butterfly in French, she knew. She thought that was a dumb name for an airplane. She hoped it would fly more like a hawk, an eagle, swift and strong.

A woman had come up to stand beside her. Irene snatched a glance and saw that she was petite and pretty in the way of dolls, huge eyes inside a face shaped exactly like a heart, mop of short blond curls held in place by a straw hat.

“You’re a friend of Sam’s?” the woman asked.

“You could say that.”

“I don’t mean to be rude. I saw you together earlier, that’s all.” The woman put out a tiny hand. “I’m Sophie Rofrano.”

“Oh, then you’re—”

“Yes. Run the place, together with my husband. Isn’t it a fine day? Of course, it’s mostly fine in California. That’s why we’re all here.”

Irene took the hand and was surprised at the firmness of the handshake. Most women of that size, they had a puny grasp to match. “Irene Foster. It certainly is fine.”

“I remember the first time I watched him fly. Sam, I mean. He found us right after we started the airfield. He’d flown with my husband in the service, you know.”

Irene didn’t know, but she nodded anyway. It made sense, after all.

“He’d just bought a Jenny off somebody else, somebody who’d cracked it up and quit flying, and Sam put that airplane all back together again and off he went, into the sky.” Mrs. Rofrano waved her hand at the landing strip, and the airplane toddling toward the end. “I’d never seen anybody fly a Jenny like that, not even my husband. I didn’t know you could. He knew exactly how to push her, exactly how much she could tolerate, exactly what she could do. Turns and loops and dives. He put her down again—it was an air show, just like this one—and he must have found twenty new students, right there. Are you one of them? Students, I mean.”

“Yes. No! I—well, we surf together, that’s all.” It wasn’t exactly a lie, after all, and it certainly sounded less awkward than the truth.

“Surf! On the water? The ocean?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, that’s grand. I didn’t even know Sam surfed. He doesn’t tell you much about himself, you know.”

“I know.”

“Ah.” Mrs. Rofrano folded her arms. “There he goes.”

As she spoke, the noise of Sam’s propeller, idling in the distance, turned loud and purposeful. Irene lifted her hand to her brow and stared at Papillon, an unobstructed view, soaked in sunshine. The propeller whirred furiously on its nose. It started forward, bouncing like a spring on the ruts in the grass. Irene could see Sam’s leather cap and his goggles throwing off rays; she thought she could see his expression, but maybe that was only her imagination filling in the details. Either way, the crowd stirred and spoke around her, oohed as if they’d never seen an airplane before.

And yet. Didn’t Irene feel the same way? Yes, you encountered airplanes all the time in that hopeful blue California sky of the 1920s, puttering away, climbing and falling and banking, performing heart-stopping stunts for onlookers, like looping the loop and flying under bridges and wing walking and what have you. Until now, Irene had felt no more than the usual amazement at these antics.

Now it was different. Now Sam’s airplane prepared to meet the sky. Now Sam’s airplane gained speed and thrust downfield. In Irene’s eyes, it seemed to lengthen, to suck power under its skin, to gather all that California sunshine into its wings. Irene felt the lift of its nose in her own body, the flex of its wings; she knew the exact instant its wheels came apart from the grass and the wind drew it upward, as if it had no weight at all. She followed the diagonal line of its ascent until it soared above the boulevard, the trees, and vanished into the sky, and what she wanted to do, in that moment, was not to climb inside an airplane with Sam and soar away into that vanishing sky. Was not to pilot an airplane at all.

She wanted to become. She wanted to become the airplane.