Morrow lifted his empty glass, clinked it against Mrs. Rofrano’s glass, and rose from his chair. “If you really wish to fly, Miss Foster,” he said, straightening his cuffs and his tie, smoothing back his hair, “I hope most sincerely that you lay aside any reservations, any objections from friends and family, and simply do it. Now, if you’ll be so kind as to excuse me, I’m afraid I was supposed to be in Pasadena an hour ago.”

When he was gone—and this took some time, because George Morrow never left a room without shaking a least half of the hands inside it—Mrs. Rofrano slid back into her original seat and said, “Well? Are you going to follow his advice?”

Irene’s coffee was cold. Her sandwich was nothing but crumbs. She looked down the table to Sam Mallory, who had long since returned his attention to the man sitting beside him. Sandy had finished her cream and found her way into his lap, one paw outstretched across his waist like a lover, and he stroked her small calico head with one hand and smoked a cigarette from the other. The glass of whiskey stood empty in front of him. The collar of his flight suit was unbuttoned.

“I don’t know,” Irene said. “Flying costs money.”

“Most pilots I know don’t let that stand in their way. They find the money, one way or another. They find a way to get in the air, whatever it costs them.”

When Irene was nine years old, just before her mother got sick, she went with her parents to the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. She saw the Tower of Jewels and the Palace of Fine Arts and all the other glittering exhibits, but what she loved best was the wooden roller coaster in the Joy Zone. The speed and the noise, the way it whipped you about. She made her father pay for ride after ride. When she got home, she set about building one in the backyard. It started on top of the treehouse her father had built, about twenty feet high in a eucalyptus tree. She nailed together wooden boards and fitted the rails to her red wagon. She still remembered the way it felt when she climbed into the wagon at the top of the track for the first time, staring down the curve to the ground. It was like the way you felt on your surfboard when a giant wave began to swell up beneath you, lifting you upward into the break, and you knew you were about to experience the ride of your life or else possibly break your neck, one or the other, no telling which.

“Yes,” she said to Mrs. Rofrano. “I guess I know what you mean.”

Hanalei, Hawai’i

October 1947