If you’re thinking Leo has any designs on me, now that we’ve reached our little accord, you’d be wrong. We walk across the lawn in silence, though I’m crackling with electricity. When we reach the door, he stops. He must have gone home first before he came to dinner, because he’s changed out of his sea uniform and now wears a white shirt and pressed trousers, a navy blazer, a plain blue tie, none of which I can make out in the darkness. Just the reflection in his eyes of the lights from the main house.

I touch his fingers. “I don’t suppose you had time to stop at the drugstore, while you were in Honolulu?”

He pulls the hand away and gathers it inside the palm of the other one, behind his back. “I’m afraid I didn’t have time. Good night, Janey.”

He turns and starts to walk back across the lawn.

“You were lying, then,” I call after him. “You do have hard feelings.”

He stops and turns back to me. “I wasn’t lying to you, Janey. I understand you better than you think. I just think it’s best if I stand back a little, from now on. Sometimes you have to keep watch from a distance or you don’t see things as clear as you should.”

So he walks away, and it’s strange to see. It wasn’t supposed to hurt.

Aviatrix by Eugenia Everett

July 1928: Honolulu

We forget, don’t we? We are seduced by the ease of airliners today, the punctilious way they make their rounds, like milkmen. We forget what a feat it was to cross the Pacific from California to Hawai’i, what a test of equipment and ingenuity, of mechanical skill and navigational skill, of pure luck, of courage most of all. We forget how dazzled we were by those with the guts and the ability to make these flights. How we worshiped them as heroes, and by worshiping warped them into something else. Poor Irene. Poor Sam. By the time the Centauri’s wheels kissed the Hawaiian ground and rolled to a stop, it was already too late. They could not turn back. They could not foretell that in that instant, their old lives had been picked up, side by side, by a giant wave that was hurtling them onto an uncharted shore.

Two known photographs still exist of the gala dinner in Honolulu on the night of July 31, 1928, celebrating the safe arrival of Sam Mallory and Irene Foster on the first leg of their landmark flight to Australia.