I wanted to hear my father’s gentle voice again. I wanted life not to have stopped.

She said, The men I love die.

I did not want her to be complicated in this way. I did not want her lostness or her sorrow.

Why, I asked, do you keep talking about men?

When I was still a teenager, she said, I went to do war work. There was no money for more school for me. I was sent to Fifteen Wing, the air force base on the prairie, and I learned to repair fuselages. I worked underneath on my back on a dolly with a long, curved needle. I liked the other girls and we played softball at night and we had purpose and we were away from home. I really wanted to learn to fly and I used to help the young pilots study and I learned everything they did. I could have been a girl pilot but that was for rich girls.

Mam poured us another cup of tea. We did not drink it. She looked out the kitchen window toward a cardinal’s cheer-eet, cheer-eet, and then she said, At Fifteen Wing, when you fixed a plane you had to test-fly in it to prove you hadn’t sabotaged it. A pilot called Jack Eastmund liked me and came looking for me and he said, Where is Jean? I don’t think she’s been up in that plane she fixed.

We fell in love on that first flight and I let him touch my hand as he flew us over the prairie. We had five months on the base together before he shipped out to France. I was afraid of getting pregnant and somehow I managed not to. I don’t know how and I was always worried about that. We planned to open a flight school together after the war, and he wrote to his parents about me, and I told the girls I was going to finally learn to fly and I was in love. It was war and it was a romantic time. But then the thousand-bomber raids. He wrote about flying four hundred knots and the wings are supposed to drop off at three hundred but they didn’t. He said he could change directions in six seconds. Mostly he wrote how much he loved me and he kept telling me to hang on, he was coming home. I wrote, Be careful, come back to me, I’m planning our flight school, I’m thinking of you. But on a fogged-in night, my gentle, handsome Jack Eastmund never came back.

This was Mam’s life before my father. Before me. I knew nothing about her.

She said, I burned Jack’s letters yesterday. But I want someone to know about him. He is buried in Choloy.

And she looked away.

Families sometimes tell each other things so shocking that no one knows what to say. So no one says anything. As if the words had not been spoken.

My father was gone, his loving eyes that were always interested in me, his gentle, sheepish smile. But she was talking about another man.