* * *
—
“I bought myself a Ford, too, as a kid,” Marian said. “I earned the money driving a delivery truck.”
Jackie’s approval shone more brightly. “Is that so? Laudable. What will you do with the Beechcraft if you go abroad?”
“Sell it, maybe. Store it. I don’t know. It’s had a hard run already. I’ve been a bush pilot.”
“I know. Your telegram said.” Jackie held out her hand for Marian’s logbook, flipped to the last page, looked at the total hours. Her plucked and penciled eyebrows rose and flexed. “I was surprised I hadn’t heard of you, if you’ve flown this much. I thought I had a good idea of the most experienced girls out there, but this goes to show.”
Marian waited to hear what it went to show, but Jackie just kept paging through the book. “I’ve kept mostly to the north,” she said. “And to myself.”
“You’ve certainly flown.”
Goaded by the remembered gleam of the flying trophies, the gleam of Jackie’s hair, Marian said, “I have more hours than are in there. A lot more.”
At once Jackie clouded over. “Why aren’t they recorded?”
Marian shouldn’t have said anything. She looked hard out the window, trying to think how to explain that she’d flown for a bootlegger without a license, that she’d been Jane Smith before she could be Marian Graves again. “For a while,” she said finally, “I was going by a different name.”
“Why?”
“I’d left my husband, and I didn’t want him to find me.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s dead.”
“I see.” Jackie followed her gaze out the window, seemed to be thinking.
* * *
—
In 1932, Jackie finds herself at a dinner party in Miami, seated beside a Wall Street millionaire still in his thirties, Floyd Odlum. He is from Union City, Michigan—humble roots, a Methodist minister’s son who’d made himself into a financier. In 1929, he’d had a bad feeling, heebie-jeebies severe enough that he sold off most of his holdings before the crash. After, he bought up companies cheap. They say he is the only man in America to make money on the Depression. He’d heard there was a woman at dinner who actually worked for a living （he didn’t meet many of them） and asked to be seated next to her.
Over crab cakes, he asks: What do you want?
The salt, if you wouldn’t mind, Jackie says.
Ha. I meant in life.
Her own cosmetics company. But there is so much territory, so much competition, especially with everybody tightening purse strings, some people left with just strings and no purse.
Little luxuries go a long way when you’re feeling downtrodden, she says.
He says, Hope in a lipstick.
That’s right.
What if you learned to fly an airplane? he says. You could cover big distances faster.
She has never considered flying, but something about the idea begins to gnaw and nibble at her right then. She wonders aloud, Could I fly a plane?
Of course you could, he says so firmly she has no choice but to believe him. She recognizes then that he will be essential to her. He is an external font of self-belief.
To him, she is another undervalued commodity, an asset to be picked up cheap and made mighty.
He is already married, but so what.
The first time she goes up, the flying bug bites. The bug swallows her whole. This is it. This is away.
* * *
—
Still looking out the window, Jackie said, “Do you like New York?”
Grateful to be released from talk of her husband, Marian said, “I’m not at home in cities.” Anchorage and Nome and Fairbanks had swelled with the war but were still just frontier towns. Since Pearl Harbor, there’d been blackouts at night. Everyone in the Territory was on edge.
“Is this your first time here?”
“No, I was here years ago for my honeymoon. Only for a few days.”
Jackie regarded her curiously but seemed to decide against probing further. “All right, listen, if you go to England, you’ll have to sign an eighteen-month contract with the ATA. Are you prepared to do that?”
“Sure.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“The job won’t be cushy.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do with cushy.”
“Still, I have an obligation to tell you it’ll be dangerous. Long hours, bad weather, rationed food and fuel, trigger-happy antiaircraft gunners, beat-up planes that might fall apart in midair. No radio. Germans buzzing around looking for something to shoot down. Barrage balloons all over the place. Your ship could even be sunk on the way over.”