“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Graham—” Jordan began, but an impatient flap of the hand cut her off.
“Nina. So you’re the girl Antochka likes.” She looked Jordan over, speculative, and Jordan murmured pleasantries even as she was thinking, Rats. A third wheel in the backseat—there was definitely not going to be any pulling over on the way to the airfield for kissing. With Anneliese still in Concord, Ruth gone every afternoon to a neighbor’s house to play, the shop safe in the capable Mrs. Weir’s hands, and with Ian Graham and his wife absent on some sort of driving tour for the past few weeks, Jordan and Tony had had the freedom for quite a lot of kissing. Jordan had been looking forward to more today, because Tony kissed like a man who actually enjoyed it, not a man who hurried through five minutes of it as a prelude to unbuttoning a girl’s blouse. Only now there was this woman in the backseat who Jordan hadn’t met before, though what she’d heard had certainly been interesting.
“Ian’s Red war bride,” Tony had said. “Don’t ask.”
Jordan had envisioned an exotic beauty in sables, not this compact bullet of a woman in shabby boots. Now, Nina Graham was shaking Garrett’s hand in business-like fashion, firing off questions. “You have what, Travel Air 4000 there? What else? Stearman, Aeronca, Waco—”
“Mostly American craft.” Garrett straightened, listing aircraft, and Jordan was amused to see his most charming smile wink on like a searchlight. “You’re an enthusiast, Mrs. Graham?”
Nina smiled modestly. “I fly a little.”
“Well, let me show you a few things while Jordan and Timmy here look around . . .”
“Holy hell,” Tony whispered in Jordan’s ear as Garrett sauntered off with Nina at his elbow, looking up earnestly as he expounded. “He’s flirting with her.”
“He’s trying to make me jealous.” Jordan smiled as she dug in her bag for film, relieved to realize she didn’t feel jealous. The last bit of proof, if she’d needed it, that it had been right to call off the wedding.
Garrett’s voice floated over. “. . . this Travel Air here, her name’s Olive. Pilots like to name their planes, did you know that? I could take you up for a quick spin, go easy on you—”
Tony spluttered laughter. “She’s going to eat him alive.”
“Enjoy the show,” Jordan said, laughing too. “I’m going to get my shots.”
Tony carried her bag into the hangar, looked around for the mechanics, backed her unhurriedly into the shadow of a decrepit crop duster, and gave her a long kiss. “For later,” he murmured, “when we lose the third wheel, after she’s eaten Gary boots, bones, and coveralls.”
Another kiss, even longer. Jordan pulled back eventually, trying to remember why she was here. A Mechanic at Work. Right.
She found the mechanics and introduced herself, chatted lightly, flattered them, and got them laughing—she’d picked up a few things from Tony, the way he got subjects to relax. She waved the mechanics back to work, asking admiring questions, scolding when they tried to meet the camera’s eye, clicking away once they got absorbed. Two rolls of film, no fuss. I’m getting better at this, she thought, thanking her subjects. Her photo-essay was taking wonderful shape, the centerpiece of the work she’d have to show when she began job hunting in New York. Soon she’d have to begin thinking about an apartment, job interviews . . .
And breaking the news to Ruth that yes, her sister really was going away, but she’d be back every month to visit. Jordan grimaced. Ruth knew about the New York plan, but wouldn’t acknowledge it—and lately, she was so obsessed with music that she barely noticed anything that wasn’t violin shaped. Every evening, without Anneliese here to sneak around, Jordan took Ruth to practice at the closed shop; she’d play clear through supper if Jordan didn’t drag her home. “Ruth’s doing very well,” Jordan said carefully over the telephone when Anneliese called from Concord.
“No nightmares?”
“Not lately, no.” With practice every day and a lesson every time Mr. Graham could squeeze one in, Ruth was blossoming. “You’ll want a proper teacher for her soon,” Mr. Graham had said after the last lesson, just after he’d come back from his driving trip. “I can give her scales and simple melodies, but she’s soaking it in like a little sponge. She’s even trying to piece her way through tunes she’s heard me play, or remembered from the radio.”
If Ruth has music, Jordan thought, she’ll adjust just fine when I leave in the fall. Which meant Anneliese had to be told. Soon. Not yet.
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Jordan had asked her stepmother over the telephone, hearing strain in Anneliese’s voice.
“Making plans.” Anneliese sighed. “It’s been quite a summer for plans, hasn’t it?”
And the summer was going so fast, Jordan thought, coming out onto the airfield. Soon fall would be in the air; she’d be packing for New York. No more evenings in the shop, watching a famous war correspondent teach her sister to play a simple, haunting lullaby from Siberia where Nina Graham had grown up. No more informal chats afterward as Mr. Graham made tea and told a story in his deadpan English baritone about how Maggie Bourke-White was so focused during her camera work that once her halter-neck shirt fell down around her waist and she didn’t even notice. No more Tony . . .
He looked over his shoulder with a grin, pointing at the blue-and-cream biplane named Olive now rising from the runway into a slow loop around the field. Jordan couldn’t stop her stomach from flipping at that grin, and she didn’t try. Enjoy it now, enjoy it all. Before summer ends.
“Gary took Nina up for a spin.” Tony was laughing. “He said she could take a turn on the student controls. This is going to be good.”
Overhead, Olive came out of her sedate loop with a sudden swoop downward, took a screaming turn around the airfield, then flipped inverted and clawed up steep and fast. The plane nearly disappeared into the blue, then came roaring back a matter of feet over the hangar roof, painted belly flashing overhead seemingly close enough to touch. A final hammerhead turn, then Nina brought Olive down using about half the runway Garrett had used taking off.
Jordan looked at Tony. They both burst out laughing. She barely managed to get control of herself by the time Garrett climbed out of the instructor’s cockpit, looking a little green around the gills. Nina hopped out in one lithe movement like a cat jumping from a roof, stripping off her flying cap. “. . . a little heavy on the controls,” she was saying as Tony and Jordan approached. “But good little plane. Nice.” Patting the wing, business-like. “You have anything faster?”
“Um. Well, not yet, we’re a small operation—” Garrett pulled himself together, expression warring between chagrin and admiration. Admiration won out as he asked, “Could you show me a few things, Mrs. Graham?”
“SHE WAS A PILOT with the Red Air Force?” Tony had discreetly filled Jordan in on a few things after dropping Nina off at the Scollay Square apartment.
“Sure. We don’t spread it around, not as Commie crazy as people are here.” Tony pulled up in front of Jordan’s house, hopped out of the car. “Here you go. I take it you’re disappearing into the darkroom for a few hours to develop all that film?”
“How’d you guess?” But Jordan paused. Ruth was playing at a neighbor’s house; it would be hours before she’d have to be picked up. Hours, Jordan thought, eyeing Tony.
He handed her out of the car, quirking an eyebrow at her considering gaze. “What’s on your mind?”
Nothing at all proper, Jordan thought. But the hell with proper. She was tired of the stepping-stone path of dates and doorstep kisses and white-gloved visits to meet the parents; the sedate junior-league progression of approved stages that had made her feel so caged in with Garrett. She wanted something private and wicked and just for her, something absolutely, gloriously improper. She took a breath. “Would you like to see my darkroom?”
He gave his slow, eye-crinkling smile. “I’d be honored.”
It was the first time Jordan had taken him—taken anyone outside the family, really—down these steep, separate steps under the front stoop to her private enclave. She threw the switch, pointing out Gerda and Margaret looking down from the wall, her equipment. Tony wandered around, looking at everything. “So this is where you spend all your best hours.”
“Some bad hours too. Whenever I cry about Dad, it’s always here.” Not quite as often, now—grief was beginning to be overlaid by the first layer of skin and time. Jordan supposed that layer would get thicker and thicker, and in a way she was sorry. Grief cut, but it also made you remember. “Whether good or bad, everything that’s important happens here,” she said, inhaling the familiar smells.
Tony touched the long table, looked up at the lights. “I like it.”