“Yes,” she said, smiling against his chest. “Boring old Chandler where nothing changes and everyone knows everyone else’s business.”
“Are you happy now?”
“I—Hey! why am I doing all the answering? What about you? Why haven’t I met you before? But that’s right, it was not a ‘significant meeting.’ I don’t think we have met before, because I would have remembered you.”
“Thank you. I take that as a compliment.” He moved away from her to throw more wood on the fire. “How about something to eat? A sandwich? Pickles?”
“Sounds delicious.” She could tell that he didn’t want to discuss their original meeting, and she figured it was because she’d probably snubbed him. She used to do that to men; it saved her pride. She’d tell a boy she wouldn’t be caught dead at a dance with a bullfrog like him rather than tell the truth—that she couldn’t afford a new dress.
She’d grown up in Chandler. After her father died when she was twelve, her mother, who considered herself a southern belle, had prostrated herself on a fainting couch and spent the next six years there. They had insurance money, and her mother’s brother sent them money, but it was barely enough. It had been left up to Jackie to see that the decaying old house at the edge of town didn’t fall down on top of their heads. While other girls were learning to wear lipstick, Jackie was spending her weekends hammering the roof back on. She chopped wood, built a fence, repaired the porch, built new steps when the first set wore out. She knew how to use a hand saw, but had no idea how to use a nail file.
One day when Jackie was eighteen an airplane flew overhead, a long banner tied to its tail announcing an air show the next day. Jackie’s mother, who was as healthy as a dandelion in a manicured lawn, decided to have a fainting fit on that day because she didn’t want Jackie to leave her. But Jackie did go, and that was where she met Charley. When he pulled out of town three days later, Jackie was with him. They were married the next week.
Her mother had gone back to Georgia where her brother refused to put up with her hypochondria and put her to work helping with his six children. Judging from the letters Jackie received until her mother’s death a few years ago, that had been the best thing for her. She had been very happy after she’d left Chandler and gone back to her own people.
“Twenty years,” Jackie whispered.
“What?”
“It was twenty years ago when I left with Charley. Sometimes it seems like yesterday and sometimes it seems like three lifetimes ago.” She looked up at him. “Did we meet back then, before I left with Charley?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling. “We met then. I adored you, but you never even looked at me.”
She laughed. “I can believe that. I was so full of youthful pride.”
“You still are.”
“Pride maybe, but no longer am I youthful.”
At that, William looked at her across the fire, and for a moment Jackie thought he was angry at her. She was about to ask him what was wrong when he briskly stepped around the fire,
pulled her up into his arms and kissed her firmly on the mouth.
Jackie had kissed only two men in her life: her husband, Charley, and a pilot who was just taking off and might not come back. Neither of those kisses had been like this one. This kiss said, I’d like to make love to you, like to spend nights with you, like to touch you and hold you.
When he released her, Jackie fell back against the ground with a thud.
“I think there’s still a little youth left in you,” William said sarcastically as he pushed a stick back into the fire.
Jackie was speechless, but her eyes never left him. How in the world could she not remember him? There were at least half a dozen Montgomerys in her high school class, but she couldn’t remember one named William. Of course the Montgomerys all seemed to have five or six last names on the front of their family name. Maybe he’d been called something else, like Flash or Rex, or maybe the girls just called him Wonderful.
After William kissed her, there was an awkward silence between them, which he broke. “Okay,” he said enthusiastically, “you get three wishes, what are they?”
She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again, looking up at him sheepishly.
“Come on,” he said, “it couldn’t be that bad. What is it?”
“It isn’t really a bad wish at all. It’s just that it’s so…so boring.”
“Jackie O’Neill, the greatest female pilot who ever lived, has a thought that’s boring? Not possible.”
Right away she realized that she didn’t want to tell him her wish because she didn’t want to disappoint him. He seemed to know all about her—if one can know anything about another from records broken and set, from inflated newspaper accounts that dramatized happenings that were in truth actually rather ordinary.
“I want to put down roots, stay somewhere, and Chandler is familiar to me,” she said. “Now that I’ve seen the rest of the world, I know Chandler is a nice place. But I can’t live anywhere if I don’t have a way to make money.” She put up her hand when he started to speak. “I know, I know, your family and the Taggerts pay me well when they want me to fly somewhere, but I’ll never make any money in a one-man operation. I want to hire a few young pilots, run a little business. I’d like to delegate some of the work. I’d like to run passengers and freight, maybe some mail, between here and Denver, but I’ll need a healthy nest egg to be able to set up an operation like that.”
“But…” He couldn’t think how to word his thoughts so he wouldn’t be offensive.
But Jackie knew what he was thinking. “Jackie O’Neill, the greatest female pilot of this century reduced to flying mail from Colorado to the East Coast. Queen of the snap roll reduced to hauling picture post cards. Oh, the horror of it. Oh, the great tragedy of it. Is that what you’re thinking?”