Back on the ground again, Rette felt proud of herself. She knew that she had come through with a good show, and she felt as she did after helping to win a particularly tough basketball game for Avondale—except that in the air she was the whole team.
If her knees were a little wobbly as she walked away from the plane, she concealed it well. Her head was high and her eyes were still bright with excitement as she handed Pat her logbook and watched her write in it.
“Stalls and spins...total time: 8.15.” Pat slapped the book shut, gave it back to Rette and said: “I’m thirsty. Come on over to the lunchroom and I’ll buy you a milk shake or a coke.”
It was the first time Rette had ventured into that part of the building since the day Jeff had scolded her so roundly because of her attitude concerning Elise. She followed Pat reluctantly, more because she couldn’t think of a convincing excuse than for any other reason, and wasn’t particularly surprised to see Elise herself sitting at one end of the counter, chatting with Jeff and a young instructor whom Rette knew solely by his first name, Eric. Both Eric and Elise were eating hamburgers and drinking big glasses of milk.
“Hi!” Eric called, turning as he saw Pat come through the door. “I’m stealing one of your pupils. Going to give her a ride in that new Bonanza. O.K. with you?”
Pat looked at Elise, and her eyes began to twinkle. “Don’t trust him,” she warned, then dodged as Eric threw a wadded paper napkin at her head.
Jeff came over as Rette and Pat climbed up on two stools, and put both palms professionally on the counter. “What can I do for you?”
“I want a coke,” Pat said promptly. “How about you, Rette?”
“I don’t want to be a pig, but I’d love to have a milk shake.”
Pat nodded to Jeff. “Strong stomach. Rette’s just been doing her spins.”
Overhearing, Elise looked interested and leaned forward. “Have you, Rette? How did you make out?”
“Ask Pat,” Rette advised.
“She did swell,” Pat said ungrammatically. Then her tone became bantering, “And I must say it was a pleasure, Elise, after you.”
Elise waved at Pat like a kitten batting at an adversary, but didn’t say a word.
“Why, what happened?” Rette’s question was spontaneous. She felt completely in the dark.
Elise bowed her head sheepishly. “I just lost my lunch, that’s all.”
“That’s all,” Pat agreed. “And at least she had the good grace to wait until she got back on the ground. I’ve had students who’ve been less courteous.”
“Well, that’s something!” said Elise in a teasing voice. She looked toward Rette and gestured. “Her first kind word.”
Jeff put the milk shake in front of Loretta and served Pat her coke. Eric paid for the hamburgers, and he and Elise went out together. After they had left, Pat nodded her head toward the door.
“I think our Eric has a slight crush on your young friend,” she said.
Rette glanced quickly at Jeff, but he was busy running water into the milk-shake mixer. He finished washing up, then strolled over and talked to the girls for a few minutes. “That’s some kite, that new Bonanza,” he said, using the jargon of the airport.
Pat nodded in agreement. “Quiet too.” She glanced at her watch and slid down from the stool. “Don’t hurry,” she said to Rette, who was still sipping her milk shake, “but I’ve got to go.”
Rette was left alone in the lunchroom with Jeff, and as the door banged behind the instructor she felt a little lost. She clung to the subject of the Bonanza for the longest time possible, then said abruptly, “Where’s your boss?”
“Gone to town for some supplies,” Jeff returned. “Business is picking up. For summer this may develop into a full-time job.”
“Would you like that?”
“Sure,” Jeff said. “Anything to be near airplanes, you know.” He grinned, then as quickly turned serious. “Say, Rette, I want to tell you I think your brother is one great guy.”
“He says a good word for you too,” Rette smiled back. Jeff leaned on the counter on both elbows. “Seriously, I think it’s pretty swell of him to offer to give me some flying lessons. I mean, I haven’t got any way of paying him.”
“I don’t think he’d do it for pay,” Rette said thoughtfully. Somehow, though she had never considered it before, she felt sure this was the truth. “I think you remind Tony of the way he felt when he was in high school. You know he was always crazy about the air.”
“I know,” said Jeff, “from your flying essay. I read final proof on the graduation issue of the Arrow last night. You know I shifted it over to a lead position.”
Rette hadn’t known, and her emotions concerning the news were mixed. On the one hand she was flattered, and on the other she felt that the essay was almost uncomfortably intimate, that perhaps it would look a little foolish in print.
“Does it—look all right?”
“Sure, it looks swell. It was a natural for the prize,” Jeff said.
But Rette wriggled her shoulder under her checked sport shirt. The fate of the essay, and its eventual publicity, alarmed her vaguely. The fact that nothing is all black or all white, all good or all bad, was something she was coming to recognize, yet it still irritated her. Growing up, she decided as she left the lunchroom and walked around the building toward the parking area, wasn’t as much fun as it was cracked up to be.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
After dinner that evening Rette walked down to the drugstore to get a prescription filled for Gramp.
Elise was sitting in a booth, idly turning the pages of a new magazine, and she looked up when Rette came through the door as though she were waiting for someone.
“Hello,” she said cordially.
“Hi!” Rette replied. She went to the counter at the back of the store, where the druggist peered at the prescription and said, “It will take about twenty minutes,” then she wandered back and stood looking down at Elise.
“Do any more spins?” she asked.
“A couple,” Elise said ruefully. “I can’t say I take to them like a duck to water.”
Rette’s curiosity got the better of her. “When we were talking in school today, why didn’t you tell me you’d been doing spins?” she asked abruptly.
Elise’s eyes widened. “I didn’t want to scare you,” she said as though this should have been obvious to Loretta. “Pat says the worst thing about spins is the anticipation, and I thought if you found out I got airsick—” She stopped and shrugged with a delicate gesture that reminded Rette of Mrs. Wynn.
“Well, that was awfully decent—” Rette said and also paused.
Elise sat back, her fair head against the booth, her arms straight at her sides, palm down on the seat. “I was terrified,” she admitted suddenly. “I think maybe that’s why I got sick, because today I was all right. The worst was over.”
Rette nodded, thinking back on her own experience. She had been nervous, and even scared, but she hadn’t felt overwhelming fear. She had conquered no real terror, as Elise apparently had. With sudden perception she realized that the fragile blonde girl before her had been actually brave.
She found unexpectedly that she wanted to reassure Elise, and she sat down on the corner of the opposite booth and said, “Pat thinks you’re a better student than I am. I know she does. She says you’re smoother and calmer and—and everything.”
Elise smiled. “Thank you, Rette,” she said. “But I haven’t got your drive.”
“Pooh,” said Rette. “What does drive matter?” She made a major admission. “You’ll solo before I do. You wait and see!”
Elise shrugged again. “Maybe. That isn’t important, is it?”
Rette, who had been considering it very important, asked in astonishment, “Why not?”
Elise laughed out loud. She leaned forward, her slender hands clasping her elbows, and said: “We’re not trying to beat each other at some game. We’re trying to learn to fly an airplane s
afely and—alone.”
Elise was right. Reluctant as Rette was to admit it, she recognized that Elise was looking at flying through more mature eyes than she was. Rette had to accord her a certain admiration. Elise was learning to handle a plane as smoothly as she handled boys, and without undue fuss. Elise probably deserved her spot in the limelight at school. She was actually quite a girl.
For the first time in her life, Rette found herself wanting to be worthy of another girl’s friendship. As she sat on with Elise, discussing flying, she became aware of a sense of values more firmly rooted than her own.
“I like to fly,” Elise said after a while. “And I like having Daddy so interested. But I doubt if I’ll ever go on and learn to navigate or solo cross-country. And somehow I think you will.”
“Me?” Bette touched the pearls at the throat of her sweater in astonishment.
“You.” Elise said it firmly. “You’ll find a way, somehow. You’ll want to enough.” She hesitated, then added, “That’s what I mean by drive. I haven’t that—” she spread her hands “that urgency. It’s a great thing!” There was something that touched on envy in her tone.
Rette was so astonished that Elise could find anything enviable in her that she scarcely heard the druggist when he called, “Your prescription’s ready, Miss.”
She walked over to the counter absently, paid for the bottle of capsules with money from her wallet, and was about to return to Elise when she saw the young instructor called Eric come through the door and hurry to the booth where Elise was sitting.
“Sorry to be late,” she heard him say. “I got tied up at the airport.”
They were so immediately absorbed in each other that neither Elise nor Eric saw Rette leave the store. She let the swinging door fall back quietly, and walked home through the quiet suburban streets feeling that the world was full of a number of remarkable and unexpected things.
Street lamps winked through the arching trees, splashing light on the cement pavements, and the stir and excitement of spring was in the air. Seed pods, drifting down from the maples, made dark stains like wiggly worms in light places along the road, and the toes of Rette’s shoes scuffed against them as she sauntered along.
In front of the Larkin house a car was parked, and Rette quickened her pace a little until she saw that it was Ellen’s. Then she slowed and walked sedately past it to the gate, looking the other way in order not to intrude on the possible occupants.
But a voice from the darkness called, “Rette!” and she stopped and turned. “Come here a minute,” Tony said.
Rette walked over to the car as Ellen straightened in the curve of Tony’s arm. Tony flicked away a cigarette, which made a bright arc in the darkness, and said: “Sis, we want you to be in on something that’s to be a secret to the general public for a while yet. Ellen and I are announcing our engagement the first of June.”
Loretta wasn’t really surprised, and yet it was a shock. She felt a sharp pang of loss, as though she were being roughly torn from her childhood, of which Tony had been such an all-important part.
She was glad that Ellen couldn’t see her face when she said, “That’s wonderful! I’m awfully glad, Ellen, that it’s you.”
She meant every word of it, of course. She liked Ellen better than any girl Tony had ever had. She liked Ellen for herself too, liked her quick mind and her ready humor and her patent adoration of Tony. If she had to give Tony over to anyone, she was glad that it would be Ellen Alden who would take him away from the house on Cherry Tree Road. Yet it was hard to give Tony up.
“I’m glad you’re glad,” Ellen said in her light, sweet voice. “Because I think it will be lots of fun to have you for a sister, Rette.”
“For a sister.” With those words Rette could feel resentment dissolve. Her brother couldn’t always remain her one and only hero: she had other heroes now—Stephen Irish, and, yes, Jeff Chandler. And there would probably be more to come.
“I’m going to have a party,” she heard Ellen saying. “Just a luncheon for some friends. And of course I want you to come, along with your mother. You will, won’t you?”
“I’d love it,” Rette replied. She felt quite grown-up, being thus included. She had never been to an engagement party. It would come at the end of finals, before graduation. So much was happening in so short a time—exams, her solo flight, and now this.
She felt that she should say something else, but was inadept. Twisting Gramp’s prescription in her hands she asked nervously, “You’ve told Mother, of course?”
“Of course,” Tony nodded. “She and Dad couldn’t be more pleased. I knew they would be. They’re as keen about Ellen as I am—almost.”
All three of them laughed, and Rette felt more relaxed. “I suppose I should say, ‘Congratulations,’ or wish you happiness or something. But you know I do.” She rested one hand on the door of the car.
Ellen reached out and covered Rette’s hand with her own, briefly. “I know you do,” she said with warmth. “But don’t be surprised, Rette, if it takes awhile to get used to the idea. I’m not completely used to it myself.”
Rette found that this was good advice. It was several days before she became really acclimated to the actuality of Tony’s engagement, in spite of her parents’ enthusiasm and Gramp’s repeated assurances that Ellen was “a fine girl. The more she thought about it, however, the more she liked the idea of having Ellen in the family. And Ellen, on her part, treated Rette with such genuine affection that any lingering reservations melted away.
Ellen even consulted Rette and her mother about plans for her engagement party, and the three of them discussed possible ways of announcing the great news and giggled together like three girls. Never in her life had Loretta felt so much a part of things. In fact she felt a little breathless about all that was going on.
Pat Creatore had been out of town, attending the funeral of an uncle in another state, and to Rette it was something of a relief that she wasn’t called upon to make her solo flight in the midst of all the rest of the excitement.
But the day came, of course, when Pat returned and phoned from the airport, hearty and full of inducement. “Want to schedule the rest of your lessons, now that I’m back? I’ve got a couple of hours free Friday afternoon.”
Rette thought fast. Ellen’s party was Saturday, but Friday was a day completely free, even of exams. “All right,” she said hesitantly. “Yes, I think I can make it then.”
“I’ll call Elise Wynn too,” said the voice at the other end of the wire. “Which time do you want—two thirty or three thirty?”
“Three thirty,” Rette said.
After Pat had hung up, Rette was a little disappointed that nothing had been said about soloing. Of course there was the chance that she wasn’t ready, but Rette had heard enough airport gossip to know that a student pilot’s solo flight usually came very quickly on the heels of doing his spins.
Mrs. Larkin, walking through the house with an armful of clean laundry, asked, “Who was that, dear?” as she passed. She was very busy these days, and very intense. She too felt surrounded by activity, with Tony getting engaged and Rette graduating from high school, and the inevitable change-over from spring to summer clothes and household routine.
“Pat Creatore,” Rette said.
Something in her daughter’s tone must have made Mrs. Larkin stop and balance the laundry on the back of a chair. “I do wish that you’d give up your flying lessons until after Commencement,” she said in a voice that sounded slightly harried. “It will only be a couple of weeks—”
“I can’t, Mommy,” Rette replied, using the old nickname of her childhood. “It would be too long a time between hops. And besides,” she added, thinking of an even more convincing argument, “I’m supposed to get more than one diploma at Commencement, you know.”
Mrs. Larkin did know, and she also knew that the second diploma to which Rette referred was the Wings Airport testimonial that would accompany the flight certificates. It wou
ld be given only if Rette had successfully completed a solo flight.
Rette grinned up at her mother, but the older woman’s brow knit in a little frown of concern. “Why there should be two of you in one family,” she said as she picked up her laundry and started toward the stairs, “I simply don’t know!”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
In the Town and Country Shop, on Friday morning, Loretta stood before a long dressing-room mirror trying to decide between a powder-blue linen and a white waffle piqué.
“I like them both,” she wailed. “What will I do?”
Mrs. Larkin, in a scrap of flowered hat that made her look young and, as her husband put it, “definitely frisky,” sat on a straight chair with her knees crossed and regarded her daughter critically.
“The blue’s a lovely color with your skin, and you are bound to get tan, as the summer goes on.”
“But the white is so sort of—sophisticated,” Rette said. She cocked her head and smoothed the dress over her firm young stomach. “Though perhaps it’s a little early for white.” She looked up at the salesclerk. “Do you think it is?”
Carefully amenable, the clerk said: “Oh, no, I don’t think so at all! They’re both lovely on you. I think it’s entirely up to you.”
“I’ll take the blue,” Rette decided finally, because she trusted her mother’s judgment, when it came to the question of clothes, more completely than she did her own. “Shall I send it?” asked the clerk.
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Larkin, “but we’ll take it with us.” Then when the salesgirl had left and Rette was slipping back into her own clothes, she said: “While we’re about it, let’s see if we can’t find some red sandals. They’d be stunning with that shade of gray-blue.”
There was one good shoeshop in Avondale, a branch of a big city store, and there Rette tried on some flat red wedges, size 71/2, much like the white ones she had worn last summer. They were nice, but somehow not special enough for Ellen’s party. She paraded in front of the foot glass, eying them.
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