Free The Secrets of Flight by Maggie Leffler

Jane! And you’re intent on living like it’s a sentence.”
    â€œHow long has her husband been dead—ten minutes?” Mom asked.
    On the desk in Mom’s office, the phone suddenly rang. I held my breath, afraid to move, as my heart drilled a hole in my chest. Two more rings went by. Downstairs, I could hear the machine pick up and Grandma’s voice asking my mother please pick up, because she finally went to the doctor about that itch. “Jane? Please? It’s important.” After a long pause, she finally hung up.
    Just then, Huggie started to cry—loudly—which meant that he had to pee. Huggie doesn’t wet the bed anymore, but he gets deliriously pissed at the inconvenience of getting up to pee when he’s trying to sleep. Sometimes my mom quietly guides him to the bathroom, other times we can hear her shouting, “Damn it, Hugh, we all have to pee sometimes!”
    â€œI’ll go,” Daddy said, as the crying got more insistent.
    â€œNo, I’ll go!” Mom snapped.
    As soon as I heard her leave the room, my shoulders dropped. But Daddy just sat there on the bed, not moving. It almost looked like he was staring in the direction of the French doors, and I wondered if he’d heard me exhale. Finally, he got up with a noisy sigh and went into the bathroom. Once I heard water running in the sink, I uncurled my legs, slowly stood up, and softly unlatched the French door to Mom’s office. As soon as I could see the bedroom was definitely empty, I flew across the rug, past the bed, past the dressing table, past the rocking chair, and kept going into the hallway, where, down at the far end, the kids’ bathroom door was open. Mom was swaying slightly and hugging herself, while Huggie howled and peedinto the toilet. Just as she glanced up at me, I turned the other way and ran, telling myself not to look back, thinking of the one line I’d seen on Mrs. Browning’s instructions for night flying that she’d shown me earlier: “While solo do not look back at Runway before first turn is made.” Back in my room, I collapsed on the bed, trying to erase my mom’s blue eyes from the inside of my own lids. Her face may have been angry, her brows chiseled into a terrifying V, but her eyes were soft and vulnerable and heartbroken and . . . wet. And, now, so were mine. I couldn’t really move to California and leave her alone. I couldn’t really leave her ever.

CHAPTER 6
First Flight
    April 1941
    Y ou ready for this?” my instructor Jim Newman asks as we sit tandem in the cockpit of the Piper J-3—or “the cub,” as Jim calls it—waiting for one of the line boys to prop the plane for my first flight. It’s been thirteen years since the pilot fell into my yard, three whole years since FDR announced the initiation of the Civilian Pilot Training Program, and six months since I matriculated at the University of Pittsburgh. Since only one in ten spots is available for a woman, I had to wait until this spring for a space in the program. It’s been nine days since I finished first in ground school, beating out eighteen men, and another forty-five minutes since we walked outside the ready room and started inspecting the plane before takeoff.
    â€œI’ve been ready forever,” I say, and he laughs.
    At twenty-five, Jim is six years my senior, but since he’s taught me everything about how to ready a parachute and reada tachometer and altimeter, how to transition the plane from taxi to liftoff, how to listen to the sound of the engine to determine the tilt of the plane, and how to anticipate the landing, he may as well be sixty. I am so full of giddy anticipation that I haven’t slept all week.
    â€œWhere’s your wind coming from?” Jim asks now, and as I point north, I can’t help smiling, thinking, The wind is mine .
    At last, Hurly Stevens, blond and seventeen, arrives to get the propeller