Free Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille by James van Pelt

He didn’t sign it, but we all knew, even the teacher. She didn’t erase it. It stayed there all period.”
    Meadoe considered the room, the woman. It was hard to imagine her as a high school senior. In the pictures, she was pretty, curly black hair, bright eyes peeking at the camera. Meadoe couldn’t see the young woman in the old one. “I don’t know how to ask this; it sounds rude, and I don’t mean it to be, but I need to know. Were you two . . . serious? I mean . . . were you close?”
    “Very close.” Erica looked at Meadoe and blushed. “Oh no, nothing like that. It was 1945, after all. Not today. We never . . . not ever. Good girls didn’t.”
    “That’s not what I meant to imply.” Meadoe tried to smile, but that was exactly the question she wanted answered. The pinup girls. The touch on her back, the sitting on the couch in front of Casablanca were so sexual.
    “Well, we were people, of course. Young people. I think most old folk forget how high their juices used to run, and the young ones, of course, believe they’ve invented sex. We thought about it. We wanted to, but I was firm. I was proper.” She looked past Meadoe at the pictures on the wall. “Most of the people I grew up with are dead now. I have their photographs.” She paused. The clock ticked. Meadoe cupped her coffee, warming her hands. “During the war young kids had less opportunity than they have now. They chaperoned the dances. My mother called slow dances, ‘vertical fulfillment of horizontal desires,’ and the chaperones separated you if they thought you were too close. We thought about it though, what with the boys going away to war. Some girls absolutely thought it was their patriotic duty.”
    “But you didn’t?”
    “No, we never did.” She looked miserable. “I graduated in ’45, and I was going to go to college. He still had a year left, but he told me he was signing up that summer, the summer he died.”
    Talking about his death seemed to have exhausted her, so Meadoe helped put away the coffee cups.
    “Did you see Casablanca with him?”
    Erica closed a kitchen cabinet softly, hiding cups and saucers by the row. Meadoe believed most were never used, that the old woman took out the same cup or two everyday but never any more. The house seemed bigger now, and more empty.
    “We did. At the Denham for an encore showing. It was a couple of years old by then.”
    Meadoe remembered the popcorn, the quickening of breath. “Did you sit in the back row?”
    They walked toward the front door. Erica paused. “Funny question.” She rubbed her brow in thought. “Yes . . . you’re right. We did. How did you know?”
    Meadoe shrugged.
    They said goodbye, but before Meadoe moved to the porch, Erica put her hand on Meadoe’s arm, stopping her. The old woman’s eyes were watery and pale, her gaze steady. “In August that year, my aunt in Fort Collins became ill. My mother left me alone in the house for three days. I was eighteen. She said she trusted me. For the first time since Nathaniel and I started dating we had an empty house. I was going to go to college. He was joining the army. I called him. He was coming to see me when he had his accident.”
    Meadoe nodded dumbly. The woman’s grip was intense. Her mouth grim. “He never would have been in the intersection if I hadn’t called. All these years, all these years I’ve known, Nathaniel Shirley died because of me.”

    August 5, Wednesday Evening: A Visitation

    Meadoe left her car in front of Erica’s house and walked home, deep in thought.
    Erica’s look stayed with her. The old woman’s grip on her arm. The way she said “Nathaniel.” Never “Nathan.” His whole name over and over again. When she’d spoke her final words it was if all the time between had been erased. As if only moments before she’d hung up the phone and sat in her empty house waiting for a boy who never arrived.
    A half hour later as the dusk deepened, she rounded the corner onto her