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“Are those Mother’s?” asked Clara, a grasping note in her voice.

“Not anymore. Now they are Elizabeth’s.”

Clelia fished in her handbag again and pulled out a gold necklace. “And this is for Vivian.” It was the first piece of jewelry Vivian had ever received. A round locket the size of a nickel with a tiny starburst diamond chip set in its center, strung on a thin chain.

“Really for me?”

“Really for you, provided you remember your manners.”

“Thank you, Aunt Clelia.” Vivian latched the clasp behind her neck and traced a finger around the diamond chip. She had a new dress, a beautiful sister, and a gold locket. Her mother was, mostly, happy. Her father was home and might even stay for a while.

But when she raised her eyes from the locket, she saw her father’s cheeks had flushed. His glance veered from Elizabeth to the door. Duty and desire battled openly across his face. Her mother scowled at Clelia as if to say, “Now look what you’ve done.”

He would leave, sooner rather than later. And when he did, her mother would sink back into herself, retreat to her garden beds.

Elizabeth cleared her throat. The preacher stepped forward, holding his Bible before him like a shield, and said, “The groom’s ready. Shall we begin?”

Vivian worked after school in her brothers’ repair yard, fixing cars and bikes. Now that she was sixteen, she’d also begun working on being more of a proper girl. A girl that boys like Bobby Broussard would want to ask out.

Bobby Broussard had the use of his brother’s car—a Hudson Terraplane.

As he drove her home from the cinema, Vivian listened to the engine.

It never pinged or rattled, just hummed evenly along.

She wanted to try out the Electric Hand gearshift, to lift the hood and inspect the engine, even though it was only six cylinders.

That sort of thing wouldn’t do, so she restrained herself except to say, during a lull in Bobby’s conversation, “It sure drives smooth, doesn’t it? ”

He agreed that it did, then said, “Let’s park.

” She had an hour until curfew, and there was nothing else to do in Hahira, Georgia.

Besides, Vivian liked the combination of fear and longing, resistance and surrender, that parking entailed.

The Hudson had a large, comfortable back seat.

They spent their hour there engaged in battle over the territory of her body, Bobby saying, “Please, baby, c’mon, please,” and Vivian intercepting his hands, saying, “No, Bobby,” with decreasing frequency as the minutes ticked past. The battlefront had expanded steadily over the weeks they’d been seeing each other, Vivian breathlessly and strategically conceding small bits of territory along the way.

When they finally pulled up to her house, fifteen minutes past curfew and a light blazing in the kitchen, Bobby rewarded her most recent concession by offering her his pin.

Vivian dutifully displayed it for her mother in the bright kitchen after the Hudson had pulled away and the yelling had stopped.

Clara Shaw ran a finger along the edges of the small diamond-shaped pin. Vivian held her breath. Perhaps she had finally captured her mother’s attention. Clara handed it back without meeting Vivian’s eyes and said, “You better go talk to your sister tomorrow.”

The next day, Vivian found her sister pinning little Henry’s just-washed diapers to the line. “Mama sent me,” she said.

“She called,” said Elizabeth. “Did she send anything?”

Elizabeth lived only three blocks from them, but their mother rarely walked the distance, preferring to send Vivian instead. This time with an offering of cold roast chicken.

“She’s too good to me,” said Elizabeth. “Set it on the kitchen table, would you? I’m nearly done out here.”

When Elizabeth entered the kitchen, she went straight to the percolator and poured two cups.

Vivian, who was never offered coffee at home, sat up straight in her chair, cultivating a womanly posture as she sipped hers.

Elizabeth smoothed her skirt beneath her rear as she sat down.

She looked like an overexposed photograph of her former self.

Her husband and baby and housework had leached the color and definition from her features.

She’d been Queen Bee in Hahira’s Honey Days parade her senior year of high school.

Now she looked just like all the other housewives in town: tired.

“Mama says you’re pinned and that I should speak frankly to you about things. Back when I was your age, she sent me to Aunt Clelia, who either wouldn’t say what she knew or didn’t know anything, so a lot of good that did me.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Know it all already, do you?” Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. They needed plucking. “Then you won’t mind hearing it anyway.”

As it turned out, she didn’t know it all, though she suspected much of it. “You have to be firm with them,” said Elizabeth, as if Bobby were an entire army, not just one teenage boy. “They’ll push and push and push, but they depend on us to draw the line and hold it.”

Vivian had drawn plenty of lines, then erased them and drawn them elsewhere, then erased those too. Perhaps this showed on her face, because Elizabeth said, “Don’t repeat this to anyone, hear? Just use your hands. Your mouth too—they like that a lot. It keeps them away from the other.”

Then Elizabeth cut her a slice of pound cake, gave her sugar for the coffee she’d stopped drinking, and talked about the baby until Vivian’s cheeks cooled.

It was Bobby Broussard who drove her out to the Valdosta airfield to see the barnstormers, but he wasn’t the one who drove her home.

Even though it was broad daylight, he acted surprised when she wouldn’t climb into the back seat with him before they headed to the airfield.

Vivian said he’d invited her to see a show, and a show was what she expected to see.

Bobby had gotten lazy of late about treating her to milkshakes and burgers and the cinema.

After she began following Elizabeth’s advice, he rushed her into that back seat as quickly and as frequently as possible.

She’d begun sussing out other prospects in Hahira. But the pickings were slim, and she suspected Bobby had told most of them what she was willing to get up to in a back seat. A day at the Valdosta airfield suggested expanded possibilities.

She’d never seen barnstormers before, and her expectations for the entertainment were modest. But she knew there’d be a crowd of young men there—men who lacked notions about her.

She hated being so mercenary about it, but that’s how a girl had to think.

She didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of her mother or her sister, worn out and chained to some grown-up version of Bobby Broussard.

She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life in Hahira.

Valdosta wasn’t that far away, wasn’t even that much of a step up, but it was a start.

Even though it featured three planes, it wasn’t, she would later learn, much of an air show.

There were no wing walkers, no one hanging from his teeth by a strap attached to the wheel axle, no one shinnying up a flagpole mounted to the top of the fuselage, no parachutists floating down in jellyfish-like formations.

Just three planes, flying wingtip to wingtip, taking turns flying upside down, then playing what looked like leapfrog with one another.

One plane dipping low, almost to the ground, while the others, though parallel to it, took turns leaping “over” it.

Then the planes shot straight up in the air, stalled, plummeted down-down-down until she was sure they were done for, then shot skyward again.

Vivian’s heart was an engine, stalling and racing and shooting toward the heavens.

Bobby pulled at her arm— C’mon, baby, please.

She swatted him off and threaded her way through the crowd, ignoring the interested glances of the men, until she reached the rope that kept the crowd back from the airfield.

She strained against it, gasping as the three planes came in for a coordinated landing, one rolling straight on ahead, the other two peeling off in opposite directions.

The straight-on-ahead plane made right for her.

The crowd shrank back, but Vivian leaned forward, would have snapped the rope if she could have, she so longed to put her hand on the side of that airplane.

It slowed and came to a full stop about fifty feet from her.

Who would have thought wood and canvas could combine into something so magnificent?

Vivian had left her house that day feeling pretty magnificent herself. She had on her best summer dress. She’d curled her hair, rifled through her mother’s vanity until she found the right shade of lipstick, and then ducked out the front door before her brothers could stop her.

The pilot climbed down from the plane, peeled off his goggles, made a perfunctory bow to the crowd, and then strode over to Vivian. She allowed him to take her hand and kiss it. Still bent low over her hand, he raised his eyes to hers and said, “I’ll bet you’d like a ride.”

Not, Would you like a ride? Louis Korman, she would quickly learn, didn’t ask questions.

He made statements. He gave commands. After he’d walked Vivian around the plane (a Jenny, he said, bragging about its liquid-cooled V-8), after he’d told her he liked tall girls—the taller the better—after he’d leaned her up against the side of the hangar and kissed her, tapped her locket and said, “Pretty, like you,” after he’d bought her dinner and scrounged up a car in which to drive her home, he said, “Come back tomorrow and we’ll take that ride.

I’m here for four days.” Vivian, who had already been scheming about which of the cars in the repair yard she could borrow with the least resistance from her brothers, said she would.