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The next day, they flew over Titusville and Quitman and even Waycross and the Okefenokee.

Below them farms and towns stretched out to the horizon.

A horizon that kept opening up, endlessly expanding ahead of her.

The sky was cloudless. Vast. She leaned forward in her seat.

Trained her eyes to the ever-shifting edge of the blue.

A person could go on forever up here. A person could end up very far from Hahira, Georgia.

They dropped closer to the earth, hedgehopping over fields and ponds.

“This looks like a good spot,” Louis said.

Vivian’s shoulders jumped—she’d forgotten he sat behind her.

In her mind, she was, without doing a thing, flying the plane herself.

He brought the Jenny down in a clearing near a lake.

From a compartment she hadn’t noticed, he produced a blanket and a picnic.

“Where are we?” asked Vivian.

“Hell if I know, sweetheart.”

“This has got to be somebody’s land.”

“Don’t worry. As long as we don’t scare any livestock or plow through the crops, the farmers generally take these little visits as a compliment.

” Louis snapped open the blanket, spread it on the ground, patted it.

“C’mon, sweetheart. I won’t bite.” He waited until they’d eaten the sandwiches to kiss her.

He was older than Bobby Broussard, but younger than her brothers, which seemed just the right age.

He knew how to kiss a girl. How to put his arms around her in a way that felt natural and safe, like he knew what he was about.

He smelled of tobacco and ham sandwiches and RC Cola, and before long his hands found their way beneath her skirt, and Vivian liked this better than when Bobby’s hands went beneath her skirt.

Even so, she blocked them with her own. Louis retreated.

“Whatever you say, sweetheart.” No C’mon, baby, please for him.

He rolled away from her, flipped open a silver lighter, and lit up a cigarette.

She stared up at the sky, thinking, while he smoked.

“How long did it take you to learn how to fly?” she asked, running her locket back and forth along its chain.

“Not as long as you’d think. You just have to pay attention and believe you can do it, that’s all.”

He flicked his cigarette aside, and Vivian, who, despite the golden glamour of the day, was still in a rather mercenary frame of mind, rolled atop him, kissed him hard, returned his hands to the place where they’d left off.

“Well, well,” he said, once she let him up for air.

“Didn’t take you long to change your mind. ”

“Maybe I still need convincing.”

“You seem pretty convinced to me.” She could hardly blame him for thinking so, seeing as she was unbuckling his belt.

“Maybe I’d like to learn how to fly an airplane.”

“Maybe that can be arranged.”

She levered herself back, hovered over him. “That can definitely be arranged.”

“Definitely.” Louis pulled her back down. His arms were strong and warm and certain. “Definitely that can be arranged.”

It didn’t take as long as she’d thought it would, losing her virginity. She just had to pay attention and believe she could do it, that was all.

But flying took longer to learn than Louis had let on.

It would certainly, Vivian realized during her first training flight, take longer than his remaining two days in Valdosta.

Especially since Louis made her spend so much time oiling the rocker arms and checking the antifreeze, the oil level, the cables, the fuel drains, and the air in the tires.

All of this before he allowed her to climb into the front cockpit, which didn’t even have any instruments.

“We’ll get to those,” said Louis. But Vivian could tell they wouldn’t get to them before he left.

Which was why, on the morning he was scheduled to depart, she arrived at the Valdosta airfield carrying an old cardboard suitcase she’d begged off Aunt Clelia.

She knew there was a good chance Louis would send her back home.

Knew from the way his face clouded over that he was strongly considering it.

But in the end, he said, “I guess it won’t hurt having a pretty girl sell tickets. ”

That was fine with her. Selling tickets was the least she was willing to do in exchange for learning to fly.

The pilot who lived nearby stayed behind.

Which left three men and now Vivian. Louis and Chance Durham each owned a surplus Jenny from the Great War.

They were in perfect agreement on the type of show they wanted to fly—no spinning by the teeth from canvas straps, no wing walking; they left all the aerobatics to the aircraft—and that allowed them to tolerate the mismatch in their personalities.

Chance Durham had what Vivian’s mother called the black dog.

He rarely smiled—and never at her. His every expression and gesture made it clear he wasn’t happy about her joining their crew.

“She’ll have to wear a better dress than that,” he said, “if you expect ticket sales to cover the cost of hauling her around with us.”

“It’ll be fine,” said Louis. “You’ll see.”

“Her dress seems nice enough.” This was from Bob Quigley, the mechanic, who more than earned his keep by maintaining the Jennys and smoothing over the occasional disagreement between Louis and Durham.

He gave the impression of being wiser than the pilots.

Which might have been true, or might have just been the effect of his wire-rimmed spectacles.

“She’s too tall,” said Durham. Like Louis, he was on the shorter side. “She’ll scare off the ticket buyers.”

“They’ll be able to find her in the crowd,” said Quigley. “Besides, she’s strong enough to help me with the planes.” Quigley was the tiebreaker. Vivian stayed.

Durham did what he could to make her want to leave.

She found her only pair of stockings, which she’d hung to dry in a shared hotel bathroom, laddered from thigh to toe.

There was no affording another pair, so Vivian took a grease pencil and drew seams down the backs of her legs.

Durham gave himself away by taking her by the shoulders, spinning her around, and smudging her calf with his finger.

“Look at this,” he said to Louis. “What kind of a show are we running here?”

“Vivvy, what happened to your stockings?” asked Louis.

She rubbed a spit-coated finger over the smears, furious that she’d need to redraw her seams.

“Vivian?”

“Someone wrecked them. Someone who doesn’t want me around.”

Durham snorted, and Louis said, “Now, Vivvy, you were probably just careless with them. You do leave your things lying around.”

They toured all over the South. When she wasn’t selling tickets or avoiding Durham or helping Quigley, who was thrilled to have a spare hand, she was learning to smoke and learning to fly and learning what Louis liked in bed.

Variety, it turned out, was what Louis liked.

There were other girls at other airfields.

Glamorous in their scarves and sundresses.

Eager to be leaned up against hangar walls and kissed.

As long as she got her regular flying lessons, Vivian pretended not to notice.

Sometimes they joined forces with other barnstorming troupes.

Outside Knoxville, they teamed up with a group that included a female pilot.

Ethel Blankenship was petite and curvaceous and unafraid to stand on the fuselage of her plane while her copilot took the controls.

“My God, I could never do that,” Vivian told her over dinner.

“Gutless,” scoffed Durham.

“Can you do it?” Ethel challenged him.

“Rather have you walking on planes than flying them,” said Durham.

“I’ll take that as a no.” Ethel turned to Vivian. “Louis says you’re learning to fly.”

Vivian admitted she was. What she didn’t admit was how challenging it had become to get Louis to take her up.

He often had “business to take care of.” The business usually being a girl. He was taking care of business elsewhere that very evening, which meant Vivian, after washing up in the shared hotel bathroom, made her way back to an otherwise empty room.

“You look lonesome, Shaw.” Durham loomed up out of nowhere in the dim corridor. “You lonesome? Need some company?”

Before she could answer that she certainly didn’t want his, he pushed her, sent her stumbling down the hallway. Vivian kept herself upright, but barely, and Durham advanced, ready to push her again.

A door swung open. Ethel Blankenship emerged from her room. Durham stepped back, dropped his arms to his sides. “Everything all right out here?” asked Ethel.

Vivian’s pulse pounded. She felt ashamed for being caught in the hallway with Durham. What if Ethel thought she’d encouraged him? “Yes,” she said, walking purposefully to her own door. “Everything’s just fine.”

“Well, good night, then,” said Ethel, a dismissal pointedly directed at Durham. Vivian got herself on the other side of her door and locked it quickly. Put her ear against it and listened to Durham’s boots thud back down the hallway.

As soon as she had the hours to fly solo, she took enough from the cashbox to cover her bus fare back to Hahira.

Louis had slept elsewhere again, and it was nearly dawn.

She grease penciled on her seams, put on her best dress, and, with a twinge of guilt, pocketed his silver lighter, telling herself he shouldn’t have left it behind.

He shouldn’t have left her behind. She was carrying Aunt Clelia’s cardboard suitcase through the hotel lobby when someone said, “Leaving us?”

Quigley sat next to the cold fireplace, puffing a Lucky and blowing smoke rings. “Didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said.

“I’m not scared.”

“Don’t mean to offend either. I’m sorry to see you go.”

“It was fun. But I think it’s time.”