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It was late and George was driving. Fast, out on the farm roads.

Pointing the Dodge away from home until a T forced her to turn.

She and Tom had fought. Again. The blush of joy that tinted Tom’s first weeks back had faded.

The airline had hired him almost immediately, thanks to his connection, but as a newbie, he got the dregs when it came to runs.

The prop plane from Oklahoma City to Dallas and back.

Never the jet to LA or New York, or even Saint Louis.

George understood how it must rankle. She herself had only the Dodge.

Out on the farm roads, she opened it up on the long, straight stretches.

At such a late hour, she didn’t even need to stop at the intersections.

It was as close to flying, as close to consolation, as she could get.

After their fights, she lay in bed seething, stone still, pretending to sleep as she clung to the edge of the mattress, forcing her chest to rise and fall, her lungs to accept and release air.

When she couldn’t bear it any longer, she rose and dressed and grabbed the keys to the Dodge.

After driving an hour or so, she’d think back on the fight.

What had it been about? Often, she couldn’t recall.

Some petty little something. Some feeling of being taken for granted.

A sense of being wronged, in some vague way, that resulted in one of them lashing out, the other lashing back, all this lashing done in fierce whispers so as not to wake the girls.

Though she suspected the girls knew. The very air of the house, the air that filled their precious little lungs, was toxic with the fumes of their parents’ mutual disappointment.

She would do better. She would be more patient.

He’d had a hard war, after all. Her mother had warned her, “They come back different. So just remind yourself that at least he came back.” A warning George had failed to take seriously.

She and Tom were in love. They were golden.

Their life would be golden too. Surely, now that the war had ended, everyone’s lives would be a little more golden.

She retreated from the farm roads, nosed the Dodge through the nicer neighborhoods of Enid, turning, as she always did on these driving nights, not toward her own house but toward Helen’s.

Frank had returned home weeks before, but Helen had kept him under wraps.

“He needs to rest. He’s a skeleton, Georgeanne. It’s criminal what they did to him.”

Frank spent five months in a Japanese POW camp in the Philippines, then another month in an Army hospital, before being deemed parasite-free and healthy enough to go home.

George couldn’t say what she hoped to see when she drove by the Bridlemile house at 3 a.m. A light burning in one of the front rooms?

Some sign of happiness or distress from the placid lawn, the porch with its pots of geraniums?

This night, as on all the others she’d driven by (sometimes doubling back to look twice), the house and yard were dark, tidy, not a pine branch swaying in the breeze.

Well, there was no breeze to sway them. But something swayed.

She rolled down the window and squinted at the shadow beneath the live oak.

Someone sat in the glider, rocking it back and forth in the dark.

She pulled the Dodge to the curb and crossed the lawn before she had formulated the words.

What did you say to these men? These men who had been so terribly beaten up by war, who had seen and heard, and probably done, unspeakable things, who had come home to few jobs and to wives they no longer knew and children who were strangers to them.

What George said was, “You’ll get eaten alive, sitting out here this time of night.”

“Ah, Georgeanne,” said Frank, stretching his arm across the back of the glider so that she could slide right up close beside him. “I sure missed you.”

His clavicles were sharp through his thin cotton undershirt.

They rocked the glider back and forth, not speaking, listening to the clank of the iron chains.

George ran a hand over Frank’s ribs. He gently removed it and held on to it.

Eventually he brought it to his mouth and kissed it.

“I think I made a mistake, Frank,” she confessed.

“Well, then, what are you going to do about it?” he asked, laying her hand along his cheek.

“I was thinking I might make another one.” She pulled him to his feet, began leading him to the Dodge.

“Oh, honey,” said Frank, allowing himself to be led. “We were never the mistake.”

The girls were nearly two when Vivian wrote to George and proposed a trip somewhere. “Just us girls—all four of us,” Vivian wrote, provoking in George a fear that she might not know this current version of Vivian.

“Doesn’t that just sound lovely?” George wrote back, thinking she didn’t know this current version of herself either.

Some friends of Adele’s had a place in Port Arthur.

It wouldn’t be too bad a drive. Vivian wrote back that a friend would fly her to Houston.

(She provided no details about the friend, and George made no mention of Frank Bridlemile.) From Houston, she’d take a bus.

The arrangements fell easily into place.

George pressed the girls’ prettiest outfits and trimmed their hair.

She drew up menus that would showcase how well they ate and how well she cooked for them.

She put aside favorite dolls and toys so that the girls would have something fresh to entertain themselves with on the drive.

She considered their vocabularies. Not, according to Helen, particularly advanced, but “probably nothing to worry about.” She reminded herself that Vivian’s store of knowledge about two-year-olds wasn’t exactly extensive.

The important thing was to appear competent and calm.

To show that she was as good a mother as she had been a pilot.

To show that the girls were thriving and cheerful.

But also, not to make it look too easy. Not to provide Vivian the slightest temptation to reclaim her daughter.

Salt air had rusted the lock to the house.

George had to let Ivy pee behind a palmetto because she couldn’t get the door open in time.

This was such a novel and exciting adventure that Ruth demanded to pee behind a palmetto, too, even though by then they’d been inside for an hour.

Finally, for the sake of preventing tearstained cheeks and puffy eyes, George had allowed it.

Naturally the neighbor had seen, then stared hard at the Oklahoma plates on George’s car and sniffed as if to say it all made sense to her now.

Just when she’d gotten the girls settled down and a chicken in the oven to roast, it was time to head to the bus station to pick up “Aunt Vivian.” But Aunt Vivian’s bus was an hour late.

George hadn’t brought any toddler provisions with her.

She put this down to nerves; she certainly knew better than to leave home without at least a few graham crackers in her purse.

An hour late was just late enough that the chicken would be dry, but not late enough for her to drive back to the house and then return to the station.

When the bus finally pulled in, she wiped the girls’ noses and mouths, eliminating the traces of the candy bar she’d bought them.

A stream of passengers disembarked. George wondered if Vivian had missed the bus, but then she stepped down, looking overheated but beautiful in silk and gabardine.

She unwound her scarf as she strode toward them.

Why, thought George, did I wear this frumpy old seersucker dress? She wished she’d run a comb through her hair before leaving the house. How could this glamorous creature possibly want to spend a week with a dowdy housewife like herself? Ivy didn’t help things by announcing, “I peed outside!”

Vivian burst out laughing, and George’s chest eased.

This was the Vivian she remembered. She glanced at her watch.

The chicken should be charring nicely now.

She imagined the smoke drifting through the open kitchen window and further enhancing her reputation with the neighbor. “Let’s go home,” she said.

Ruth cried out in the middle of the night. She’d vomited in her bed. She was pale and feverish, and George worked as quietly as she could to clean up the mess and settle her back down to sleep. Almost exactly twenty-four hours later, Ivy followed suit.

George and Vivian spooned chipped ice and JELL-O into Ruth’s and Ivy’s hot mouths.

They placed cool cloths on their burning foreheads.

They washed bed linens and towels. Then washed them again.

Vivian found a roll of plastic sheeting in the shed and spread it over the carpet.

George was exhausted. She and Vivian slept in shifts, but George tried to let Vivian sleep longer.

My God, George thought as she dipped her daughters into a cool bath to ease their fevers, what if I catch it? How on earth would Vivian manage on her own?

“My God, George,” said Vivian as she mopped watery vomit off the plastic sheeting, “you’d better not catch this. How on earth would I manage on my own?”

And then Ruth’s color returned. She kept down a few saltines and some flat Coke.

A day later, Ivy followed suit. Their skin cooled.

Their eyes brightened. At least, thought George, they could still have a couple of days of fun on the beach.

They’d escape the cramped and now rather pungent Port Arthur cabin, build sandcastles, splash in the waves.

“Was that thunder?” asked Vivian.

It was. The first of a series of storms rolling up the Gulf Coast, bringing driving rain and piercing wind and not letting up until the time came to drive Vivian back to the bus station. “Next time,” said George, “why not visit us in Enid?”

This was a long shot, she knew. After this awful week, Vivian was unlikely to want a next time. But their focus on the sick girls and the exhaustion that came from tending to them had erased the awkwardness between them. They had a job to do, and they’d done it. But she wished they’d had more time.

“We didn’t get much chance to talk,” said George. “I feel like we didn’t catch up at all.”

Vivian kissed Ivy and Ruth goodbye. She showed no signs of wanting to take one of them home with her. Then she hugged George tightly. “I’d love to visit you. I’ll come soon. I promise.”