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“Get up,” said Adele, sweeping open the curtains.

George rolled over and pressed her face into the pillow to escape the sunlight.

She had to pee, but that could wait until her mother left the room.

Then she’d tiptoe to the bathroom and back to her bed before anyone realized she’d been up at all. But her mother wasn’t leaving.

Adele flapped the chenille bedspread. “Time for a shower,” she said.

George moaned a no into her pillow.

“You can’t go out smelling the way you do.”

Who cared? She was never going out again.

“Ruth graduates today. You’ll hate yourself if you miss it.”

She hated herself already. What kind of a mother must she be for one of her daughters to run away?

As if Adele could read her mind, she said, “What sort of mother misses her daughter’s graduation?”

Showered, powdered, and dressed in a clean skirt and blouse, she sat propped between her mother and Tom.

He kept a protective arm around her. Adele held her hand.

George’s chest felt simultaneously heavy and empty as Ruth followed Carl Rutherford across the stage.

She clapped for her daughter, singular, and willed herself not to cry.

She sensed people in the crowd staring at her, but when she looked around, no one met her eyes.

Ivy’s name was not called. Nor was her disappearance mentioned by any of the staff or the families of other graduates of Enid High.

George felt this erasure of her daughter like a physical illness.

Her trembling hands fumbled with the program.

She doubted she’d ever be able to fly again.

It didn’t matter. Once this ceremony was over, she’d go back home and never leave. She had to be there when Ivy returned.

The police had assured her they were looking.

(“But she is over eighteen, ma’am. Legally allowed to go where she pleases.

”) Tom had assured her Ivy was a smart girl—she’d be all right.

But his hair had gone from blond to gray virtually overnight, which told George he didn’t buy what he was selling.

Frank had held her but said nothing because what could anyone possibly say?

No one wanted to speak Ivy’s name. No one wanted to hear Ivy’s name spoken. Not Adele. Not even Ruth.

Ruth had gone with her friends, stubbornly smiling down the other girls’ concern, on their shopping trip to Dallas.

George barely slept, imagining all the reasons she wouldn’t come home.

Imagining losing both of them. But Ruth had returned.

She’d lazed in front of the television set for two weeks, which suited George just fine.

If her daughter wanted to sit at home and watch television all day, George wasn’t going to complain; she’d always know exactly where she was.

But Adele wasn’t having it. “A grown woman now,” she said.

“Time to get out in the world. Do something.”

So Ruth went to work in Frank Bridlemile’s office.

Filing and fetching coffee and looking decorative at the front desk when customers came in.

“If her typing speed picks up, if she learns shorthand, we’ll put her in the steno pool and give her a raise.

” Frank said this to George one afternoon as they unwrapped themselves from the sheets.

He said it as if it were the greatest compliment he could give to a young woman.

I flew planes, she wanted to say to him.

I flew planes, when they wouldn’t let you do that.

Instead, she said, “I’m busy the rest of the week,” and nudged him out the back door.

“Now,” George said to Ruth as they sat down to dinner that night, “do you want this steno pool promotion? Because if you do, we’ll get you a shorthand class. I mean, if that’s what you want, that’s fine with me.”

Ruth set down her fork and scowled. “It’s not flying airplanes, I know, but it’s not lunching with the Women’s Club every other Thursday either.”

“Sweetheart, you misunderstand me. I’m only trying to help you have what you want. But to do that, I need to know what that is.”

George regretted this conversation for months because Ruth doggedly stuck with her filing job at Bridlemile Properties.

George believed she stayed there out of spite, but she began treating Ruth the way she used to treat Ivy.

Don’t say no outright. Don’t make demands.

Bide one’s time, wait for the right moment, then obliquely propose or provide what seemed appropriate.

She waited more than a year before Ruth, one night at dinner, suggested that she wanted to go into nursing.

“Nursing?” said Adele, unable to keep the disdain from her voice.

“Leave her alone, Mother,” said George. She understood Ruth’s desire to be a normal girl.

To fit in. To do what the world expected of her.

Part of George—a part her mother would never understand—applauded Ruth’s instinctive conformity.

It would make things easier for her in the long run. And Ruth deserved some ease.

Not long after Ivy left, Tom had stopped pretending to live at home.

He’d transformed from a family man into something more exciting—a pilot with an apartment in Oklahoma City.

A pilot with a dashing air that his evident grief about Ivy only enhanced.

A pilot who—she wondered exactly when—had stopped wearing his wedding ring, though they never spoke of divorce.

He surfaced on occasion. George would arrive home from the store and find him sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he’d say, as if he’d been there all the time.

She allowed this. She even allowed him to share her bed.

She told herself that by allowing this she allowed Ruth some sense of normalcy.

“Normalcy,” said Adele, “is overrated.”

But George disagreed. Normal, at her age, meant a husband in one’s bed at night and the knowledge of where all of one’s children were during the day.

Ivy had been gone for more than a year. “Missing,” everyone said, as if Ivy herself had no choice in the matter.

George, knowing her daughter, didn’t believe that for a moment.

And now Ruth would leave too. This was healthy, George told herself. This was good. And she was only going as far as Oklahoma City.

“Nursing,” said Adele again.

George wondered what choice her mother would prefer Ruth to make. “Exactly what doors do you think are open to young women these days?”

“She could at least go farther away,” said Adele. Then she placed a placatory hand on George’s arm. “I’m sorry, but you know what I mean.”

“We’re lucky she’s willing to go anywhere at all,” said George, pulling her arm away and ignoring her mother’s apology, refusing to confirm her mother’s suspicion that she wanted to keep Ruth as close to home as possible.