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“She left me a bit. And some to Helen and Vivian. But she wanted most of it to go to you and Ivy. Except for the plane. The plane she left just to you.”

“What? Why?”

“It’s a good plane. You can easily sell it. I know someone who might be interested.”

“Cardiology is just swamped these days,” said Kimberly when Ruth caught up with her in the hospital parking lot one morning. “I can barely find time to pour myself a cup of coffee.”

Ruth feigned understanding. “What about tonight?” she asked. “It’s been a while. I miss you.” She reached out to touch Kimberly’s arm, but Kimberly stepped just out of reach.

“Maybe. I might have to stay late.”

“Come late, then. You know I don’t mind.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll cook something,” said Ruth. Her cooking had improved.

All it took was practice. Pork roast, she decided.

With chopped iceberg salad and twice-baked potatoes on the side.

Her mother’s recipes. Dishes that made her nostalgic for the days when the five of them, Ivy and Tom and George and Adele and herself, sat down together.

Now it was just herself and her father, and he bid every flight he could, keeping himself up in the air.

The roast was dry and the potatoes long cold when Kimberly finally called and said she couldn’t make it after all.

“It’s okay,” said Ruth, trying her hardest to mean it. “Maybe tomorrow.”

But the next day Lloyd was home sick and Kimberly couldn’t come. The day after that, Kimberly announced that she and Lloyd had decided to freshen up their kitchen and she’d have to spend all her free time painting.

“I could help,” said Ruth.

“Oh, sweetie,” said Kimberly, and Ruth’s heart swelled, “I couldn’t possibly let you help. Not with everything you’re going through right now. I just wouldn’t feel right about that at all.”

No one likes a moper, thought Ruth. She kept busy, kept it together. At work, during meetings with Frank Bridlemile to review her mother’s investments, while listening as Helen tried to interest her in an excellent serve-and-volleyer from the club.

She kept it together—if only barely—when she spotted Kimberly across the parking lot. Kimberly waved, then pointed at the watch on her delicate wrist and darted into the hospital.

She kept it together when at last Kimberly called and asked if she could come over. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.

Ruth played it cool. Not much in the fridge, no dinner on the stove. She wouldn’t chase or beg. She wanted Kimberly to understand this the moment she walked into the house.

“I wanted you to hear it from me,” said Kimberly as she perched on the edge of the armchair, “and I think some of the other nurses in cardiology are starting to suspect. You know how everyone gossips at the hospital.”

Ruth was ready to plead extra caution. Separate cars, staggered arrival and departure times from work. Whatever it took.

“And in a couple of months, there won’t be any hiding it anyway, I suppose.”

Ruth was ready to argue that she could be discreet for years on end.

“I’m pregnant.”

She was ready for anything but that.

“You’re what?”

“I’m going to have a baby.”

“But—”

“I know I said I didn’t want to have babies. I know I said that.”

“You did.”

“And Lloyd and I don’t always get along.”

“You don’t.”

“But your mom’s service made me realize, I want to make a family with someone.”

“I want that too,” said Ruth. “More than anything in the world.” More than anything in the world she wanted that with Kimberly.

“But we couldn’t really, you and I,” said Kimberly. “You know that, right?”

“No,” said Ruth. “I don’t.” Ivy had been bringing children out of Vietnam when she died. An impossible number of orphans had been shipped to the United States. The supply and demand ratio surely tilted in their favor.

Come on, Ruth, she heard Ivy say. You saw it yourself, what those kids went through. Now they get doled out to nice, upstanding American families. Little spoils of war. And you want in on this?

Ruth ignored her sister. “We’d be good parents,” she insisted.

Kimberly’s brow squinched up the way it did when she was exasperated. “You’re delusional. I can’t keep living a delusional life, Ruth.”

“You will be living a delusional life if you stay with Lloyd.”

“He’s not so bad,” said Kimberly, her voice soft. “And we’re having a baby together. So there’s that.”

There was also the Jet Way. The Control Tower. Ruth hadn’t gone in months, but she felt right at home returning. There were airmen, stationed far from their hometowns, who were just as lonely as she was. She no longer saw the point in counting her drinks and knowing her limit.

At work, she argued with the doctors and the head nurses.

She was reprimanded twice for tardiness—because sleep only descended in the hour before her alarm rang—and once for unkemptness—because her hair had escaped from its pins and she hadn’t worn lipstick.

The previous night had bled into morning, and she was still too drunk to apply it within its proper bounds, so she simply hadn’t.

Now here she was, late again, bare lipped, her hair escaping its pins. She batted strands of it out of her eyes as she raced through the hospital lobby.

Kimberly caught her arm before she reached the elevators.

She hauled Ruth into the restroom and made her splash water on her face.

Then she repinned her hair, swiped a coat of lipstick on Ruth’s lips, and handed her a tissue.

“Blot,” she commanded. Ruth blotted. “Now get some coffee and stay clear of your supervisor. You don’t smell so great, to be honest.”

“Gee, thanks,” said Ruth.

“I’m trying to help you. But you could do a little more to help yourself these days.”

“What do you care?”

“Don’t do that, Ruth. Don’t make me regret helping you keep your job.”

No one likes a moper, thought Ruth.

She hid out in the cafeteria, sipping her coffee, wondering whether she’d be fired when the head nurse discovered her malingering again. A man approached her table. He wore civilian clothes—a crumpled linen suit—but Ruth recognized a military bearing when she saw one.

“Miss Rutledge?”

She nodded and gestured to the empty seat across from her.

“My name’s Sam Benson. I worked with Ivy.”

She leaned forward in her chair, pushed her coffee aside. She didn’t need it now; she was bolt awake. “You were in Vietnam.”

“Back and forth. As the situation dictated. I understand you’re in the pediatric unit here—they say it’s a good one.”

Did they? Well, the children weren’t dropping like flies, she supposed. The majority of them made it home, minus their tonsils or appendixes or adenoids. There was no Over There in pediatrics. Thank God.

“I spoke with Claire Stanich about you. She says you’re wasted in pediatrics. That you should be in trauma.”

“Mr. Benson, I can’t see any reason why you’d need to talk with anyone about me. And so far, I can’t even see a reason why you need to talk to me.”

“I apologize. Professional habit.” He placed a small box on the table between them. “A few things Ivy left behind in her apartment. She was in a hurry to get home. I’m sorry about your mother. And your sister.”

“We weren’t actually sisters,” said Ruth. “But you already knew that.”

“That’s what she claimed. Even though she called in some favors to transfer you to Cu Chi. But then, I may not put as much stock in biology as someone in your profession does.”

“And there’s this,” he added, sliding a pale-blue envelope across the table. A letter from her to Ivy. One of the later, pleading ones. Begging Ivy to take pity on their mother and come home, claiming that Ruth had found out everything and would only tell once Ivy got home.

“I’m afraid this didn’t make it to her. I thought you might want it back.”

“It’s been opened.”

“Yes. We kept a close eye on correspondence of our employees.”

Ruth snorted. “The Donut Dollies knew so much.”

“Let’s not play games, Miss Rutledge.”

“No, let’s not. Is it the truth, that she never saw this letter?”

“It’s the truth. There’s one in the box that she did receive.”

Ruth lifted the lid of the box. A postcard offering Greetings from Oklahoma! sat right on top. On its reverse: one of her nagging messages to Ivy, updating her on their mother’s illness, pleading with her to write.

She was coming home because she loved us, thought Ruth. She loved us after all.

“I have a question for you, Miss Rutledge.”

Ruth suspected that his question, rather than the return of Ivy’s paltry effects, was the real reason for Benson’s visit. She gestured for him to ask it.

He pointed at the blue airmail letter he’d brought her. “You told her you knew who her mother was. I had my best researchers on this. And unless you learned something from your mother or from Vivian Shaw—which strikes me as unlikely—I’d like to know what they missed and how you found out.”

“I was lying,” said Ruth. “Saying what I needed to say to get her to come home.”

The corners of his eyes crinkled. He seemed pleased by her answer. He pushed back from the table, ready to stand, then paused. “Do you have any questions for me?”

So many questions. What had Ivy been doing in Vietnam?

(What had any of them been doing in Vietnam?) How did Ivy get there to begin with?

What was Sam Benson going to do now; what were all the Ivys and Bensons going to do, now that it was over?

Where was he headed next, and what terrible price would everyone have to pay for it?

“Nothing you could answer. Not truthfully anyway.”

The chrome-and-canary Cessna, so vivid in Ruth’s memory, was clouded with pollen dust. Her father had found a buyer and she decided to take a last look at the plane before accepting the offer.

She circled it, wishing her mother would talk to her the way Adele sometimes did.

But Ivy’s voice came to her instead, taunting her to open the door and climb inside.

Don’t tell me you’re chicken. I know you’re not chicken. I watched you in Cu Chi.

Ruth ran her hand along the top of a sun-warmed wing. Her fingers came away gray.

The plane was beautiful with its yellow swoops of paint.

Voluptuous right down to its fenders. (Were they called fenders on planes?

She wished she’d paid more attention.) But it looked lonesome alongside the planes tethered nearby.

Planes whose owners kept the tires filled, the fuselage polished, the props oiled.

She’d bring some towels out tomorrow and clean off the Cessna.

Buff it until it shone. It would do her good to get out in the sunshine.

Then reward herself with an early start at the bar.

Ivy’s voice again, exasperated: Come on, Ruth. Last one standing wins. And that’s you .

They’d only flown with their mother that one time.

Now she was gone. Adele and Ivy too. She traced their names on the plane’s dusty flank.

A manifest of missing passengers and crew.

Only she and Vivian remained, and Ruth wondered if she’d ever see Vivian again.

But here was this plane. Her prize for winning. For lasting. No, she would not sell it.