Cloudmaker. Malcolm Brooks

not straight out of the Rutherford B. Hayes era. She’d known better than to suggest air passage herself—Mother had gone so far as to confiscate A.E.’s book, citing it as the root of all the trouble. The Fun of It. Ironic, she knew. Practical or not, she’d have crushed the idea on principle.

      She held her own against the seduction of sleep right on through to Salt Lake. She watched the pink of the rising sun bathe the toes of the mountains west of the city, watched the same pink wash move up the bare slopes and into the snow at the top. Her father stirred when the train slowed.

      They killed a few hours in a diner waiting for her connection north. Annelise freshened up as best she could in the ladies’ room. She would be placed in the charge of a conductor who would see her to Butte, Montana, and then east a few hours to Billings. Her father would turn right back around on the next train home.

      “You could’ve flown, you know,” she said to him. The first time she’d initiated a conversation in days, and he blinked at her across his hash and eggs as though he were not only hearing but also seeing her for the first time in a year. “We could have flown here even, out of Burbank or Grand Central. We could have saved ourselves a solid day, a day neither of us can ever get back. You know that, right?”

      He resumed chewing, and he looked as exhausted to her in the moment as she herself felt. She couldn’t recall ever having seen him with stubble on his face before. Now he drained his own coffee and waved for more.

      “I mean, isn’t that part of it? Not to dillydally your time away? Look alive, because no man knows the day or the hour?”

      “Annelise, I own stock in Douglas. My firm negotiated a property dispute for Grand Central. For that matter, I’m the one who backed your flying lessons. I do not by any means regard myself as a Luddite. Remember I told you this was not my idea?”

      “Then why do you go along with her? Why don’t you put your foot down?”

      He shook his head. “Because Mother is not wrong, Annie. And as difficult as this might be for you to see, she has your heart and your soul and your safety and”—he halted, tripped over his own words—“and your reputation in mind.” He went so far as to point at her across the table. “She is not wrong.”

      The night’s caffeine had run out of her blood like fuel from a tank, even the remnant fumes combusted and gone. She was still in the air but totally without power, and no place in sight to put down. She tried to hold a level gaze across the table and finally went to rubbing her eyes instead. “She called me ‘damaged goods,’ Daddy. You heard her.”

      Not only that. They went so far as to haul her to the family doctor to have her put in the stirrups and examined, which she dodged only by finally copping en route to what they already suspected. Her father had practically driven off the road. “Is that what you believe, too?”

      He could hardly look at her then, and he could hardly look at her now. “Eighteen is a puzzling age, I’m not going to pretend other­wise. And these are puzzling times we live in, for all of us. Mother included.”

      “These are wonderful times, if you can see the fun in anything. The opportunity. And if it’s occurred to Mother even once that she might not have the answer to every little thing, she’s certainly never let on.”

      He stirred his coffee, stirred and stirred. “You always were headstrong. Even when you were a little thing pulling a red wagon around. Selling books you’d outgrown to the neighbors. You and Mother are too much alike, that’s half the problem. Cut right out of the same cloth.”

      “Too much alike? No, sorry, I live in 1937, not 1837.”

      “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

      “‘Damaged goods’ implies I’d actually stoop to accept a man who wants a piece of property to begin with. Anyone who thinks that doesn’t know the first thing about me.”

      He glanced around, and she realized her voice had risen above the clatter from the kitchen, the clink and clank of plates and knives. A few of the other patrons appeared to notice.

      She tried to turn the volume down. “I didn’t betray you, you know. It’s not even possible.”

      “I know. I can see why you’d say so.”

      “I’m not goods, and I am not damaged.”

      “And I am sorry you had to hear that.”

      “I mean, is a widow damaged? Is Sister Aimee damaged after divorce number two?”

      “I know—”

      “What utter hypocrisy.”

      “I know. It’s just that boys don’t . . . always understand that the consequences, for girls, can be disastrous. Socially disastrous. And visible. And permanent. Boys will be boys, but girls . . . the expectations are something different. Because the consequences are different. Fair or not.”

      Now Annelise did look at him. “Visible? Are you hearing yourself?” She felt the slap of her own hands, clapping at her cheeks with minds all their own. “Everyone knows why girls up and vanish midway through a school year, and it’s not for a mere . . . indiscretion, or a dalliance, or whatever polite terminology you choose.

      “Daddy. People are going to think I’m sent off because I’m actually in a fix. Did this not occur to anyone?”

      He slid out of the booth and walked toward the counter, and she could tell by his posture and gait how strained he was, by travel in part but mostly by circumstance. She read this like she could read her own name. She wished she could resent whatever pain or exhaustion or judgment he felt, because she was the one with no say in the matter, and no power. But the fire seemed to have gone out of her.

      He came back with a fresh newspaper and laid down the front page for her to see: earhart is off around the globe.

      She looked up at him. “That could be me. Someday.”

      “I believe you.”

      “This whole thing is a vast waste of my time. I’ve already started soloing, and now all this.”

      He eased into the booth again. “I’m aware.”

      Something else had occurred to her, too, a subject she hadn’t dared broach with her mother around. But she was pretty sure she was right. And as a lawyer and a Christian, wasn’t he obligated to tell her the truth? “Is this even legal?”

      She saw him blink and knew she had him. “That’s a bit of a . . . gray area, let’s say.”

      “But if I’d really put my foot down? Refused to go along with this? You’d have done what, kick me out to the street?”

      “Lord, of course not.”

      “But that’s the only real recourse you could have had. Am I right?”

      He rubbed his bloodshot eyes with fingers and thumb, probably, she imagined, to avoid having to face her. She was yet again in no mood for mercy.

      “I became a legal adult clear back in November, didn’t I? On my eighteenth birthday. California’s one of those states, isn’t it?”

      “You are . . . not entirely wrong. It’s one of those states. One of those few states . . . Most are a, ah, sensible twenty-one.”

      “And now you’re sending me to one of them, against my adult will.” Her stinger was coming up by the second, her scorpion’s defense. “By the standards of the state in which I actually reside. Do I have this right?”

      He shook his head at the ceiling, let out a breath. Gotcha.

      “Because that’s the way it appears. Are you actually breaking the law with this?”

      He was still looking at the ceiling. “Not one that any prosecutor would argue before a judge. Or that any judge would enforce, for that matter.”

      “Why? Because I happen to still be in high school