acquire one. Last Christmas Garrett had replaced his college ring with the expected diamond—a pear-shaped stone on a gold band, dainty and pretty. The thought of a fall wedding after Garrett graduated had seemed safely distant, but the ring had been the first pebble in a landslide as plans started falling into place with alarming speed: a September ceremony, a honeymoon in New York, Ruth in pale pink gauze as flower girl. Jordan’s little sister was ecstatic. Everyone was ecstatic.
Jordan pushed off thoughts of orchids and centerpieces and raised the Leica, snapping Garrett beside the plane. “We’d better get back. I’m opening up the shop at one.” The little airfield sat northeast of Boston: a crumbling business that hung on, Garrett said, by renting out its small collection of outdated biplanes for flight instruction, crop-dusting, and joyrides. Jordan returned to the car, and as Garrett squared things away with the mechanic, she tried fluffing her hair in the rearview mirror. When she had turned twenty-one last June, she’d decided it was time to swap the schoolgirl ponytail for something more adult, but now she wasn’t sure the hairdresser had done her any favors. “We’ll take some of the length off,” the woman enthused, “then curl the back. You’ll look just like Rita Hayworth in The Loves of Carmen. Did you see that one, honey?” But the Rita Hayworth effect required a lot of pins and curlers, and however much Jordan twirled and tugged in the morning, a good breeze had the whole dark-blond mess lying limp as a dishrag.
Whack it all off and top it with a beret like Gerda Taro, the long-smothered voice of J. Bryde whispered—the part of Jordan that still had silly daydreams about trading her pin curls and crinolines for a sleek leather trench and heading for New York with the Leica over one shoulder. But Jordan put that thought back where it belonged, turning to Garrett as he jogged over. “When can we come back? This was fun.”
“Whenever you want.” He hopped in over the driver’s-side door. “I’ve been working here, every other Saturday. Pat—Mr. Hatterson, he owns the place—he’s on the ropes. I put in a couple days a month, give the weekend joyriders a few loops and spins, and Pat pays me in flying time.” A quick glance. “It doesn’t scare you, me flying? Mom says it gives her the shivers now that I have my license. She keeps saying I already broke one leg flying, and a man who’s going to be married soon needs to think of his family.”
“Fly all you want when we’re married,” Jordan proclaimed, using the word she usually managed to avoid. “It doesn’t bother me a bit.”
Garrett leaned over and gave her a good, long kiss. “You’re quite a girl, you know that?”
“I do know that.” Jordan leaned forward, murmuring into his ear. “Do you still have that blanket in your trunk?”
She should feel him grin against her cheek. “Yep.”
“Anywhere around here a girl and her fella could get lost?”
“Yep.”
Shortly after the college ring had been traded in for its half-carat cousin, Jordan had decided a different kind of trade-in was in order. You once wanted to travel the world with a string of European lovers in tow, she thought. At the very least, you can graduate from making out in the backseat of a Chevrolet coup.
It was with a certain amount of snickering now that they drove off in a spin of tires and dust, not back toward Boston but farther past the airfield, down a smaller dead-end road. Garrett got the blanket out of the truck, bowing elaborately toward the trees. “After you, miss.”
“Do you have—” Jordan tried her best to be a woman of the world, but she wasn’t quite past euphemisms when it came to what her girlfriends in school had always just called those things. “You know.”
Garrett patted his wallet. “I was a Boy Scout, remember? Be prepared.”
“I hope this wasn’t in the Scouts’ manual.”
“If it had been, I would have paid a lot more attention to my Scoutmaster . . .”
They found a thick stand of trees and brush, well out of sight of the car, then spread out the blanket and tumbled onto it. The first time they’d ever done this (four months ago, in an apartment borrowed from a friend of Garrett’s) Jordan had expended considerable thought on exactly how one got from fully dressed and kissing to naked. Given all the fastenings on everything that the New Look