“Do you want to go for a walk?” he asked finally, when she'd cleaned up the mess from her ice cream. She nodded as she smiled at him.
They walked quietly down the beach for a while, with a nearly full moon shining brightly on the water. They could see everything on the beach, and they walked side by side, comfortably close together, silent for a time.
After a while, he looked up at the sky, and then down at her, and smiled. “I love flying on nights like this. I think you'd like it too. It's like being close to God for a little while, it's so peaceful.
” He was sharing with her what mattered most to him. He had thought of her once or twice when he flew night flights, and couldn't help musing how nice it would have been to have her with him. And then he told himself he was crazy. She was just a kid, and if he ever saw her again, she probably wouldn't even remember him. But she had, and they felt like old friends. It seemed like a gift of destiny that they had met again. And in spite of what he'd told her, he hadn't been at all sure that he'd have the courage to call her father, and had been leaning against it.
Meeting her at the barbecue had solved the problem for him.
“What made you fall in love with flying?” she asked him as they began to walk more slowly. It was a beautiful warm night, and the sand felt like satin under their feet.
“I don't know… I always loved airplanes, even when I was a little kid. Maybe I wanted to run away… or get so high above the world no one could touch me.
”
“What were you running away from?” she asked softly."
"“People. Bad things that had happened, and feeling bad about them.” He had never known his parents, and the cousins who had taken him in when they died had been hard on him. There was no love lost between them. They had always made him feel like an interloper. And by the time he was sixteen, he had left them. He would have left sooner if he could. “I've always liked being alone. And I like machines. All the little bits and pieces that make them work, and the details of engineering.
Flying is like magic, it puts all those things together, and the next thing you know, you're in Heaven, way up in the sky.”
“You make it sound wonderful,” she said, as they stopped and sat down on the sand. They had gone a considerable distance, and they were tired.
“It is wonderful, Kate. It's everything I ever wanted to be and do when I grew up. I can't believe they pay me to do it now.
