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on aviation; she talked endlessly with D. K. about the triumphs of women pilots, how Katharine Wright had worked right beside her brothers Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk; how Amelia Earhart had flown solo across the Atlantic in 1932; how Jacqueline Cochran, who had broken the sound barrier as early as 1953, held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any other pilot, male or female, in aviation history, more than 200 of them, including in 1964 a speed record of 1,429 miles per hour in the F-104 Starfighter; how the astronaut Sally Ride had rocketed into space from a launch pad in Florida and the whole country had sung to her, “Ride, Sally, Ride!” How Amy Johnson (Annie’s idol because the beautiful British pilot had looked so glamorous and been so daring) had taken the record for flying solo from England to Australia in a secondhand De Havilland Gipsy Moth that her father had helped her to purchase, even though back then girls were not supposed to fly planes.

Annie used her earnings from her weekend job at Now Voyager to pay for subscriptions to aviation magazines, which she scanned each month for stories about women pilots. Sometimes she wrote to these women, asking for their autographs. A retired female air-circus flyer, who’d done nine 360-degree loops in an old Cessna 150 to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, wrote her back, enclosing a poster from her flying circus days. The poster was still on the bedroom wall beside Annie’s treasured black and white signed photograph of Amy Johnson. Near them was a framed commemorative U.S. Post Office sheet that D. K. Destin had given her of the stamp for Bessie Coleman, the African American pilot who’d had to make her way from Texas to Paris in 1921 to get a license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale because they wouldn’t give her one in America.

“That’s right. Her own country treated Bessie like dog-doo on its shoe,” groused D. K., when handing Annie the framed stamps. “So Bessie got herself to France! The Froggies let that girl fly. ‘Ma chérie, over here you can fly your derrière off if you want to!’ That’s a French word, ‘civilization,’ don’t you forget it. You don’t gotta be a white boy to fly; hell, you don’t gotta be able to walk to be able to fly.”

Annie said, “I want to fly to France.”

“I bet you will one of these days. But you gotta get from one end of Emerald County to the other first. Finish that checkpoint list. Master, on. Radios, on. Mixture, rich.”

One gray morning on her sixteenth birthday, Annie piloted the Piper Warrior solo for the first time. It was scary without D. K. in the plane next to her, correcting, adjusting, without his tapered big fingers signaling her as if in an urgent language for the deaf. She’d felt shaky, first climbing into the plane alone, and she’d stepped back down onto the wing.

He hurried toward her in his wheelchair. “Get back in there! Don’t you prove me right! I’m a sexist child of my times, girl. So you show me a girl can do solo. Show me you can do it, Sugar Pie, because you can; you’re the best in the west, east, south, and you know it.”

Annie believed him because, scared as she was, she knew he was right. She climbed back into the plane and he waved her off.

It was D. K. who had replaced the engine in Jack Peregrine’s Piper Warrior and had driven it out of the Pilgrim’s Rest barn and flown it right up off the unmown field into the air with the girl, thrilled, beside him. Day after month after year, with the songs of R&B girl groups like the Shirelles and the Supremes blasting from a boom box beside them—“Baby, It’s You” and “Come See About Me” and his favorite, Betty Everett’s “It’s in His Kiss”—D. K. made her a flyer. He told her that in the cockpit of a plane, nothing mattered but how good you were.

When Annie’s pilot license arrived in the mail, she announced to Clark and Sam that they better sit down to hear her news. She planned to go to Annapolis and wanted their help to get there. She wanted a career in the Navy.

Clark not only sat down, he looked as if it might be hard for him to get back up.