3. Four Houses Down #3
After one of those Sundays, Charlie spent the next few days building a communicator out of a transistor radio and a flip-top cigarette case she'd found at a yard sale.
It didn't communicate with anything, but it looked just like the ones the crew of the Starship Enterprise had, and that was close enough.
She presented it to Katie with great ceremony, and Katie carried it around for a week, flipping it open in the grocery store and the backyard and once, disastrously, in church, making phaser sounds that echoed off the vaulted ceiling while Diane went a shade of red that Charlie didn't know human skin could produce.
But boy did it make for a good story to tell Frank and Helen a few days later.
When Frank decided it was time to show Charlie the plane, he went to talk to Ed and Diane first. Charlie walked with him to speak with her parents, nervous, rubbing her fingers inside her jeans pocket to try to channel her anxiety.
Frank's voice, measured and polite, explained that he'd like to take the girls out to the municipal airport to see the plane he'd had for almost twenty years, the one he'd been working on for the same amount of time.
He explained that it would be a nice afternoon trip, educational, and that he'd have both girls back before dinner.
There was a pause. Then Ed's voice, flat and already moving on, "Sure, fine."
And Diane's, in the particular pitch she reserved for neighbors, "That's so nice of you, Frank. The girls will love that."
Charlie waited for the follow-up. What kind of plane?
How far is the airport? Will you be flying it?
Will my daughters be flying 10,000 feet in the air with a neighbor?
! Any of them. Literally any of them. A twelve-year-old could come up with one question.
But the follow-ups never came, because in this house, inquiry was treated like a luxury item, only used on special occasions and never on the daughters.
Charlie noticed it. And she wondered if Frank did, too.
Frank said thank you, and walked back across the driveways, Charlie right beside him as she heard her front door close.
When they got back to the garage, she stared at the Cutlass's engine block for a long time after that.
Frank looked at Charlie as she stared at the engine.
He could see it on her face that she noticed the lack of conversation that had occurred between him and her parents.
He didn't comment on it, not then. He just said, "We're going Saturday.
I'll make sure Helen tells your sister."
Charlie and Katie couldn't wait for Saturday to arrive.
The girls had decided to take Charlie's bike to the airstrip since it was only a short ride, exactly a mile and a half up the road, past where the houses thinned out and the farmland took over.
Charlie pedaled and Katie rode the handlebars, her legs swinging with every bump while happy, giggling shrieks escaped on the turns.
Frank had driven ahead an hour earlier in his truck to get the plane ready, and told them he'd meet them at the field.
Shelbyville Municipal Airport was a flat stretch of pavement and grass with a wind sock and a few corrugated hangars lined up along the tree line.
When Charlie and Katie arrived, Katie jumped off the handlebars and ran over to Frank, wrapping her arms around his legs.
Frank lifted her up under her arms and twirled her around in the wind as Charlie dropped her bike dead in the grass and ran over to join them.
Frank put his arm around Charlie in a side hug and placed Katie down next to her.
"You ready to see a damn fine piece of machinery, girls?" Frank asked with a sparkle in his eye. Katie giggled, since Helen wasn't here to say "language," and nodded vigorously.
"Hell yeah!" Charlie exclaimed, causing them all to laugh. Frank knew he'd have been in trouble for that one, especially.
Frank led the girls to the last hangar on the row.
"Can I get a drumroll, please?"
Both girls started smacking their legs, arms, even the tops of their heads, creating a drumroll fit for the grand reveal Frank planned before them.
He made a great show of it, gripping the handle on the hangar door, holding it tight, and, finally, sliding the door sideways on its track.
The hangar door rolled wide open, and the Indiana sunlight slid across the concrete floor and up the shiny metal of the beauty that was waiting inside.
"That there is 'Lock Haven Yellow,' girls.
The original color they were back when they flew in the Pacific.
And that black lightning bolt running the length of the fuselage?
That was standard, too," Frank explained, touching the side of his plane with care as he walked around, showing the girls its merits.
"That's fabric skin pulled tight over a skeleton of welded steel.
You can even see the ribs underneath, like the bones of something alive.
" Frank emphasized the word and raised his arms like one of the monsters from the old black-and-white movies.
Katie squealed and hid behind Charlie, who laughed, but it wasn't long before her eyes couldn't move fast enough to look over everything there was to see on the elegant machine before them.
"That there's a wooden propeller, too," Frank continued, walking around to the front of the small plane. "High-quality, laminated birch."
"It's incredible," Charlie said, stepping back from the plane. Oh my god. Will he let me see the engine? Will he let me work on the engine?! Oh my god. "What is it called?"
"This here is a Piper J-3 Cub," Frank answered. "The best plane you can have on home turf."
Frank moved over and stood next to the plane. "And, there, under the cowling..." His words trailed off as his gaze looked over at Charlie. "What do you see, kiddo?"
Charlie could smell it before she even saw it.
Aviation gasoline and oil and sun-warmed fabric, a different blend than the garage but from the same family.
Charlie beamed while Frank opened the cowling.
She stepped forward to look inside and Katie moved over as well, having to stand on her tiptoes to see.
"That's called a Continental A-65," Frank said.
"Four cylinders, horizontally opposed, air-cooled.
And it has a whopping sixty-five horsepower built right in there.
" Charlie knew this language. She'd learned it in the garage with the toaster and the drill, but it was Frank's Cutlass that made her fluent.
The same pistons, the same valves, the same spark plugs she'd had her hands on just last week in the Beckman driveway.
Except this engine was lighter. Simpler. And it was built for the sky.
Charlie stood in front of the open cowling with her hands gripping the edge, itching to explore, and her lips slightly parted.
She couldn't speak. Her mind was doing that thing it did when something was too big to process at normal speed.
She went still, taking it apart in her mind, examining every piece, making sure the architecture held the thought and the excitement and the wonder altogether.
It held. It held all the way up.
"It's an engine," she said, almost to herself. "An engine I know." Her smile spread across her face as she turned to look at Frank.
"That's right, kiddo," he confirmed with warmth in his voice. "It's an engine you know, built to explore everywhere from here to the edges of our world." Charlie looked out the hangar door toward the Indiana sky, her face lit by the golds and bronzes of the late afternoon sun.
Frank, standing behind her, said nothing further. He didn't need to. He'd had the same face, the same realization almost forty years ago, standing on the hangar deck of the USS Enterprise with his hands on a Pratt & Whitney radial for the first time. He remembered that feeling.
Katie was watching Charlie look out the hangar door toward the stars.
She'd seen Charlie fall in love with machines in the garage, in the Wickett house, at Mr. and Mrs. Beckman's warm home, and now here, at the edge of an airfield in their hometown.
She'd been there since the first day Charlie picked up a wrench.
And now she was watching it happen again, bigger than before.
She captured it and stored it in the place in her heart where she kept all the things about her sister that Charlie didn't know were extraordinary.
Almost a whole year later, during the summer Charlie was thirteen, she fixed the Hendersons' kitchen faucet, a sewing machine for the woman at the end of the block, and a shortwave radio belonging to a man three streets over whose name she never learned.
(The shortwave radio was a complete mess on the inside, in Charlie's professional opinion, and she made a personal pledge to the little guy that she'd never let anyone treat him like that again.)
Frank had started telling the neighbors about Charlie and her talents. Word moved through the neighborhood the way it moved in small towns, by way of fences and driveways and the hardware store on Saturday mornings. The oldest Wickett girl can fix anything.
By fourteen, people began to leave things on the Wickett porch.
A toaster with a note. A turntable in a paper bag.
A vacuum cleaner with 'Please!' written on masking tape across the handle.
Charlie fixed them all and left them on the porch when she was done.
She never advertised and never asked for business.
The truth was, she didn't need to. All it took was a garage full of projects and a retired Navy man with a big mouth.