5. Go Your Own Way
FIVE
GO YOUR OWN WAY
? SHELBYVILLE, INDIANA, UNITED STATES?
In the years that followed, the Beckmans' house became the place where Charlie and Katie were found almost every day.
They didn’t officially live there. Their beds were still four houses down, and their names were still registered at the address of the Wickett house.
But Helen's kitchen table had four place settings at every meal, and Frank's garage had a second lawn chair that he never bothered putting away because Charlie was always in it.
Helen learned early that Katie would eat mac and cheese until she had way too much that she'd get sick if nobody stopped her, and that Charlie's eyes lit up at chicken piccata the way most children's eyes lit up at birthday cake.
So Helen made mac and cheese on Tuesdays and chicken piccata on Fridays, and the girls showed up like clockwork, and nobody on the street thought anything of it.
They went to the hangar with Frank at least once a week.
Sometimes to work on the Cub, Charlie with her hands in the Continental while Frank talked her through the finer points of fuel mixture, all while Katie sat on an overturned crate eating an apple or banana, or during the summer days, an ice cream cone from the Pilot's Lounge.
Sometimes, they'd just go to the hangar to be near the plane.
Frank did take them up in the Cub, eventually. One at a time.
Katie went first because she'd been begging for months. She came back down with her hair wild and eyes the size of dinner plates, with the oh so eloquent line of "it was pretty good, I guess." But she ended up talking about absolutely nothing else for the rest of the week.
Charlie's turn was quieter. She sat in the front seat and looked out through the greenhouse windshield, watching the farmland flatten into geometry below her.
When they landed, she didn't say anything for a long time.
But Frank didn't ask her to, either. He knew what the sky did to a person the first time they saw it from the right side.
A few months after their first flights in the Cub, Charlie decided one Saturday morning that she wanted to try her first cup of black coffee at the Beckman table.
"Why on Earth would you want to drink that awful stuff?" Helen had asked.
"What do you mean?" Frank exclaimed on the other side of the table. "It's the stuff made from the Gods!" He poked his elbow into Charlie's ribs. "Of course she wants a taste of the good juice." Frank winked at Charlie, then raised his own cup of black coffee to her in salute. Charlie smiled.
"Please, Mrs. Beckman? Just one cup?" Charlie said, putting on her most charming face. Helen looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
"Oh all right," she relented, standing up from the table, grabbing a mug from the cabinet, and pouring a cup of steaming black coffee for Charlie. "But don't say I didn't warn you."
"You did, we all heard it," Frank teased. She swatted his arm as she sidled up beside him. Charlie watched them, wondering how they made sharp words sound that warm.
She took the mug from Helen, sniffed the aroma steaming up from the liquid, and took one sip.
She made a face that Helen would describe for years afterward, and pushed the mug away.
"How in the heck do you drink that stuff, Mr. Beckman?"
Frank looked offended. "Are you kidding? This stuff is primo luxury quality compared to what we had on 'the Big E!'"
"Then I feel very bad for 'the Big E,'" Charlie said, and Helen laughed so hard she had to set down the orange juice pitcher. Charlie swore off coffee for life. She would break that promise spectacularly in college, but that was a problem for future Charlie.
Katie went through a friendship bracelet phase through that summer, right alongside all the girls her age at school.
She brought her threads with her in her backpack wherever she went.
She made them at Helen's kitchen table, her small fingers working the knots with serious intent and concentration.
She made one for Helen, who wore it on her left wrist and called it her "finest piece of jewelry.
" She made one for Frank, who wore it just to the side of his watch without hesitation.
And she made one for Charlie, and Charlie never, ever took it off.
Ed and Diane didn't seem to mind that their daughters spent most of their waking hours at a neighbor's home instead of their own.
In fact, it had helped immensely with their budget by not having to pay Mrs. Linden's babysitting fees any longer.
They never asked where the girls were going or when they'd be back and they never came to the Beckman house for dinner, despite Helen's standing invitation.
This should have said something, and it did, but nobody in the Wickett house mentioned things, and the Beckmans were too kind to say it out loud.
Frank and Helen just kept the door open and the table set.
They hoped, quietly, that their home would come to feel like the girls' home too, even if it wasn't where they laid their heads to sleep every night.
But it was exactly what it became. Both girls were more at home with the Beckmans, at their yellow breakfast table, with the cookies and lemonade and lawn chairs and stories, than they ever did anywhere else.
It started with an errand. Helen needed buttermilk for a recipe, but Frank was in the garage working on a broken sprinkler from the back lawn, replacing one of the plastic gears with one made of more substance.
When Katie and Charlie walked in and Charlie showed the two of them her freshly-minted, brand-new driver's license, Frank and Helen exchanged a look, that look of two people who have been married for an uncanny number of years and can hold an entire conversation with only their eyes.
"Hey, kiddo," Frank said, wiping his hands on a rag. "You want to run to Kroger for Helen? She needs buttermilk."
"Really?" Charlie asked, her pulse jumping at what might be coming if she asked the right question. "Should I go get my bike out of the garage?"
That was the right question.
"How about you take the Cutlass, instead?" Frank answered with a smirk, tossing her the keys. "Put that new piece of identification to good use."
Charlie caught the keys in her hand and beamed. "Sure thing, Mr. Beckman!" And Charlie spun on her heel, running back to the car at the end of the driveway.
Back in the garage, Frank looked at Katie, who was sitting on the step eating a cookie. "Why don't you go with her, boss? Give your sister a little company for her maiden voyage."
Katie was running for the passenger side of the Cutlass before Frank finished the sentence. She arrived next to the door, arms folded across her chest, chin lifted, planted. Immovable.
"What are you doing?" Charlie asked.
"Going with you," Katie replied, as if this were obvious.
"It's only three blocks, Kit-Kat."
Katie looked at her like she had three heads. "So? Just how much trouble do you think we can get into in three blocks?"
Charlie snorted, got in the car, unlocked the passenger door, and once confirming Katie was safely buckled in, turned the key in the ignition.
The Cutlass roared to life, and Charlie felt the vibration of the running engine beneath her.
Katie reached across and cranked the radio up so loud the rearview mirror shook.
Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way" came thumping out of the speakers like a declaration of independence.
Charlie drove those three blocks to Kroger at twenty-five miles an hour with the windows down and the spring air blowing their hair sideways while Katie sang along at the top of her lungs, getting every other word wrong.
Charlie never corrected her once.
She would remember that drive for the rest of her life.
The steering wheel under her hands, the air through the window, her sister's voice murdering a Fleetwood Mac song beside her.
And the first real taste of a freedom she hadn't known she needed, shared with the only person she would have wanted to share it with.
On the way back, they passed the Wickett house. Ed's car wasn’t in the driveway. It hadn't been in the driveway when they'd left, either. Katie's eyes went to the empty spot and then to Charlie, and neither of them said a word.
That became their summer. Open windows, borrowed keys, Katie always in the passenger seat, and the Cutlass carrying them wherever they needed to go around town. Frank never said no. Helen just asked them to be home by dinner.
They went to the Shelbyville Grand Cinema most Saturdays, the two of them buying tickets for whatever was playing because the ritual they wanted to create of going mattered more than the movie.
They'd always made sure to sit in Row E, seats 5 and 6.
In the beginning, they'd chosen Row E as a small nod to Frank and his time on the Enterprise.
Charlie remembered it clearly when Katie had told Frank about it earlier that summer.
Katie wanted to be the one to tell him, and Charlie saw no reason why not.
What she did see was the mist in Frank's eyes when Katie explained why they'd chosen Row E.
"That's great, boss," he'd told Katie, holding her hand. "That means a hell of a lot to me."
It was always the same: two tickets, one large bucket of popcorn, and Katie getting butter on Charlie's sleeve every single time. Charlie had long ago accepted this as simply another law of physics, and who was she to argue with Newton?
It was during one of those forgettable matinees, midway through a trailer reel that neither of them was paying attention to, that thirty seconds of footage stopped Charlie's heart.
Spaceships. A war in the stars. A ship that looked like it had been welded together from six different machines by someone who didn't care about elegance and cared enormously about function.