On a rainy Saturday, Sam climbed the narrow stairs to his grandmother's attic, because she wanted to sell the old house and someone had to sort through fifty years of boxes. Dust floated in the gray light above a museum of forgotten things: lamps, letters, a broken radio, and a bicycle with one wheel.
Inside a shoebox, under some old maps, Sam discovered a black-and-white photo. It showed a young woman standing beside a small airplane, wearing a leather jacket and an enormous smile, with one hand resting on the propeller as if the machine belonged to her.
Sam carried the photo downstairs and held it out. 'Grandma, who is this?'
His grandmother put on her glasses, and for a long moment she said nothing at all. Then she laughed — a young, surprising laugh that Sam had never heard before. 'That,' she said, 'is me, at nineteen.'
'You flew planes?'
'For three wonderful summers,' she said, touching the photo softly. 'I delivered mail and medicine to the islands up north, and in bad weather I was sometimes the only pilot who agreed to fly. My father hated it. He said it was no job for a young lady.'
'Why did you stop?'
She shrugged slowly. 'Life happened. I got married, your mother was born, and the little airfield closed. I always planned to return someday, and then someday never came.' She looked out the window at the rain. 'Sixty years later, I still dream about it — the sky over the water, early in the morning. There is no place like it.'
Sam was quiet, because he had known this woman his entire life — her soup, her garden, her Sunday sweaters — and he had never once asked what she dreamed about.
'Why did you never tell me?' he asked finally.
She smiled. 'Nobody ever asked.'
Two months later, on her birthday, Sam handed her a small envelope with a flying lesson inside. At a small airfield outside town, the young instructor asked kindly, 'First time in a small plane, ma'am?'
His grandmother zipped up her jacket like a nineteen-year-old. 'Not exactly,' she said.