She didn’t know how long she’d been there crying when she heard footsteps coming down the row.
Quickly, she wiped her eyes and sat up.
The person she locked eyes with was the last one she’d expected to see: Maggie.
Lottie hadn’t crossed paths with her once since they’d arrived in San Diego. And yet here Maggie was, at the moment Lottie least wanted to see her.
Predictably, Maggie didn’t even ask her what was wrong. Instead, she just said gruffly, “Stop that, princess.”
Then she looked down the aisle, toward the door that led out to the base. “You didn’t let those men see you cry, did you?” she asked.
Wiping her tears away, Lottie shook her head.
“Good,” Maggie said. “Don’t you let them. They’ll think you’re weak.”
What if I am? Lottie thought. But as she listened to herself, she realized how much that sounded like Pearl. She shook her head, to shake that thought out of it, and lifted her chin.
“That’s right,” Maggie said, and started off down the aisle again.
But after a few steps, she looked back. “You know,” she said, “some princesses grow up to rule.”
Eleven
IT WAS STILL DARK when Lottie opened her eyes the next morning: true dark, without a hint of dawn.
But she didn’t close her eyes again. Instead, she groped blindly for her work uniform, put it on, tied her hair back under a bandana, and slipped out of her room while all the other women in the barracks still breathed deeply, in the grasp of sleep.
Outside, there was the dim light from the fading stars but no electric path lights to guide the way. The base was on a perpetual blackout by night, so as not to attract enemy attention.
It was unlikely the enemy would ever get close enough to stage an attack on California like the one that had devastated Pearl Harbor. But the United States Navy didn’t plan to be surprised again, by anything.
And neither did Lottie.
The guard at the gate to the repair hangars wasn’t quite asleep at his station, but he wasn’t exactly on full alert. When Lottie walked through the gate, he scrambled upright on the chair he’d been slumped on, then did a double take when he realized she was a woman.
From the expression on his face, Lottie could see that he was wondering whether she was just another part of some dream. She also wondered with amusement, as she walked by, whether he thought it was a good one or a bad one.
She just pointed at the name sewn onto her work uniform and kept walking. In the darkness, the repair and storage hangars rose around her. It was strange, Lottie thought, how much a place could change from day to night. In daylight, she barely noticed the size of the hangars. She was too busy trying to figure out her place among the men and the machines that the hangars sheltered. The hangars hung overhead, easy to forget, just like the sky. But by night, with no one else around, the shapes of the buildings were so big they almost seemed like they were made by God himself—as if they must have been part of the land somehow, like small mountains.
When she got to her assigned hangar, she felt a burst of nerves when she laid her hand on the lever of the entry door. The giant hangar doors were safely closed against the night winds off the bay, and even if they weren’t locked up, she wasn’t sure she knew how to open them herself.
But mercifully, the lever turned easily under her hand. She opened the door and stepped into the shadows of the hangar.
Enough moonlight poured through the hangar’s big windows for her to make her way over to the engine that had defeated her the day before. When she got there, she didn’t hesitate. She simply found a nearby lantern, flicked it on, and found a tool kit in the harsh light from the naked bulb.
Then she went to work. By the time sun was streaming brightly through the windows of the hangar, it looked like she had dismantled about half the engine block, part by part. She had thoroughly checked both rotors, worked her way through every connection in the fuel system, and was in the process of trying to look deeper into the recesses of the engine when she heard a footstep behind her.
She glanced up at the clock on the wall beside her makeshift workstation. It was still over an hour before any of the other men were expected to report for duty. She laid down her wrench and turned around.
As she did, Captain Woodward, who had just walked in the nearby door, leapt back, startled. He stood frozen in the square of light from the door for a moment, then recognized her.
“Palmer,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
Lottie started to give him a friendly smile by way of greeting, but as he stalked over, scowling at her, she scrambled to her feet, wondering if she should come to attention or not. She wound up doing some approximation of it, while trying not to trip over the engine parts she still had scattered all over the floor.
“Just working on this engine, sir,” she said. “I didn’t get it finished yesterday, so I thought I’d come in this morning.”
“Did I order you to keep working on this engine?” Captain Woodward asked, still stone-faced.
“You ordered me to fix it yesterday,” Lottie said. “And I haven’t fixed it yet.”
She braced herself for some kind of blast from Captain Woodward, but to her surprise, it didn’t come.
Instead, he just looked down at the parts, now with some curiosity.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, surprise in his voice.
“I already tested both rotors,” Lottie said. “They’re moving freely. All the connections in the fuel lines that I can see are tight. Everything I can get at right now performs as expected. So I’m trying to get a look at what I can’t see from here. The problem has to be deeper in the engine.”
Captain Woodward raised his eyebrows.
“I’m a good teacher,” he said. “But even I know I didn’t teach you all that yesterday. You’ve had some training.”
He stated this flatly, as a fact. But in his eyes she also saw the question carried with it: Where did a little lady like you learn your way around an engine like that?
Lottie’s mind flashed back to all the afternoons she’d whiled away with Gus in the family garage, or crouching on the roadside with her head in an engine. “I’ve had some training,” she agreed. “Back in Detroit.”
Captain Woodward nodded appreciatively, gazing down at the pieces she’d removed from the engine, apparently calculating what she must have been working on and giving a slight nod as he took each piece in.
But then his expression changed. His eyes went wide. Wide enough that his stony expression betrayed a hint of vulnerability.
“Detroit…” he said. “The Detroit Palmers?”
People had been asking Lottie this all her life, and she had a whole series of deft or coy ways to answer, depending on how she was feeling. Sometimes she said, “Not many people have heard of us,” as a joke, because it was so obvious that almost everyone had heard of the Detroit Palmers. Sometimes she simply said yes and hurried the conversation past the moment as quickly as possible. Sometimes she shook her head no, just to see what they did then.
But this time, she felt a sinking feeling. She didn’t want to be a Detroit Palmer to Captain Woodward. This time, for a change, she wanted to stand on her own two feet. And she still couldn’t seem to escape the extremely long shadow cast by her family name.
Then her debutante training kicked in. If you didn’t like where a conversation was going, her mother had always told her, just change the subject. “Where did you get your mechanical training?” she asked.
Surprised, Captain Woodward met her eyes. Even in the early light, they were just as blue as the sky that was starting to peek through the high windows of the hangar.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I was too young to remember most of it. Out on my dad’s farm in Nebraska, we had to know how to do everything, because everything else was miles away. One of my first memories is climbing around in the engine of my dad’s tractor. I think they might
have handed me a wrench when I was born.”
“Nebraska?” Lottie said with a wry smile. “Hmm.”
Suddenly, for the first time she’d ever seen, Captain Woodward cracked a smile. She was surprised by how handsome he suddenly seemed. And how her heart flipped in response.
“Now, don’t you go getting any ideas,” he said.
What did he mean by that? Lottie wondered, panicked that she had somehow given her sudden attraction to him away.
But as he went on, she realized he had no idea. “You might be from the jet set in Detroit,” Captain Woodward said, “but we farm boys are a lot more sophisticated than you might think. You know the difference between a Guernsey and a Hereford cow?”
Amused, Lottie shook her head.
“I didn’t think so,” Captain Woodward said.
Then he knelt beside the half-dismantled engine. “And more to the point, I can pull a Merlin like this apart and put it back together in just under an hour,” he said.
Lottie lifted her chin. “I might not be able to do that yet,” she said. “But I’m going to learn. The Navy won’t be sorry they took me.”
Something flickered in Captain Woodward’s eyes at this. He glanced away from her.
“You think they will?” Lottie said, then bit back her next words. She was already out of line, she knew, talking to an officer in that kind of tone.
But Captain Woodward seemed to have forgotten the fact that he was an officer, at least for the moment. His eyes had gone distant, and almost sad.
He shook his head. “They won’t be sorry they took you,” he said. “But you might.”
Lottie’s brows drew together. “I’m not giving up, if that’s what you think,” she said. “No matter how hard it gets.”
“There’s a kind of hardness in war,” Captain Woodward said, still not meeting her eyes, “that no one can know until they see it.”
Suddenly, Lottie realized that they weren’t talking about her and her capabilities, but about something much more.
“It might be hard,” she said. “But it’s an honor to be part of it. And we can’t give up. We have to fight.”
Captain Woodward gave his head a quick shake. She had the sense that he wasn’t even responding to her, but to something in his own mind.
Then, finally, he met her eyes. “I appreciate the spirit, Palmer,” he said. “But I wasn’t looking for you to get this old thing up and running. I saw the work you did. Your instincts are good, and your troubleshooting was smart. That’s what I was looking for: the courage to try and not give up. And you already passed that test.”
This was the first praise Lottie had heard from anyone since she joined up. But something about it rankled her. She knew she’d passed the test already. She wasn’t trying to impress him. She was working something out on her own. And she knew she could do it. She didn’t need him to tell her that. And something about the way his handsome features had thrown her off balance a moment before made her even more irritated.
“Well,” she said, an edge of sarcasm in her voice. “I’m glad to hear I passed the test.”
Instantly, all the friendliness vanished from Captain Woodward’s face. He took a smart step back, and for an instant, Lottie was afraid that he was going to snap to attention himself, or even worse, bark an order to her.
“That was yesterday,” he said. “This is today.”
He looked down at the parts spread over the ground again.
“You’ve made a real mess here,” he said. “I want it all cleaned up before any of the other men get here.”
Lottie bristled a bit at the phrase “other men.” Did he mean other men besides him? Or besides her? And if he was thinking of her as one of the men, should she take it as an insult—or a compliment?
When she didn’t start moving instantly, Captain Woodward barked, “Now!”
Lottie actually jumped. Then she crouched over the thick chunks of metal and tiny screws that she’d scattered over the floor. She picked one up blindly and began to fiddle with it, her face so hot with irritation she knew it must have turned a deep shade of crimson.
As she did, she could hear Captain Woodward’s boots slap the concrete as he stalked away.
When he was finally gone, safely doing something else at the opposite side of the hangar, Lottie finally figured out what was in her hand: a valve for reducing fuel pressure that she’d removed in hopes of getting a better look at the engine workings.
As quickly as she could, she began to fasten it in place, trying to beat back her frustration, which mingled with her determination to do even better today than she had the day before. She would prove that she deserved her place here. She would do it whether he wanted her to or not.
So he might try to make her life miserable from now on, she realized with a sinking feeling. He clearly thought she was an incapable girl. He might have liked to pretend to be the fair one in front of the other men. But when it came right down to it, it was clear he had the same opinions about women as the rest of them—and he wasn’t thrilled to have her in his shop.
But no matter what happened, she told herself, her training here in California couldn’t last forever. When it was done, she’d never have to see Captain Woodward, or remember this day, ever again.
And that couldn’t come soon enough for her.
Twelve
WHEN LOTTIE WALKED INTO the women’s barracks, she thought at first that she’d accidentally stumbled into one of the large, lavish dressing rooms outside the ladies’ restroom of a tony hotel or private club.
The beds were normally neatly made, in reverent fear of the patrolling officers, who were always on the lookout for a messy blanket, a disreputable-looking kit, or a wayward towel. But now they were piled high with stockings, brushes, lipstick, and even high heels.
And the women themselves, usually neatly arrayed in the sober blue or white of their dress blues, had suddenly blossomed into all kinds of glorious colors: a red pencil skirt, a green silk blouse, a boatneck dress in a beautiful deep shade of turquoise.
As she slipped through the chattering, laughing crowd, heading for her own bunk, Lottie realized she was one of the only women still in uniform. The women on the base who were working desk jobs, which was almost all of them, had been let off at a normal hour. But Captain Woodward had kept his class late that day, insisting that nobody could go home until they’d finished work on an old bomber that nobody in the class had successfully managed to get running. By the time they finally did, the California night had already set in around them.
Apparently, that was why all the women were dressing up. Not only was it night. It was Friday night.
When Lottie finally made it to her bunk, Frances, a friendly brunette who bunked nearby, grinned at her while unpinning her own locks to reveal freshly minted pin curls.
“Where’s your uniform, recruit?” she asked.
“I didn’t realize we had to muster this evening,” Lottie shot back.
“Muster,” Frances said with a laugh. “I guess that’s one word for it.”
“What’s going on?”
“Evening pass!” Frances said. “We’re all going out to some clubs on the bay. You better get changed if you don’t want to miss it!”
Lottie looked around at the whirlwind of activity. “They should hire us on as smugglers,” she said. “I can’t believe what these girls have been hiding in their kits.”
A woman with short blond curls walked by, with a huge rhinestone clip in the shape of a swallow holding back one wing of her hair.
“Is that military issue?” Lottie asked Frances jokingly.
“If it is, we need to join that branch,” Frances said with a wink. She pulled the last plain bobby pin out of her own hair, gave it a shake, and then patted it into place. “You better hurry up!” she said, taking a bright red alligator clutch from her bunk. “If you don’t want to miss all the fun.”
Lottie stepped back as Frances brushed past, not wanting to spoil Frances’s
pretty gold blouse with the grease on her hands and overalls.
Frances wasn’t the only one on her way out the door. All over the barracks, women were putting the final touches on their evening’s attire and streaming out the doors into the night.
Quickly, Lottie grabbed her towel and soap, heading for the showers.
By the time she returned, pulling her hair down from the scarf she’d tied it up in to keep it dry, the place was almost deserted. A few stragglers were laughing as they headed out the door together.
Other than that, it looked like she had the place to herself, the whole giant barracks as her own very large but very unglamorous dressing room.
With a sigh, she dropped her overalls onto her bunk and knelt to pull out her kit. But as she was foraging through her clean clothes, looking for one of the few dresses she had brought with her to training, she saw something out of the corner of her eye.
A figure was coming out of the women’s bathroom, which was odd, because Lottie hadn’t noticed anyone in there when she left herself.
Even odder, the woman hadn’t been there to check her hair or outfit one more time, or put on a last smear of lipstick. Instead, she seemed to be the only woman in the place still in uniform.
As Lottie looked at her, puzzled, she realized with a shock that, even at a distance, she recognized the woman’s red hair and freckled face.
It was Maggie.
“Hey!” Lottie said, waving, as Maggie came down the wide aisle between the stands of beds on either side. She pulled an evergreen dress with short sleeves and pretty magenta piping on the collar and cuffs on over her head.
When her head popped out again from the fabric and she settled the knit fabric over her hips and let it drop to her knees, Maggie had frozen where she was standing, several rows away.
“I never thought I’d be ahead of you at anything,” Lottie called, full of excitement at the chance to go out and just a little pleased to be in a position to tease Maggie about something for a change. Part of her, though, felt uneasy as soon as she said it. Maybe it would have been better to just let Maggie walk on by. They’d both made it clear enough that they weren’t thrilled to be stuck in the same place together again.
For Love and Country Page 9