Something Ive Been Meaning to Tell You

seemed very public, around the house. The sign was on the fairgrounds gate. People came mostly after supper but a good many in the afternoon, too. The Bird children all came without fifty cents between them and hung on the gate. We got used to the excitement of the plane coming in and taking off, it wasn’t excitement any more. I never went over, after that one time, but would see him when he came to get his water. I would be out on the steps doing sitting-down work, like preparing vegetables, if I could.
    “Why don’t you come over? I’ll take you up in my plane.”
    “I’m saving my money,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.
    “For what? For getting married?”
    I shook my head.
    “I’ll take you up for free if you come sometime when it’s slack. I thought you would come, and have another cigarette.”
    I made a face to hush him, because you never could tell when the children would be sneaking around the porch, or Mrs. Peebles herself listening in the house. Sometimes she came out and had a conversation with him. He told her things he hadn’t bothered to tell me. But then I hadn’t thought to ask. He told her he had been in the War, thatwas where he learned to fly a plane, and now he couldn’t settle down to ordinary life, this was what he liked. She said she couldn’t imagine anybody liking such a thing. Though sometimes, she said, she was almost bored enough to try anything herself, she wasn’t brought up to living in the country. It’s all my husband’s idea, she said. This was news to me.
    “Maybe you ought to give flying lessons,” she said.
    “Would you take them?”
    She just laughed.

    Sunday was a busy flying day in spite of it being preached against from two pulpits. We were all sitting out watching. Joey and Heather were over on the fence with the Bird kids. Their father had said they could go, after their mother saying all week they couldn’t.
    A car came down the road past the parked cars and pulled up right in the drive. It was Loretta Bird who got out, all importance, and on the driver’s side another woman got out, more sedately. She was wearing sunglasses.
    “This is a lady looking for the man that flies the plane,” Loretta Bird said. “I heard her inquire in the hotel coffee shop where I was having a Coke and I brought her out.”
    “I’m sorry to bother you,” the lady said. “I’m Alice Kelling, Mr. Watters’ fiancée.”
    This Alice Kelling had on a pair of brown and white checked slacks and a yellow top. Her bust looked to me rather low and bumpy. She had a worried face. Her hair had had a permanent, but had grown out, and she wore a yellow band to keep it off her face. Nothing in the least pretty or even young-looking about her. But you could tell from how she talked she was from the city, or educated, or both.
    Dr. Peebles stood up and introduced himself and his wife and me and asked her to be seated.
    “He’s up in the air right now, but you’re welcome tosit and wait. He gets his water here and he hasn’t been yet. He’ll probably take his break about five.”
    “That is him, then?” said Alice Kelling, wrinkling and straining at the sky.
    “He’s not in the habit of running out on you, taking a different name?” Dr. Peebles laughed. He was the one, not his wife, to offer iced tea. Then she sent me into the kitchen to fix it. She smiled. She was wearing sunglasses too.
    “He never mentioned his fiancée,” she said.
    I loved fixing iced tea with lots of ice and slices of lemon in tall glasses. I ought to have mentioned before, Dr. Peebles was an abstainer, at least around the house, or I wouldn’t have been allowed to take the place. I had to fix a glass for Loretta Bird too, though it galled me, and when I went out she had settled in my lawn chair, leaving me the steps.
    “I knew you was a nurse when I first heard you in that coffee shop.”
    “How would you know a thing like that?”
    “I get my hunches about people. Was that how you met him, nursing?”
    “Chris? Well yes. Yes, it was.”
    “Oh, were you overseas?” said Mrs. Peebles.
    “No, it was before he went overseas. I nursed him when he was stationed at Centralia and had a ruptured appendix. We got engaged and then he went overseas. My, this is refreshing, after a long drive.”
    “He’ll be glad to see you,” Dr. Peebles said. “It’s a rackety kind of life, isn’t it, not staying one place long enough to really make friends.”
    “Youse’ve had a