Sentimental Journey by Jill Barnett Page A

have to be blind to miss.
    From this angle he could tell she was lush and curvy and all woman even in the zippered jumpsuit and clunky boots she wore. Too bad she hadn’t bent over the plane that way. He’d never have thought she was a man.
    He tossed the towel aside, then cast a quick glance over his shoulder and out the back window. The storm clouds were getting so black that it grew darker inside and made the place look even more dreary than it was.
    Red flipped on the black wall switch for the overhead light, hoping it might brighten the place up a bit. It was like hoping for the sun to rise in the kitchen sink. The single fixture hung off-center from the middle of the ceiling and the light from its cracked and dusty bowl of frosted glass dimmed and flickered when the power generator surged.
    He stared up at it, hope gone.
    There were black specks in the basin, dead bugs and flies he hadn’t noticed before. It spread bright light down on the kitchen table, where a dismantled carburetor, a set of pistons and barrels, a manifold, and a distributor were spread out like Sunday chicken dinner.
    His pride made him suddenly want to make the whole place just disappear.
    “No one could possibly fly in that mess of weather out there.” She still didn’t look at him, so he didn’t know if she was talking to him or to herself.
    Most people hereabouts believed that only the very old or the very crazy talked to themselves. He was nineteen, yet he’d been talking to himself for years.
    The wind whistled down the walls, through the old window frames, and rattled the glass, then over the roof and through the eaves, making them shudder slightly. It was a loud, howling wind.
    She straightened suddenly and turned around, leaned back against the windowsill and stared up at the ceiling as if she expected it to fall in.
    “Your plane should be safe enough inside the garage. It might look like the roof could cave in, but it won’t.”
    “I’ve never seen hail like this. It’s huge.”
    “Then you haven’t been in Texas long.”
    She pushed away from the window looking as out of place in the shabby, small room as a silver dollar in a handful of plug nickels. She was so tall she could look him in the eye. He’d never seen a woman that tall before . . . well, at least not a pretty woman.
    “I was in Lubbock last night and had planned to be in Wichita Falls by this afternoon. Instead I’m in . . . ” She paused, then looked at him, frowning. “Just where am I?”
    “Acme, Texas .”
    “Oh.”
    “A hundred miles west of Wichita Falls .”
    For a second the only sound in the place was the hammering of the hailstones from outside. He went to hitch his hip on the corner of the kitchen table and sat down instead on the distributor. He felt his face flush hot and red, so he turned and tried to push the parts aside.
    He sort of wished she would keep talking. The silence made him feel naked. He said all the wrong things to this fly-gal. He’d just never expected a female pilot to land in his gas station. Who would? But she made him feel like he was dumber than toast.
    It was strange, the way she jumped to the conclusion that he thought she couldn’t make a living at being a pilot because she was a woman. All he’d been surprised at was that anyone could be paid for something as fantastic as flying an airplane.
    He might have set her straight, but somehow he figured there was a big argument in that, at least when she was still mad as hens at him for something he didn’t really say.
    He was a little rusty at talking to women, except for Nettie, his sister, and Ruth Wendell, Pastor Wendell’s wife, who invited him for beef dinner the first Sunday of every month. He talked to female customers once in a while, but most of them were older than Eve. They had known his granddaddy as well as his daddy, had white hair, and remembered the day Red got his first tooth and his first haircut.
    She wasn’t looking at him, but around the