"Tail number," Naomi said.
Jasmine wrote it down.
They did the walkaround together, slowly, the way Naomi had done her first one at sixteen with a crusty old instructor who had made her touch every rivet. She showed Jasmine how to check the oil and drain a sample of fuel into a clear tube and hold it up to the light to look for water. She showed her the ailerons and the elevator and the pitot tube, and she let her put her hand flat on the propeller, cool and smooth and faintly oily, and explain back to her, in her own words, how a wing made lift. Then they climbed in, Jasmine in the left seat, Naomi in the right, Odette in the back clutching the headset to her ears with both hands and laughing at herself.
"You're the captain today," Naomi said. "I'm the one in charge of the radio."
She talked Jasmine through the takeoff with her own hands resting lightly on the yoke, and at a thousand feet she took them away and said, "Your airplane," and the girl said, "My airplane," in a voice that cracked on the second word. For forty minutes they flew over the green-and-brown quilt of the county, over the river and a water tower and a Little League game in progress, and Jasmine made two gentle turns and one not-so-gentle one and climbed and descended and leveled off, her lip caught between her teeth, her eyes going back and forth between the instruments and the horizon exactly the way Naomi had shown her. On the way back there was a light crosswind from the left. Naomi flew the landing herself, but she talked through every second of it out loud, crab and de-crab, and when the wheels touched with a small, soft chirp, Jasmine shrieked.
"That was the runway," Naomi said. "It's a very forgiving runway."
* * *
Afterward they sat on the hood of the Skylark at the edge of the ramp, eating gas-station sandwiches, and watched a Piper Cub do touch-and-goes in the morning light. Odette had gone into the farmhouse to talk to the flight school owner about what lessons cost and how a scholarship application worked, which she had been pretending all morning she was not going to do.
"Can I see the envelope?" Jasmine asked. "The one in the glove box. Mama told me about it."
Naomi slid off the hood, opened the passenger door, and brought it out. It was a new envelope; the old one had finally split along its spine in the spring, and she had moved everything into a clean manila one. She had kept her father's label, though. She had cut the square of brown paper with his capitals on it out of the old envelope and glued it onto the new one. IF THEY ASK.
Jasmine went through it slowly and carefully, the way she had been shown to go through a checklist. The registration and insurance, current. The yellow carbon of the bill of sale, PAID IN FULL — CASH. The cash receipt with Mr. Tolliver's name in the corner. The court dismissal. The index card. And two new things: a letter on Calder Police Department letterhead, dated May, informing Naomi Whitfield that all records associated with the listed VIN had been reviewed and permanently cleared, signed by the deputy chief and, beneath that, in a smaller, careful hand, Kyle Brandt, Records Audit Team. And a long brass key on a loop of old string, with a yellowed tag that said HOLD.
"Why do you keep this?" Jasmine held up the key. "Isn't it, like, the bad key?"