Naomi thought about it.
"It's the key they kept in case," she said. "Now I keep it. That's the difference. It's mine now. Nobody's holding anything for anybody."
Jasmine turned the key over in her fingers. Then she looked at the label on the envelope, at Walter Whitfield's square capitals, and frowned. "Do you still need it? The envelope? Now that the record's gone?"
"Probably," Naomi said. "It's a different world than it was in 1979. It isn't as different as it should be. Somebody's still going to ask me someday."
"Whose car is this," Jasmine said, in a gruff voice, mimicking.
"Whose car is this."
The girl thought about it, the way she thought about everything, with her whole face. Then she put the key back in the envelope, and the letter, and the card, and the receipt, and the bill of sale, in the right order, and held it out to Naomi. But before Naomi could take it, she pulled it back, and uncapped her pen, and on the front of the envelope, under the old label, in her own round careful hand, she wrote a second line.
She handed it over. Naomi read it.
IF THEY ASK, it said, in her father's capitals. And underneath, in Jasmine's: TELL THEM.
Naomi sat looking at it for a long time while the Cub went around and around in the bright air above the field. Then she put the envelope back in the glove box, where it belonged, and closed it, and tapped it twice with two fingers, the way her father always had. Odette came out of the farmhouse with a sheaf of brochures and a look on her face like she had just been talked into something wonderful. The windsock stirred and lifted and pointed down the runway toward home.
"Come on, Captain," Naomi said to Jasmine, and handed her the key, the right key, the one that had always been theirs. "You can start her. Mind the starter. Sometimes it needs a little encouragement."
It started on the first try.