"You'll be godmother, of course!" Gail told her.

Barbara was overjoyed at the thought. "I'll be the most doting godmother a child ever had!"

I'm going to be godmother to my dearest ones' child! Barbara realized.

So overjoyed, and so resigned by then to her friends' marriage and happy for them, she did not even think until alone in her apartment that night:

It will be the closest I will ever come to being mother to Paul's child.

Feelings of some guilt were always there. Am I terrible to still be in love with Paul? Maybe it is terrible of me, but I just can't help it.

And I'm not a threat to their marriage. Paul is totally in love with his wife. We're just great friends, the three of us. Can't we be friends without me feeling guilty about it?

A week later, after completing a total of ten hours of flying time, Barbara was at the controls of the same Piper Cub Gail had soloed in. Now it was her turn.

The night before, it rained hard and part of the airport field was under water. Gail, Paul, and even Red Olafson urged her not to solo that morning. But Barbara was too exited to postpone what she had been dreaming about since she was a child.

"A piece of cake," she assured them, quoting Paul's favorite words for any challenge as she strapped on her parachute in front of the Cub as it stood almost challenging her on the runway.

Her determination to go ahead made Olafson and Paul put their heads together and revise her soloing instructions. If they couldn't talk her out of flying, they would do the next best thing and make the flight as short as possible.

Barbara managed to take off around the puddles on the runway, went around the flight pattern she was instructed to take, and made a perfect landing. All in ten minutes.

Still, it had not been an uneventful flight. Just after taking the Cub aloft and leveling off, the engine stopped.

Barbara's heart raced as fast as the engine had until it fell silent. But she managed to glide the plane down safely for a dead-stick landing.

She might have given the engine a moment or two to kick back in, but storm clouds moving in convinced her to follow her soloing instructions to the letter. Though she wanted to stay in the air for an hour, if she could get the engine going again, she did not want to take risks, with her life or with Olafson's plane. Also, she wanted to show Paul and Olafson she had nothing to prove to them as a woman flyer. It was because they had so often demonstrated they had nothing to prove to her as male fliers.




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