Don't Marry Your Contractor*

Chapter 20 - Sweet Sixteen

Fourteen Years Earlier:

The night before Charlotte's sixteenth birthday, in mid-June. she was studying hard. The next day at 1 PM she was scheduled to take her driver's test in her grandfather's old 1964 and a-half Mustang convertible. The perfectly preserved car was all original and had less than 100,000 miles and featured a Ford 289 V-8 engine and a four-speed on the floor. However, before her driving test, she had a more important appointment earlier that next morning.

At 0630 hours the big day arrived. Charlotte was going to fly solo for the first time. She got up early and dressed as professionally as a sixteen-year-old could and met Carl in the small kitchen of their old house. Her grandmother was sleeping in so it was just Carl and Charlotte for the pre-dawn wakeup. Charlotte was up first and made coffee strong the way the old fighter pilot liked it. When he arrived in the kitchen, she smiled and poured him a cup. "Just the way you like it, Gramps."

He took the offered cup from his granddaughter whom he had noticed lately was rapidly turning from a tall, skinny young girl to a still a bit skinny but ever-confident young woman. "Charlotte, are you ready for all this? It will be a long day but, in the end, you'll have a tale worth telling."

Charlotte smiled and sipped her orange juice. "Well, I don't know about that Gramps, it's not exactly the journey of Lindbergh across the Atlantic, but will probably be slightly more worthy of a story than my friends who are spending their summer working at the water park could tell."

Carl smiled as he thought that his granddaughter was wise beyond her years. "You didn't stay up too late studying, did you?"

Charlotte shrugged. "No sir. I took your advice and did my best to get eight hours of sleep, more or less."

Carl stood up and handed her the keys to the old car. "Good. Why don't you drive us to the airport? It should be a good way to keep you from overthinking everything. Because..."

Charlotte groaned a bit and then laughed as she filled in the end of his sentence. "...Because thinking hurts the team, just fight what you see."

Carl leaned over and kissed his granddaughter on the forehead. He tried not to, but could not avoid thinking that she was his last remaining kin. On that melancholy thought, Carl poured his coffee into a traveling mug, topped it off and smiled at Charlotte. "Shall we go, my dear? Your morning adventure awaits."

Charlotte took his hand in hers and smiled. "Indeed, we shall Colonel Janssen. By the end of the day, I think that there will be another pilot in the family."

After the early morning levity, Charlotte drove her grandfather's old Mustang in silence from Boise's North end to the Nampa airport where the old Piper cub was hangared. She did not know it at the time, but at one point in the future, the airplane, house, car and everything else owned by her grandfather would be hers.

Upon arriving at the airport, Charlotte carefully parked the Mustang next to the hangar that her grandfather had been leasing for many years. She smiled at him, looked around and spoke. "You know Gramps, everything around here except me is old. The car, the plane, and..."

Her grandfather laughed. "And me?"

Charlotte smiled. "Well, if the shoe fits... Anyway Gramps, how did your first Solo go? Did Orville get out of the Wright Flyer and just let you go fly?"

Carl thought for a moment and smiled. As a 30-year fighter pilot; he had been razzed way better than that. "You know Charlotte, even after that clever jibe you are still my favorite grandchild."

Charlotte smiled coyly. "I'm your only grandchild."

Carl returned the smile with one of his own. "So, you got me there. Anyway, it was Jimmy Doolittle who soloed me."