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bag-wheely machine, we head to the car-rental booth at the other end of the airport. Mallory asks for a midsize red convertible four-door. She gets mad when the car lady hands the forms to Lyle to sign.
    “I’m paying and I’m driving,” Mallory announces. I can tell she’s using Lyle’s chapter two: “Your Vocal Focus.” Her voice is so big that other people turn.
    The lady gives the key to Mallory and apologizes, but it’s too late, Mallory’s energized. As soon as we’re out in the car lot, she starts in on her speech.
    “I’ve earned my own salary and paid my own way since I was sixteen years old. More than half my life spent as a working woman. To still be faced with that kind of prejudice really gets me where I live.”
    “Ah, she’s a dumb teenager,” Lyle says.
    “No excuse for ignorance,” Mallory answers. “No excuse.” She wears her chin and mouth pulled high.
    We stay quiet because there’s no arguing with Mallory when she is taking her stand against Ignorance. Once I asked her what was hardest: being famous, being black, or being pretty. When she frowned at me I thought she was mad, but then she rubbed the top of my head like you’d pet a dog, and she told me she was living fine with all of it. She told me it was other people’s opinions about her that got to be tiresome.
    The weather is warm and the sun presses pinwheels through my eyelids. Mallory forgets her bad mood as soon as the guy drives the car around. Cars aren’t my thing, but I can tell this one is top quality.
    “Mal, I don’t know,” Lyle starts.
    “When it comes to the selection and steering of the automobile,” she says, “I’m in the driver’s seat. And if we get ticketed, I’ll pay.”
    Mallory is a whole different type of driver from Lyle. She wouldn’t ever set a time of arrival or think that the challenge is in keeping it legal. She zoops down the top and vv-vrooms the engine, rolls the stick shift through its gears, and cruises back and forth between lanes so many times that soon we don’t have any car friends left on the highway.
    From where I sit, Lyle looks unbendable. He rests a hand exactly the same way on each knee knob. From the front he must be a sight; it’s like taking Abraham Lincoln out for a spin. Mallory turns to him and goes, “Whoo-haaa!” a couple of times, to try to spur him into the mood. I join in with a “Whoo-eee!” but neither type of whoo takes effect.
    “Tell us where we’re going,” Mallory shouts through the wind, and so Lyle pulls out the map the ignorant teenager car-rental lady gave him. He seems to relax as he slides his fingers over the roads that lead to the hospital. Mallory knows how to get Lyle sidetracked.
    I feel the crunch of my juice-wrapper Slice tucked inside my jacket pocket. Soon as I pull it out, the wind’s grabbed it backward from my hands. I turn around and it’s a firefly on the highway before it crazy-catches another direction and then it’s gone, sucked underneath the hood of the car behind us. I keep watching, hoping that it might snap back to me or pop out the other side, but it doesn’t.

L YLE FIGURED OUT ABOUT me and airplane models, even when Mom said I probably didn’t have the patience for them. But she was wrong and he was right, which was becoming a pattern, so far as I saw it. Lyle said from the minute he saw my first paper airplane, a Swallowdive that unfolded into a birthday card for Mom, he thought I had more complicated designs inside me. He said my brain was right for holding three dimensions.
    The first Sunday Lyle came back from the hardware store with a model, I thought it looked too hard, which gets me smiling now, since it was cake. An F-14 Navy Tom Cat, only eight separate pieces. Lyle said he’d help, but the model was mainly my project. He put down newspaper on the kitchen table and read me the instructions while I built it myself. After the glue dried, I painted it gunmetal with U.S. and French flag decals. Then Lyle