Beautiful Days by Anna Godbersen Read Free Book Online

grandstanding.
    â€œYou really think old Hale could be that bad?” asked a man with a straw boater propped way back on his head, who had been standing entirely too close to her for some time. The smell of his cheap cologne filled her nostrils, and that wasn’t the sort of question Cordelia had any kind of answer to, so she turned her face to the water and stepped away from the group. That was how she noticed that another crowd was forming—this one bigger and more animated—near the shoreline. In the tranquil blue sky above, a silver biplane was twirling out puffy letters. The white plumes the plane left in its wake strung together a jaunty message— THE BEAUMONTS WISH YOU A HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY —and as each word was completed, the girls below jumped up and down and squealed.
    A dazed smile came across Cordelia’s face. She had seen this kind of lettering before—when she had only just stepped off the train from Ohio—and all the wonder of that first hour in New York returned to her. She had observed the same aerial skill once again, from the vantage of nearby Everly Field, and then on another occasion she had witnessed it failing spectacularly. She hadn’t seen the daring pilot Max Darby since delivering him to the Rye Haven Catholic Hospital.
    Since that night, she’d barely had a moment to wonder how he had fared. Her family had been in mourning, and she had been too preoccupied with all the things she had done wrong to speculate about someone else. But now, on the Fourth of July, when the air was humid and fragrant with grass, she felt a twinge of excitement to recognize his plane up there. Absentmindedly, she put her hands into the deep pockets of her loose-fitting skirt and drifted away from Charlie and his friends, her head bent back so that she could watch the end of the air show. The plane twirled a few more times and zoomed low over the heads of mingling partygoers twice. Once she saw that it was sailing down toward a smooth landing on the far side of the property she set out at a brisk pace across the lawn.
    But the other girls were actually running. They mobbed Max Darby when he jumped down from the cockpit and cried out his name.
    It was another twenty minutes before he emerged from the crowd of jubilant young women and she managed to catch his eye. By that time, the color of the sky was already ripening with the suggestion of dusk, and she was holding a pitcher of mint julep in one hand and a glass for him in the other.
    â€œIf that’s for me,” he said when he reached her, his blue eyes pale in contrast to his tanned skin, “I don’t drink.”
    â€œOh.” She lowered the pitcher. His appearance, like his words, seemed uniquely unadorned against the background of the Beaumonts’ party. All across the field were young people wearing the latest thing, but Max’s dark hair was so short it was almost a shadow on his forehead, and the light brown color of his leather jacket matched his trousers.
    â€œI’m glad to have run into you here,” he said with a formality that made him sound not exactly glad. “Because I’ve been meaning to thank you for—what you did that night.”
    â€œThat.” Cordelia wrapped one leg behind the other girlishly, and her red-painted lips sprang upward at the corners. The mention of the night she’d seen his plane go down on the field of some Long Island farm made her feel a little dizzy. Suddenly she remembered the way he’d smiled at her, after being so serious, in that empty early-morning hospital, how wonderfully alive he’d made her feel, after days of feeling lost and useless and worse. “Well—here I am.”
    â€œThank you.” She waited expectantly for him to go on, but after he looked away toward the place on the lawn where the band was setting up, her expectation began to curdle. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and perhaps on his