The instant Barbara hung up the receiver, Ma Phelps eagerly asked her, "Would you like to go with me next Tuesday night to the new social club I've joined? It's called the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund, or the 'Bund' for short. My husband wasn't German, but I am. Jewish-German, and lots of nice people of German descent around Mohave get together every week and we talk and play those new games, Bingo and Monopoly."
"I'm sorry, but I'm going to be busy next Tuesday night."
Barbara barely got it in before Ma Phelps spoke on.
"The young people perform wonderful gymnastics and someone who knows about politics usually speaks, although I hardly understand it because I'm not political. They tell us how a man with a funny Charlie Chaplin mustache named Adolph Hitler who used to hang wallpaper is finding jobs for so many German men who have been out of work. He's putting them into his new army. Isn't that nice?, because I don't think he's German himself. He's formed a party with a funny name and his soldiers march a lot to some peppy march music, but I don't think it's John Phillip Sousa. The soldiers keep their knees so stiff, the toes of their shiny boots almost hit the fanny of the fellow marching in front of them. It's called a 'goose step.' Isn't that a hoot?"
Please, no more, Mrs. Phelps! Barbara agonized while her landlady laughed her sides out. Take a breath, so I can find an opening and leave the room politely. "I have two sisters in Warsaw and their school-teacher husbands, Sol and Samuel, are out of work. You'd think they'd let teachers keep their jobs teaching in Germany, wouldn't you? Maybe Hitler will put them in his army. I send them some money every month, through the Bund, and they tell me it's helping them."
Who, your sisters or the Bund? Barbara wasn't political either.
Opening or not, Barbara had heard enough. "Goodnight, Ma, and thank you for the use of the phone. Add it to my rent, all right?"
That night in bed at Ma Phelps's boarding house, Barbara smiled. It was cold in the desert at night, but had been hot during the day with the bright sunshine. The word had a new meaning to her now. She was already so busy thinking of ways to get the airport up and running again, she hardly remembered that only a few days before, she had been in Chicago with her friends.
The next morning, Barbara went through the pile of bills in Russ Oberman's office and found that the airport was in even worse debt than she had feared. But with hard work and a little luck, and she believed in both, she could pay it off and put the airport in the red. She had to. There was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, if she wanted to make her life flying, and by then she would settle for nothing less. Failure had not been in her vocabulary, and she would not put it there now.