As the small plane passed overhead, a hand appeared out of the cockpit window and she shouted, “Hello, Jimmy.” Though Jimmy Kaas could not hear her and she knew this was so, she felt that she should say something, as he had gone to all that trouble of creating a drama. The plane made a steep climb and then disappeared in the direction of the golf course. She learned that he had crashed while attempting a “touch-and-go” on the grass landing strip. His family, a small Norwegian island in a sea of Anabaptists, left town shortly after his death.She sometimes thought of Jimmy, though not with any great emotion. She had cried for a day after his death, and she had cried at his funeral, and for a month she had felt that her heart was broken, but then her emotions settled down and she began to understand his death as something that had happened to him, not to her. Years later, after she had children, the death of her first boyfriend became an interesting story, one of romance cut short.
