"Too bad," Jess agreed.

Jess looked across the gym to see the man holding the remote control, to see her man: Mustafa. He was standing under the '34th Annual Model Airplane Contest' banner, and her heart started to leap for him, just as it always had. But then, seeing the tension on his face and recalling a discussion from that morning, her heart hesitated and tripped, fell flat in her stomach.

Even from across the basketball court, Jess could see the grey hairs of Mustafa's beard twitch with disappointment because although Mustafa had landed the plane as gracefully as he could, there was no mistaking it: the competition was lost. And Mustafa was not the type to shrug it off.

Mustafa was a serious man. He took things seriously. "And that," he had told her this morning, "includes you." She had feigned a smile at him then, one of complete ambivalence, equal parts hope and fear, knowing he wanted more of her, unsure she had anything of herself to spare. It was a little girl's smile and Mustafa, who had quite a few more years in the world, recognized it for what it was. "You can't live the rest of your life in whimsy," he said placing his coffee cup on the counter. The clunking noise of it had made Jess's neck go tight. She had never liked the idea of growing up.

Mustafa was a man of hands not words. What he felt in his heart he forced into creation, made tangible and into things: soaring things—like the planes-and heavy things made of metal. He did not speak silly words or hum romantic songs. He was serious. He made things. And it was exactly this seriousness that drew Jess to him, a part of her young heart wondered what Mustafa could make of her. Mustafa's seriousness was capable, powerful, and, unlike her, totally focused. But now, it was exactly this seriousness that terrified her.

Mustafa was a welder at the Navy Shipbuilding yard and it was there that they met, while Jess was still an intern, working on her second masters degree, on her final Daddy scholarship. It was taking her a little longer than most to find her path. The day they met, Jess had been on a research excursion. Her team was working on a new method of welding, friction stir welding: a solid-state joining process that left original metal characteristics unaltered. The team had hoped to bring the technology to the shipyard, but it wasn't catching on.

Jess had always felt somewhat intrigued with the technology, but primarily, as an intern, she just liked being the youngest and the prettiest girl on the engineering team. She liked to play dress up in suits and lab coats. She did work sometimes but mostly just flirted the day away, enjoying the attention of men too boring for her to date and yet, completely smitten with her. One of these colleagues she could—to her great amusement—by just lifting her eyebrow, make stutter. And it was he that approached her about the field trip.

"We need to go d-d-d-down to the shipyard," he said.

And so they did.

The group of researchers walked around the Shipyard looking awkward and getting in the way. Until finally, one of the group walked up to a welder and asked him directly, why there was a hold up transitioning to the new welding method. That man was Mustafa.

"This is what we know," Mustafa said when they asked, after he removed his executioner's hood, his welding gear, "And it works."

Someone in the group started to explain that friction stir welding was already used in many automotive lines and had many advantages over conventional fusion welding. Mustafa had already started to lower his mask when Jess spoke up.

"For one thing, friction stir welding doesn't make sparks," she said, knowing her voice alone could usually get a man's attention; and it did. Mustafa turned his full face, with brown eyes and trimmed beard to look at her.

"But I like my work now," Mustafa said, his voice strong like a bear, "and I like the sparks."

No one knew what to say to a thing like that, and so, the group walked on, except for Jess. Jess chose to stay with Mustafa, the bear, and she smiled when he lowered the hood, though she couldn't tell through the hood's window if he saw her. He set to work then, making sparks fly, sending one of those sparks to Jess's heart, which leapt at the shock.

The night after the competition, Mustafa stood at the orange workbench, fiddling with the plane. Jess stood next to him and saw for the first time that the frame had been cracked.

Tomorrow there would be another Shipyard tour, eight months after Jess first met Mustafa. Jess was nervous about that. Her internship was coming to an end, and it was coming time for her to make some serious, grown-up decisions. She had been soaring without direction, but now she could feel the turbulence of her current ways, and she both yearned for and feared something more stable.

Jess touched his arm and Mustafa blew some air out his nose. "The tour is tomorrow," she reminded him, and he grunted.

The next day Jess put on her suit, her low, practical-yet-dignified heels and toured the shipyard again with her colleagues. They interviewed the men, one by one, getting no where, until they came to Mustafa.

Mustafa didn't stop his work to entertain her tour. He kept his torch blazing and the sparks flying. He didn't even acknowledge Jess until finally, after she had worried that he might not acknowledge her at all, he tilted his head her way. The glass in his mask turned orange with the light of his torch.

Jess became mesmerized watching Mustafa's sparks and the arc they made. She stood and watched Mustafa, transfixed by a man—her man—at his work as he created a weld with a graceful, old-fashioned fan of sparks. She stood and watched Mustafa's sparks exploding, even as her tour moved on.

She watched until she felt her heart leap just as it had the first time she saw him, away from the whimsy in her chest, and toward the welder. She watched Mustafa work until she trusted him, watched him until she became a spark herself, flying through the air, first rising then falling, and finally sputtering as her spark-self bounced once on the rubber matt by Mustafa's foot and extinguished.