“I wonder if I’ll ever get used to that view,” Wy said. Seiners, drifters, pleasure craft, sailboats, a Coast Guard buoy tender, all passed in review on the other side of the window.

“I haven’t and I’ve lived here for over thirty years, my dear,” Sybilla said. The server appeared and she ordered a vodka martini with three olives and a steak sandwich, rare. Wy ordered a diet Coke and a bowl of clam chowder. The drinks came immediately—there was a lot to be said for eating out in the off season in a tourist town—and they toasted and sipped.

Sybilla, on her best society dame manners, said, “What do you do, dear?”

“I’m a pilot.”

The martini, which was disappearing fast, paused midway. “You fly airplanes?”

“Yes.”

Sybilla nodded her head at Wy’s glass. “No consumption of alcohol within eight hours of flying.”

“Yes.”

“I will feel that much more safe when I fly with you, my dear. Do you work for an air taxi, or are you freelance?”

“Both, now, I guess. I owned my own air taxi in Newenham before we moved here. I’m basically on call for now.” Only to the state of Alaska so far, but flight hours were billable hours no matter who she was in the air for.

“You owned your own business?” Something snapped together behind Sybilla’s eyes and she became suddenly far more present. “What was your annual gross?”

Wy answered that and other questions about net income, expenses, insurance, depreciation, amortization, and taxes as best she could without her files in front of her. In the end Sybilla was pleased to give an approving nod. “Well done, my dear, well done, indeed. You sold it when you moved here, you said?”

“I did.”

“Profitably, I hope.”

Wy straightened in her chair. “Of course.”

Sybilla signaled the waiter, addressed him by name, and ordered another martini. He looked at Wy and she shook her head. “Do you mean to start another business here in Blewestown?”

“I don’t know,” Wy said. “Not right away, at any rate.”

“Thinking of starting a family, are you?”

It didn’t matter what she said to this old lady, who would very probably forget it before lunch was over. Wy told her the truth. “No. I’m infertile.”

Sybilla nodded. “I see. And how does your husband feel about that?”

“He says he’s okay with it.” As usual, whenever Wy thought about it, she wondered if it was true. “We have one son, adopted.”

Sybilla’s third martini arrived. Her hand was steady and her diction was perfect. Maybe octogenarian livers, having stood up under all their hosts could throw at them for that long, were impervious to further abuse. “I didn’t have children, either, but in my case it was by choice. I had a good voice and a talent for business and, god knows, Alaska during the pipeline years was the place to make money. If you knew how, and I did. Customers would come in after nine weeks on the line, deposit an entire paycheck with the bartender, and drink until it was gone.”