“Yeah. Well. The glass can be half empty or half full.”

Leni knew the glass was broken. “Where are we going?” she asked.

“Do you really care?”

“No.”

“We’re going back to Seattle. It’s all I could think of. Thanks to Large Marge, we’re flying and not hitchhiking.”

The door opened, bringing in a rush of ice-cold air. A woman in a brown parka appeared, a Cowichan tuque pulled low on her forehead. “Plane’s ready for take-off. Flight to Anchorage.”

Mama immediately pulled the scarf up to just beneath her eyes, while Leni flipped up her parka’s hood, pulled the strings so it tightened around her face.

“Are you our passengers?” the woman said, looking down at a sheet of paper in her gloved hands. Before Mama could answer, the phone on the desk rang. The woman moved toward it, answering, “Glass Lake Aviation.”

Mama and Leni hurried out of the small office toward the airfield, where their airplane waited, propeller whirring. At the plane, Leni tossed her backpack into the aft area, where it fell amid boxes to be delivered somewhere, and followed her mother into the shadowy interior.

She took her seat (there were only two of them behind the pilot) and tightened her seat belt.

The small plane rumbled forward, clattered hard, then lifted, swayed, leveled out. The engine sounded like the cards the kids on her old block used to put in their bicycle spokes.

Leni stared out the window, down into the gloom. From this height, everything looked charcoal-gray and white, a blurring of land and sea and sky. Jagged white mountains, angry white-tipped waves on an ash-gray sea. Cabins and homes clinging stubbornly to a wild shoreline.

Homer slowly disappeared from view.

*   *   *

SEATTLE AT NIGHT in the falling rain.

A snake of yellow headlights in the dark. Neon signs everywhere, reflections cast on wet streets. Traffic lights changing color. Horns honking out staccato warnings.

Music tumbled out of open doors, assaulting the night, unlike any music Leni had heard before. It had a clanging, angry sound and some of the people standing outside of the bars looked like they’d landed from Mars—with safety pins in their cheeks and stiff blue Mohawks and black clothes that appeared to have been cut to ribbons.

“It’s okay,” Mama said, pulling Leni in close as they walked past a group of homeless-looking people who stood listlessly in a park, passing cigarettes back and forth.