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fire up the engines.”
    “Propellers,” Allison said.
    “Can you fly it?” Sues said.
    “I can. I’m going to need someone up front with me, assisting with the controls. It’s a two-pilot job,” she said.
    Allison stared at me. I couldn’t say anything. Palmeri sounded confident.
    “Shotgun,” Erway said.
    Palmeri came down the stairs. She took a thick braided rope with a hook from the back of the buggy and hooked it onto the front of the plane. “Going to need to open the hangar doors and for someone to drive this thing.”
    We all needed to take turns. It was the one thing that kept coming around. Just like there were a million things to volunteer for before now, there will be this instance, and then a million more after. Each time the threat of danger and dying would be possible, if not probable and prevalent.
    “I’ve got it,” Sues said, and raised her hand like she was about to answer a question.
    Dave grabbed her arm. She shrugged out of his hold. “Sues,” he said.
    “I can’t sit anymore,” she said. “I can’t just be on the sidelines. We’re a family. Chase said so more than once. And we need to take turns doing these crazy things. We need to. This, driving that buggy and pulling this plane out of the hangar, this is my crazy thing I get to do. You need to let me, Dave. I need to do this.”
    Palmeri pointed. “Dave, Chase, move those blocks set in front of and behind the wheels. Everyone else, get on the plane.”
    “She’ll be okay,” I said to Dave.
    “I don’t like this.” He sounded like Allison. “I’m opening the hangar door. She can pull the plane out, but I’m not getting on until she does.”
    “I’m not arguing. That’s what you should do. It’s what I’d do.” I smiled.
    “You would?”
    “Yes. If it were Allison, it’s what I’d do. Same thing.”
    “Okay. Good. Go get on the plane. We got this,” Dave said.  
    I moved the rolling steps out of the way, kicked it toward the hangar wall and hoisted myself up and into the plane.
    “Where’s Dave?” Allison stood next to my daughter. They were still hand holding.
    I’d never been inside a plane like this. Saw them in movies. To my right were roughly twenty fold-down seats, ten on each side of the fuselage. “Is this where we sit?”
    “Did you see them?” Allison pointed. “Those don’t look safe to sit in at a picnic, much less going three hundred miles an hour thirty-thousand feet in the sky.”
    “I think she said we’ll go around two hundred miles an hour,” my daughter said.
    “Char,” I said.
    “Sorry.”
    “Why don’t you two go get buckled in,” I said.
    “Wait. Dave. Where’s Dave?” Allison said.
    “He’s going to open the hangar door for Sues,” I said. “Go buckle in.”
    On the left was the door to the cockpit. I opened it. There was room to walk in, but then the pilot and co-pilot needed to climb up and over the center console to slide into their seats. Erway and Palmeri were packed in tight.
    “We set in back,” Erway said.
    “Seems like it.” I stared out the front window. Dave was just about to pull open the hangar doors. Palmeri had maps unfolded in front of her. “What are you working on?”
    “Flight plan. GPS is down. Would have been able to plug in to in an airport, or something. Doing it old school. Charting our course. Good thing is, I don’t expect too much company in the sky. Think we’re going to have it pretty much to ourselves,” Palmeri said.
    The hangar door was open all the way, and now Dave ran the hook from the back of the buggy toward the front of the plane. I lost sight of him.
    The plane rocked forward. I held onto the cockpit walls for balance, to keep from falling backward. “We’re really doing this?”
    “We are.” Palmeri held the W-shaped control wheel between her thighs, a hand on each grip.
    We were slowly wheeled out of the hangar. Sues led us cautiously toward the runway. “That enough runway to get us out of here?”
    “Has