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ticket.”
    Debbie looked up through her hair. Willie crinkled his brow and shook his head.
    “Why?”
    Jenna shrugged.
    “Because you may never be back this way again. And if you miss the boat, your life will be completely different. And I can’t have that on my conscience.”
    Debbie laughed a short burst and sniffed loudly. She smiled like an angel up at Jenna. Kids. Bobby would have done that one day. He would have gone with a girl on the ferry for a couple of months, getting off and on the boat in depressing little towns, eating crappy food, sleeping in tents in the rain. Having the time of his life.
    The trio left Starbucks and headed down toward the ferry terminal. Jenna and Willie walking side by side, the girl trailing behind. It was warming up into another beautiful day. The waterfront looked crisp and colorful, the waves sparkling in the sun. Jenna smiled to herself when she realized that she probably looked like a crazy woman—dressed in a wrinkled black suit, with yesterday’s makeup on her face—offering to buy some girl a ferry ticket.
    Willie led them into the ferry terminal, a vast, freshly painted room with a small counter against one wall. Above the counter was a huge logo of the ferry system. On other walls were murals of Northwest Indian totems. The room was lightly populated—someone slept in a chair, a family sat on the floor with their bags piled around them, a janitor silently mopped the floor in one corner.
    Willie stopped and looked at Jenna skeptically. Debbie sidled up to him and looked at Jenna also.
    “Are you really going to do this?”
    Jenna nodded.
    Willie looked at her for a long moment. He nodded, turned, and walked up to the woman behind the sales counter. Jenna and Debbie watched as he spoke and gestured. The woman took something out of a drawer. She filled out a ticket book. She calculated some figures. She spoke back to Willie. Willie nodded. He turned to Jenna and waved her over.
    “It’s two sixty-five with tax.”
    Jenna smiled to the woman behind the counter. She opened her purse, took out her wallet, and handed the woman a Visa card. The woman ran it through the machine and Jenna signed the paper. And that was that. Willie took the ticket and the three stepped outside.
    “Thanks a lot. If you give me your name and address, we’ll pay you back when we get the money.”
    Jenna smiled.
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    Willie shuffled his feet. He thrust out his hand and Jenna took it.
    “Well, thanks a lot, then. Thanks.”
    He gestured to the big blue and white ship that was tied to the dock. Debbie looked up at Jenna. She seemed relaxed, relieved to have everything settled. Jenna reached out and touched her cheek.
    “You kids have a good trip.”
    Willie and Debbie headed off down the dock, toward a group of other young wanderers who were sitting on their backpacks, waiting for the loading to begin.
    Jenna walked back toward the street. When she reached the end of the boat slip, she looked back. The ferry was nosed into the slip and its prow arched high out of the water. The Columbia. The same boat her grandmother had taken. The same boat Jenna was on when she was in high school and made the trip with her friend, Patty, and they stayed with Gram.
    Jenna wondered what had happened to Gram’s house in Wrangell. No one lived there, she supposed. It was so old it had probably fallen down. On Front Street, down from the dock. A big old two-story house. The top floor had been closed off when Jenna and Patty went. It was too run-down, and Gram couldn’t make it up the stairs anyway. But Jenna hadn’t seen it since then. Seventeen years ago. She had wanted to stop by Wrangell when she and Robert and Bobby went on that fateful trip to Thunder Bay two years ago. But the trip was cut short.
    Jenna checked her watch. It was seven thirty. She was suddenly taken with an impulse to get on the boat and go up to Alaska. See Wrangell again. Wander through the streets of the little