GRIFF DROVE TO another airfield. This one was even smaller than the last. It was private, tucked away next to a lake where Griff’s bright yellow plane waited, its bulbous floats keeping it crouched on the water like a bug.

In a building—not quite a cabin—beside the tarmac, he served us a dinner of fat, sizzling sausages on buns with yellow mustard and no ketchup, which I thought might be more of his odd obsession with yellow but turned out to just be because he ran out.

“The legendary Sequoia Green,” he said. I didn’t correct him. “Your daddy’s one of my best friends. He saved my life once. We were rafting, you see, and we hit a big rock. I fell in, and he fished me out. So he saved my life.”

Griff didn’t tell very good stories. The way my dad told the same story, Griff and I laughed so hard we had to hold our sides because our ribs hurt, and Griff snorted beer out his nose and into his beard and then we all laughed about that. Only now I can’t remember how he told it, and even if I did and I wrote it down it wouldn’t be as funny, because Dad’s just like that. Dad makes people laugh. It’s why Mom married him even though she shouldn’t have, even though anyone could see that.

Dad made people laugh. Past tense. He died and I’m alone, and no one is coming for me. Pretending won’t bring him back. But in that moment with Griff at the airfield, Dad was an entirely different kind of gone. He was hovering in the future, not lost in the past. Somehow it worked out to nearly the same thing.

But meanwhile, Griff and I were eating our sausages and he was telling terrible stories and saying weird things. Things like: “God loves everybody, and when you die he can finally tell you direct. That’s why heaven’s so nice.”

And: “I don’t think a person should get married until they’ve punched someone and been punched at least once.”

And: “You ever see a moose run sideways?”

When Griff asked you questions, you didn’t have to answer. He’d move on before you could even think it through. He did all the talking for the two of us, which suited me fine. I was still trying to figure out what I felt about all of this, and what I should do. Like, say, run for help. But once you get talking with Griff, the notion of him hurting you goes right out the window. And it wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go.

“We’ll leave in the morning,” Griff told me, slurping down coffee. “Not enough light left today.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’re going home. I’m going to the middle of nowhere,” Griff said. I laughed because I thought it was a joke, and he looked pleased, so I guess it was. But only in the sense that it was supposed to be funny, not that it wasn’t true. We really were going to the middle of nowhere. And it was going to be home.

Griff slept on the floor in his little shack on the airfield, and I slept in his cot. It smelled like him, like sweat and that musky smell guys get. Not bad, just strong. There wasn’t any heat, and even bundled up in blankets with two layers of socks on I didn’t sleep most of the night.

In the morning Griff poured me coffee that tasted like he’d mistaken jet fuel for Folgers, and then we loaded into his plane. I’d stopped asking questions about where we were going. It was obvious I wasn’t going to know until we got there.

“Your dad tells me your mom was a pilot,” Griff said when we got settled. “And that you’re a bit of a pilot yourself.”

“My mom was teaching me. I was working on getting my license.” I’d been looking forward to that more than getting a driver’s license. It’s not that exciting to drive when you can fly.

“Why don’t you run through the checklist for me, then?” Griff said, and handed me a clipboard.

My mom told me that checklists are why her job was so safe. Pilots don’t have to depend on memory, which will always fail sooner or later. The checklist is God. It works so well that surgeons are studying the way pilots use checklists, to eliminate mistakes when they’re operating. You have to assume that you know nothing and that you’ve forgotten something, because the moment you assume you’ve got it and don’t check, something will go wrong.

Mom was right—I should probably write one right now. Except it would fill this whole notebook. There’s always so much to do.

We went through, checking everything over as the plane came bit by bit to life. Call and response, like a ritual. Safety gear—aboard. Temperatures and pressures—in the green.

My finger trailed down the checklist Griff handed me one item at a time, and I could almost imagine it was Mom’s voice responding. That if I looked up, I’d see her as I had so many times before, mouth set in concentration, the faintest line between her eyes as she frowned her way through the safety checks. Mom flew big airliners, but she never, ever got tired of taking us up just the two of us, with nothing but a thin metal skin between us and the sky.

I used to be afraid that my mother would die in a plane crash, and I’d spend the rest of my life wondering if she had time to be afraid. If she could see the ground rushing up. If she was grabbing for an oxygen mask. If she tried to comfort the passengers or if she was only focused on the instruments, on wrenching the giant metal beast back into the sky where it had finally realized it didn’t belong.

And then she died on the ground. She died in a car accident, and I was there. The other car came at us from the side, its headlights blotting out any sense of its size. She had time to say my name and fling her arm out across my body, as if that could keep me safe, and then the world ended. Only half of it came back. My half. It was full of wet cold rain and wet hot blood. Of sirens and screaming. But my mother was silent.