"You did that when I was little," Nora said. "Counted."
"I know," said Dana. "I didn't think you'd remember."
"I remember the counting and the wind," said Nora. "That's about all. And you saying the thing about the gliders."
"That's not a bad two things to remember."
"Can we please keep climbing," said Renee, "because if I stop now I'm going to die on this staircase and you'll both have to carry me down a hundred and fourteen steps."
"A hundred and fourteen," Dana said approvingly. "She was counting too."
At the top the wind came at them hard out of the west, smelling of salt and fir. The whole world was down there: the town on its hills, the bridge running four miles across the river to Washington, a red-hulled container ship coming in slow off the bar with a pilot boat riding alongside it, Youngs Bay, the dark green ridges going away toward Saddle Mountain. Nora stood at the rail with her hair whipping and looked at the ship for a long time.
Then she reached into the paper bag from the gift shop and handed out three balsa wood gliders, a dollar each, still in their cellophane.
They assembled them the way you do, sliding the thin wings through the slot in the body, the little red plastic nose weight snapped on the front. Nora had brought a pen. She wrote something on the wing of hers and didn't let either of them see it. Then she held out the pen. Dana took it, and thought, and wrote something small. Renee took it last and stood there with her glider in one hand and the pen in the other and could not think of a single thing, and finally wrote, in her florist's block capitals, the only thing that occurred to her, which was the date.
"The card," Dana said suddenly. "You didn't throw it out."