Chapter 1- The Chicken She Ordered 8999
“You can make do with the salad.”
The flight attendant put the plate down while June Ellis was still clearing a space for it. A cherry tomato rolled across the tray table and landed in the cuff of her green sweatshirt. June fished it out. She was considering whether the thing could reasonably be eaten after a trip up her sleeve when the attendant turned to the man across the aisle.
“For lunch today, sir, would you prefer the braised beef or the lemon chicken?”
June set down her fork. “Excuse me. I ordered the chicken.”
The attendant glanced at June's sweatshirt. It was a dark green pullover with a white mark on one shoulder where her daughter had leaned against her with wet paint in her hair. June had spent most of the morning feeling tender toward that mark. Now she found herself wanting to cover it with her hand.
“Are you sure you were supposed to be in first class?”
A man across the aisle closed his menu. “She's in the right seat. And you didn't ask to see my boarding pass before you served me.”
For the first time, the attendant looked June in the eye. June turned the plate around so the woman could read the little meal card caught under its rim.
The printed side said LEMON CHICKEN / 3A / J ELLIS. On the back, in square blue capitals, somebody had written five words.
LET HER ASK FOR IT.
The man's expression changed before the attendant's did. He had the sort of face June associated with expensive watches and school photographs taken outside. Now he looked like somebody who had found a letter addressed to himself in a dead man's coat.
“Do you know what that means?” June asked him.
“Yes,” he said, then, after a moment, “I think I do.”
The attendant reached for the card. June put two fingers on it. The tomato was still in her other hand. She became aware of this ridiculous fact and put it down very carefully in the center of the plate.
“Would you bring me the meal I ordered, please?”
“My name is Meredith,” the woman said, as though they had somehow reached the point in a conversation where introductions could fix it.
“All right, Meredith. I'd like my lunch.”
“I'll speak to the galley.”
“That sounds promising. It is where the food lives.”
Behind them someone laughed. June immediately regretted giving anybody an opening to enjoy this. She wanted a hot meal. She wanted to eat it while it was hot. She wanted to be in Portland by three, in time to change in a station bathroom and stand in a county office with her little sister when the clerk said the words that would finally make her somebody's mother on paper. She had bought this seat because everything cheaper would have brought her in after four. A sandwich at the gate would have been fine if anybody had told her buying a sandwich was necessary.
Meredith pushed the cart six inches down the aisle, pulled the brake, and walked toward the front. The man leaned across the gap between their seats.
“May I see the back of that again?”
“You can see it from where you are.”
He adjusted his glasses. He was younger behind them, somehow. Forty perhaps. June had him at forty-eight until she noticed the little scar across one eyebrow, still pink, and the places on his jaw where he'd missed a patch shaving.
“Did somebody write the same thing on your food?” she asked.
“No.”
“Then what do you know about mine?”
He looked down. “I helped put the meal system on these airplanes.”
June turned the card over. There was a small green dot beside her name. “Something wrong with your system that it thinks I'm plant-based?”
“There are supposed to be three statuses. Loaded, offered, and accepted.”
“Does one of those mean green?”
“Green means accepted.”
“How can I have accepted it? I haven't even seen it.”
“That's what I'd like to find out.”
He took out his phone. She drew the card closer without especially meaning to, and he put the phone away. That made her like him a little better. The space between the two seats was scarcely the length of her arm, but he had understood that her end of it belonged to her.
“Daniel Vale,” he said.
“I'm going to eat first, Daniel.”
She ate the salad. The lettuce was cold, the dressing was excellent, and there were exactly two half walnuts. She gave the tomato from her sleeve its chance along with the rest. She had driven a city bus for eleven years. She knew that sometimes a person made one foolish judgment at the beginning of a shift and spent the next nine hours trying to justify it. At some point twelve years ago a bus driver had decided that a Black girl with pale blond hair and a stroller was going to hold everybody up. He had shut the doors an inch from the front wheel and mouthed, Next one. The next one was an hour behind. June still remembered how clearly she had been able to see the little hairs in the man's nostrils when he'd looked down at her. She had become a driver partly because she liked engines, partly because the union had dental coverage, and partly because she wanted, just once, to be the person with her hand on that lever.
An older woman in the seat directly behind hers touched her shoulder through the gap. “I'll have a word if you like, honey. I'm good at words.”