When the call ended June held the empty screen for a moment with both hands. Then she opened the door. Inez stood there with her duck lunch bag and her flight jacket folded across one arm. She'd been crying. Her eyes were red and she had a square of toilet paper grasped in her fist with which she had dabbed at her mascara, making four small black smudges like musical notation.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “The fellow at the desk told me you might be here. They're going to ask me if I want to make a written statement, and I can't figure out what they're asking me to confess to.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Service quality and somebody who thinks my shop steward is going to be a problem. My shop steward is a woman named Melanie. Melanie is an enormous problem. It's why we elected her.”
“Is she with you?”
“Five minutes out.”
“Then I would wait five minutes. What is it you want from me?”
Inez took her phone out. “Northstar published a thing.”
The thing was a statement on a plain blue background. It said an inadvertent allocation error had occurred on flight 640. Two employees involved in what appeared to be the unauthorized sharing of passenger information had been removed from service pending a review. Northstar was in touch with the passenger, who had provided documentation that would assist the investigation. The last line said it was happy to have resolved her immediate concern to her satisfaction. It didn't use her name but the photograph with the statement showed the front of her meal card with her name blanked out. It also showed her green sleeve with the little brush of white paint, Libby's handiwork from six years ago. June had bought the sweatshirt that very afternoon. When she saw the paint she'd been so annoyed they had finished the bedroom in silence. All these years later it was her favorite thing she owned.
“I never said I was satisfied.”
“You aren't the only one who's been surprised by the things she apparently said today.”
Inez was young enough to think herself replaceable and old enough to know that there were a dozen people in a room deciding whether she was. She had a baby asleep at her mother's apartment and was paying to finish a degree in respiratory therapy. The airline job was the first one she'd had with predictable health benefits. The duck bag, June learned, belonged to a four-year-old stepson who had asked her to take it aloft so it could experience its first flight. She had sent him a picture of it belted into a jump seat.
“Did you put the card under the plate?” June asked.
“No. I didn't give you the plate. You turned the plate when Meredith was standing there. I came up when you had soup.”
“I remember. I wrote it down.”
“Thank you.” Inez stood with her chin down for a moment. “But I think I know why they suspect me. Somebody has been taking pictures of those meal cards in the kitchen. They've been showing up on a crew group. I liked one. I know one of the women who works there. Her name's Raquel. The company reported it to our supervisor. She called us in separately and asked us to leave our personal phones in our lockers on duty.”
“Which sounds perfectly reasonable until it's put beside everything else.”
“Exactly.” Inez looked down at the duck. “I've been trying all afternoon not to say that to someone in a way that would make her think I was making excuses. Do you know how hard it is to come up with the truth when the person asking already picked one?”
“Yes, I do.”
Ruth opened the door farther. “Come on in, child. There's crackers.”
They sat another eleven minutes, waiting for Melanie. June wrote down her phone number on the back of an airport map so Inez could give it to the union if she wanted to. She was careful to ask permission before photographing the statement on the girl's phone. She understood an element of courtesy she hadn't understood that morning. Melanie arrived, a tall woman in a navy skirt, breathing hard, with one earring and the other in the pocket of her jacket. She thanked June, said she intended to get her people home with their jobs intact, and escorted Inez through the crowd without anybody getting in their way. Daniel had left a handwritten note outside the door. It said he was sorry and gave the address of the conference and a number where he could be reached. There was no expectation in it, and she appreciated that too.
June took Ruth to meet the nephew who was driving her home. He was an enormous affectionate man in his fifties, with a beard full of white and a strangely beautiful arrangement of daisies stuck in a coffee mug. When he hugged his aunt he lifted her an inch off the ground. Ruth left June the pencil. “Have a good couple of days with your girl. You may tell her I admire her signature.”
For the next two hours June was exactly as happy as she had hoped to be that morning. She met her family at a roller rink that smelled of floor polish and reheated pizza. She fell twice, once with dignity. Ada wore a purple dress and a necktie and took the corners like a kid who knew there would be people there to stand her up again. Noreen won a stuffed cabbage at a claw machine. Someone had stitched a frown on its green face. It acquired the name Judge Cabbage and looked down on them from the table while they ate a vast quantity of ordinary food.