Meredith took a long narrow piece of paper from her wallet. It was a photocopy of the original training note reduced to the size of a bookmark. There were little folds in it. June had seen people keep prayers like that, or the picture strip from the booth they went into on their last good date.
“It wasn't the words I objected to,” Meredith said. “It was the change to the order of service. The old way, everybody who ordered something got it. If you had any left and somebody else wanted it, you could offer it to them. When the carrier got bought out, they started selling a tier of membership with something called preferred choice. It promised you could eat whatever you wanted, even if you hadn't picked it before. They didn't add any more chicken, as you've probably worked out.”
“So the chicken had to come from somebody.”
“We were supposed to use a meal for a no-show, if there was one, or for somebody who'd asked to sleep. Then they started telling us the deadline to release an unclaimed meal was the beginning of the second pass of the cart. First pass is drinks. On a short flight you have some excuse. On our flight yesterday we had hours.”
“Who decides a meal's unclaimed?”
“Me.”
“You ever go by someone's seat with something to drink and let them know their meal will be gone in twenty minutes?”
“At first, yes. Then I got told it was inciting complaints. Then we got the bulk button on the screen. Once you tap that, you look at a list of people who have supposedly accepted their lunch. When somebody complains, you're thinking about how to get through your report instead of how to get them something to eat.”
“Did you write LET HER ASK on everybody's?”
“No. Mostly on seats where I thought there wouldn't be trouble if they had to take something else. People who were sleeping, or who didn't speak much English, or who were dressed a certain way.” Meredith's face grew deeply flushed. “I had got myself to a place where I thought I could tell by looking who would understand. Isn't that a lovely word? Understand. I meant who would put up with it.”
“And you decided you could say what you said to me because of how I looked. What part of that was the computer?”
“None.”
June broke her toast in half. It was good toast. “Why did you ask me if I belonged up there?”
“Because when you told me I was wrong I wanted to make you wrong first. It came right out of me. I'm not going to tell you there was a sentence in the manual told me to say that.”
That was the first time June could imagine Meredith at home, taking her shoes off, calling to a person in a different room. Until yesterday she had done plenty of imagining her as an attendant. Now there was going to be the inconvenience of imagining her as a person. It did not lessen the offense. Curiously it made it more serious.
“Northstar says a mix-up took place. Mix-ups do happen,” June said. “I once let a man off at a different Mercy Hospital than the one where his wife was having a baby. It was a terrible day till we got it sorted out. In my defense, the city ought to consider the trouble with having two hospitals with the same name along one road. This wasn't that.”
“No.”
“Are you going to tell them so?”
“I did at seven-thirty this morning.” Meredith handed over her phone with an email open. In plain language it said she had read the name, reserved the meal for a preferred passenger, and spoken rudely to its owner. It said Inez had not been assigned to plate meals in first class and had entered the cabin after June had already seen the card. It asked Northstar to withdraw its statement.
“You're liable to lose your job,” June said.
“I've been doing this for twenty-seven years. My daughters used to think the best thing about me was the way I could fold a blanket and make a pouch for a toy rabbit's ears. The oldest one's at school in Michigan and the youngest sent me that video yesterday. Didn't ask if it was edited. Texted, ‘Mom, did you say that?’ She expected me to tell her. I thought she was entitled to know who she was going to have to love.”
“How'd she take it?”
“She said, ‘Okay.’ My kids tell me that's a whole conversation.”
June nodded. “When my kid's really put out with me she sends a thumbs-up. I'd sooner she kicked me.”
Meredith's laugh turned into tears in the time it took her to look toward the window. She swallowed and collected herself. Nobody in the restaurant paid the slightest attention. At a table near the door two mechanics were building a little tower out of half-and-half containers to see how high they could get before it leaned. June paid for their coffees on her way to the till. She could still do things with other people's meals. The world was wonderfully large.
Her phone rang as she came out of the restaurant. Daniel had given his speech. It had taken three minutes, and the photograph of the chicken had not made the cut.
“I showed them the slide with the number ninety-eight point two,” he said. “That's our reported percentage of passengers who received the meal of their choice. Then I explained how we had counted the woman in seat 3A as a success the minute the cart was rolled out, before we'd asked her a question. I said I couldn't tell them what the correct number was. There's no way of finding out from the data we've got.”