June looked at the machine. “Oddly enough I need somebody with a tape deck.”
Two and a half hours later she sat in Tess's kitchen between Ada and a tape recorder borrowed from the back room at the newspaper. On the table was the cassette that had been across the country three times, carelessly loved until it had almost come apart. The first half of the recording was a radio announcer offering concert tickets to the seventh caller, followed by an ad for a Ford dealer and a few bars of an old country song. Ada insisted upon playing it from the very beginning. She thought it rude to interrupt the man with the tickets.
They let the whole twenty-six minutes wind out. Then June heard her father drop a spoon on the kitchen floor, and her mother's dry, beloved voice say, “Leave it there, Leon. You spend more time chasing what you've dropped than you do stirring what you've got.” The singing began. There was a third voice on the tape. June had forgotten it entirely. Very faintly, almost too far away for the recorder to catch, little Tess was singing the wrong words behind their parents. She sat beside her daughter now, absolutely still, as she listened to her four-year-old self putting dishes away in a kitchen two thousand miles and thirty-seven years in the past.
When it ended, Ada kept her fingers on the button. “You did it the same way she did.”
“Who?”
“Oh, both of you. All three of you.”
Noreen had made a clean digital copy, which she called Kitchen, and another copy which she put on a little drive that looked like a red house. Ada elected to carry the red house in the pocket of her purple dress. They put the original away for safekeeping. On the way upstairs to bed the little girl turned to ask if there was room in the tiny red house for something from the mother who wrote her letters.
“Of course,” Noreen said. “All the room you need.”
It was the second thing that day June was glad a person had thought to ask for.
Chapter 5- The Price of an Ordinary Lunch 8999
Two days after June came home, a padded envelope arrived at the bus depot. The return address was in Colorado. Inside the envelope was a memory card taped to a sheet of white paper. At the bottom someone had written, in what looked like a child's best cursive, It was supposed to be for my uncle.
The writer was a thirteen-year-old boy named Matthew. His uncle was the passenger who had fainted in the back of the plane. Matthew and his mother had occupied middle seats on opposite sides of the aisle in the last row of first class, where their tickets had been changed so that they could be nearby in case the man needed help. He had been going to Oregon to stay with his brother after an illness and was extremely anxious about the trip. Matthew had promised the man good pictures of the mountains to watch when he felt better. While trying to get a good view out the window between two seats he had heard Meredith speak and turned his camera. He had kept it on until June said she would like her lunch. Then the man in the back called for his sister, Matthew's mother went to him, and the recording ended.
Matthew had sent the clip to his cousins in the family's group chat with the observation, Hope this lady isn't on our plane back. Someone in the family had put it on a private social account. He had no idea how Cabin Justice got hold of it. He wished he had wiped it off the phone. He was sorry somebody had made up a lie about the people in it. His mother was sorry too but said there was a difference between being sorry and being guilty of something. He wanted June to know that the pictures of the mountain after Denver were nice and that his uncle was home.
There was a grown woman's number on the back. June called and got Matthew's mother and through her a shy boy who had been made to understand the importance of apologizing for a thing he had not exactly done. She pictured Ada at nine with her shoes on, ready to leave before a grown-up had a chance to be displeased with her.
“You can put it away if you'd rather,” Matthew said.
“I have a reporter who will want to see it. She'll ask you first. May I give her your mom's number?”
“I guess so.”
“And I want you to keep the mountain pictures. You did the right thing looking after your uncle.”
He hesitated. “If I'd been a grown man with a seat near you, I'd have said it was yours.”
“Matthew, when you are a grown man with a seat near somebody who needs one, you'll have a straightforward way to do that. Meantime, let me talk to your mother again. I'd like her to know what an excellent letter you wrote.”
After her shift June handed the memory card to Beatrice's colleague in the city room of a local paper. The full clip was forty-one seconds. At the end, just audible beneath the sound of somebody dropping ice into a glass, was Meredith's voice saying she would speak to the galley. There was no sign of a second attendant. The little card appeared under June's hand in practically the first frame. There had been no plot, no identities waiting to be unveiled at the last dramatic second. There had been a woman treated with contempt, another woman who had made a habit of choosing who got less, and a group of people with varying degrees of power to do something about it.