The newspaper ran the piece on a Sunday. The headline was THE MEAL THE NUMBERS SAID SHE HAD. It included photographs of two training cards, an explanation of the software change, and a careful account of what an airline had promised its highest spenders while leaving the people who actually served them to take food from somewhere else. The paper did not name the minor passenger who had supplied the footage. It said the company had acknowledged the incident but still disputed the inference that whole groups of passengers were being disadvantaged. The reporter pointed out that its method of counting made it impossible to measure which groups had received what.
June cut the story out with scissors because she had got to be an age where that was how people experienced the news when it actually belonged to them. The first time she looked up from the page Libby was sitting across from her with one of the blue pots between her palms. She had ground the foot down and put a little felt underneath it. It stood perfectly steady on the table.
“Grandma could've used one of those,” June said.
“I think I'm going to put the crooked ones on sale the way they were. I was so busy making them stand up straight I forgot how to tell one from the other. One of my teachers asked me if they would hold water. I said yes. She said you ought to take some credit for having made a thing that does what you set out to make.”
“Now there's an idea.”
“I also told her my mother owned an airline, so I'd be able to subsidize the business until I could get it going.”
June threw a dish towel at her. The young woman caught it, wiped the bottom of the pot, and began emptying the dishwasher.
They read some of the comments the first day and very few after that. A man in Kansas wanted to know how a city bus driver could have bought a first-class ticket on her salary, apparently in the belief that all bus drivers had agreed to submit their bank statements to his inspection. Three women who used wheelchairs had sharp observations about the use of the word offered, which in their experience could mean somebody had glanced toward the boarding ramp from a distance and decided it looked functional. One former kitchen worker remembered Daniel's mother, Bea, who used to wear different-colored earrings because she did not care to share the burden of two matching ones with the rest of her responsibilities on a Monday morning. Daniel confirmed this. He sent June a photo of a woman in a paper hat standing by a stack of plastic trays, wearing a cherry on one ear and what looked like a very small sneaker on the other.
Northstar issued a correction on Tuesday. It was four sentences long and took eighteen people to approve. June knew this because Gloria from passenger experience called to apologize and, in a lapse into candor, complained about the time it took to get eighteen people onto the same call. The correction acknowledged that June had not approved its first statement. It confirmed there was no evidence of a crew member staging the incident. It said the company was reviewing service and recordkeeping on flights with advanced meal orders. June asked why it couldn't just say a woman was served salad because somebody figured she would accept it and give her chicken to a better-paying customer. Gloria said, “Because nobody knows how to get eighteen people to sign that.”
“Could you sign it?” June asked.
Gloria said nothing for a while. Then she said, “Between the two of us, I think that is what happened.”
“Then you have a starting number. Seventeen more to go.”
Inez went back to work on a Thursday. She sent a picture of the duck bag sitting upright beside her half of a home-baked potato pie. Raquel in Denver had shared the pie. A paper flag stuck in the crust bore a handwritten instruction: EAT THIS YOURSELF, INEZ. The girl reported her stepson had requested an official certificate recording his duck's accumulated miles and was quite angry to discover that while adult passengers could earn points, bags in the shape of waterfowl could not. The airline had not paid Inez for two lost days of work until Melanie persuaded someone that having an attendant wait at home by a phone to be asked about a photograph was work by the company's own definition. It took four weeks. Those were two days for which the girl had had to find child care and groceries in real time.
Meredith's case took longer. She received a written warning and was taken off lead duty for a month. At the hearing, three members of her crew confirmed that the procedure she had described was common. One of them said he had been taught it by Meredith herself six years earlier. She wrote to June afterward. I thought it was brave of him to say so while I was sitting there. When I told him that afterward he said I'd made him afraid for years. I am trying to listen to things like that without looking around for something I can prove.