June kept the letter. She didn't invite Meredith to dinner. They both had friends and full lives and all the ordinary things two women might discover they liked in one another if they met under other circumstances. June didn't owe anybody a friendship to establish she had accepted an apology. What she did, three months later, was write a note saying she hoped the woman's younger daughter was having an easier semester and that a sincere okay was a great deal better than a false never mind. Meredith wrote back on a postcard from Milwaukee. The picture on the front was a giant chicken standing outside an ice cream shop. On the back she wrote, Finally found one big enough to go around.
In the meantime Daniel's numbers improved by getting dramatically worse. A trial run on four routes asked crew members to mark an individual meal accepted when the passenger actually had it. People who wanted quiet could select that option before takeoff. Their meals stayed on the cart. The airline could promise preferred passengers a choice among unassigned meals, and if somebody wished to buy the promise of a full choice, the people who packed the cart could put on an extra dinner. It took money and space. There turned out to be ways to make room for food when a person stopped considering the expense of storing it more real than the fact of somebody else's hunger.
On the first week of the trial, seventy-nine percent of passengers received their chosen meal. The person at the top of the company who had to explain to investors how an improvement had knocked almost twenty points off a measure of success had a very long morning. Daniel sent June an account of it. He added, I found an old card while clearing out my desk. It says, “Don't fix a thing before you know what it is.” I wrote this one myself. She must have told me that fifty times and been old and tired by the time I thought I'd discovered it alone.
The story left the front pages and other stories came along. When somebody spilled coffee down the back of an actor at a charity auction, Cabin Justice used it to predict the imminent bankruptcy of a whole chain of hotels. June stopped hearing from strangers. The smart and careful correction the website eventually printed at the end of the eighteen-second clip got a few hundred views. Its original had already been seen by more people than lived in some countries. She could live with this imbalance because there was simply no good way to go looking for all those people and explain things again, and she had ordinary places that actually required her attendance.
One was the bus depot on a Wednesday just as winter was giving the city a trial run. A sixteen-year-old in an expensive school blazer stood by the front door with the wrong change in his hand. His mother had put a ten in his pocket and the machine took a different kind of payment. Behind him was a tired woman in bedroom slippers carrying a purse in which June could hear coins. Behind her was a man with a bicycle that would barely fit on the rack. Everybody was going somewhere they had been promised they could reach in a reasonable amount of time. It was tempting, in such circumstances, to decide you knew what people needed by the way they looked as they stood there holding things.
“What do you need from me?” June asked the boy.
“Can I just stand here till my dad goes? I don't need to ride anywhere. He thinks I'm catching a bus to meet some kids from school. I'm not doing that anymore. I just don't know how to tell him yet.”
“Is somebody making trouble for you?”
“One kid mostly. I have got to tell him myself.”
June looked in the mirror. No car waiting at the curb. A man outside the coffee shop across the street raised a hand at the bus. When his son lifted his own in response the man turned around to leave.
“You're welcome to stand here another minute. Do you have someplace warm to go?”
“Yeah. Actually I might go across and sit with my dad. He's probably not doing much of anything.”
The boy got off the front step to let the woman in slippers on. She asked June how far it was to Mercy Hospital.
“Which Mercy?”
“Oh, honey. There's two?”
June smiled. She put the brake on properly and took out the map. People in the seats behind her were in a hurry. The woman with the purse had a grandchild in one of the hospitals and nobody had had the sense to write down the street. It took a minute to call. It took another two for the woman who answered to go to a window and see what street she was looking at. The bus left three minutes late. Across the road the boy in the expensive blazer was telling his father something at a small metal table. There was no way of knowing whether he was explaining what had happened or asking for the ten back to buy them both something to eat. June was prepared to leave the two of them their privacy.
That evening she came home to find a box from Portland. Ada had sent her a hand-painted wooden sign that read JUNE'S KITCHEN and a proper jar of jam made out of blueberries that had grown behind Ruth's nephew's house. Ruth had met the family for lunch and brought a great many blueberries and no boiled eggs. In the bottom, wrapped in tissue, was a paper card in a child's square best handwriting.