The man across the aisle had heard. He wiped his mouth and got out a small spiral notebook, the kind contractors kept in the breast pockets of their shirts. “I used to have lunch in the loading kitchen once a week,” he said. “A woman there would write on the cards when a meal needed extra attention. Big letters. She wrote with her left hand because the rack was on the other side. That's why the letters slant downhill.”
June examined the card. The last T was a fraction lower than the L at the beginning. “Do those words mean something different downhill?”
“They meant that a woman coming out of chemo had asked us not to wake her up. She was sick most afternoons and didn't want to be asked about food in front of strangers. If she wanted her lunch, she'd ask. That was a long while ago.”
“And you think somebody got that mixed up with me?”
“No. I think something meant for one person got turned into a rule. I've seen it happen with other things.”
“Who's the woman who wrote the first card?”
“My mother.”
June looked at him more closely. His watch was quite ordinary, the sort with glow-in-the-dark numbers. She had put him in a whole category on account of his face and the crisp collar on his blue shirt. The difference, she thought, was that nobody had ever taken away a man's lunch because she thought he probably owned a good watch.
“Is that her handwriting?”
“No. She died six years ago.” He took his glasses off to examine the card and left two pale half-moons at the top of his nose. “I know it sounds like one of those things people tell you about their mothers after they die. How they put together the first satellite or invented the Oreo. Mine actually did run a kitchen that fed airplanes. I washed dishes there summers. Went off to school. Came back with a very expensive diploma and made the system worse.”
“Which part?”
“The green dot.”
He turned a page in his notebook and drew three circles. Years ago, before vending companies owned the kitchens at most of Northstar Air's hubs, leftover food had been counted by hand. The kitchen got billed for extras and penalized for shortages. For a long time they had no decent way of telling how many people had actually been offered a meal. Daniel's contribution was to let the crew close a whole row of orders at once instead of tapping a screen twenty-four times. His mother had said he would be sorry. He had accused her of being afraid of technology. Not an outstanding hour, in retrospect.
“A person can go back and change one,” he said. “At least they could when I left. I'd have to see the current build.”
“I'm a bus driver,” June said. “They gave us one of those little screens for counting bus wheelchairs. First week they bragged we'd carried forty-three people in wheelchairs on my route. There's a road hump outside St. Anthony's that does the counting all by itself. You can make a nice chart out of practically anything.”
Daniel laughed. He seemed surprised she had a sense of humor. Maybe everybody with a notebook thought the world was divided into people who explained things and people things happened to.
Her watch buzzed. She had bought an hour of internet to hear from Tess. The message read, Bad news but don't worry. Which June thought was a particularly mean pair of instructions to send somebody thirty thousand feet up. Another bubble appeared.
Clerk called. Docket moved up. 2:40. We told Ada you'll come straight from the airport.
June's scheduled arrival was 1:39. She knew Portland traffic. Getting there in time would require everything to be where it was supposed to be, including her suitcase, her hired car, and the bridge across the river. She wrote, Tell her I'll wear my traveling clothes. Saves seven minutes. A picture arrived of Ada's face, her front tooth halfway grown in and a black bow tie around her neck that belonged to Tess's wife. June had bought the tie for their wedding. You could trace most of the history of that family through people borrowing things on important days.
The captain announced they were beginning their descent into Denver.
June looked up at the ceiling as though she could see through it to the map. They weren't supposed to be landing in Denver.
A man a few rows back had fainted. A nurse had answered the call, and the captain had elected to put the plane down. The explanation took less than a minute. The older woman behind June started gathering her loose belongings. People looked at their watches, including June, and then felt bad about it, including June. The diversion could mean forty minutes or three hours. Somebody else's worst day had just brushed up against her sister's best.
She sent the news to Tess and got no answer. She wrapped the cassette in her green sweatshirt pocket and pulled the zipper shut. On the other side of the aisle Daniel was texting furiously with both thumbs. A flight attendant in the back called for more space. June heard the sound of an oxygen bottle being rolled into position, the two little clacks when the valve was opened. She knew the sound from the winter a passenger had had a stroke on her route while everyone else had been trying to get to a snow day at school.