Meredith came down the aisle. She had pushed up both sleeves. Her hair was coming loose beneath one ear. The white receipt with its empty signature line was sticking out of the pocket of her apron.
“Seat belts,” she said. “Sir, could you pick up that laptop? Thank you. Ma'am, can I get that cup out of your hand?”
June gave it to her. “Is he doing okay?”
“He's talking. That's about the limit of what I can tell you.”
“Then I'll hope he's got plenty to say.”
Meredith ducked her head. She had a way of receiving a kind word as though she expected a second, less kind one to follow. She helped the old woman behind June get a stuck buckle closed, pulled the curtain back, and disappeared.
When they landed the sky was an enormous hard blue. An ambulance came out across the apron, moving surprisingly slowly. A small boy two rows over waved madly at it. His mother tried to put his hand down. When the ambulance got close the driver raised his hand and waved back.
June's phone began to ring before the aircraft had stopped rolling. She took it out expecting Tess. It was a number back home, and underneath it the name East Borough Transit.
“I'm off today,” she said, answering.
“I know perfectly well you're off, Ellis.” It was Marsha, the dispatcher. “My kid just sent me a video. I would like to know why my favorite driver is on the internet holding a tomato and being brave.”
June closed her eyes. “What video?”
“Green sweatshirt. Man with a dark jacket. A bunch of people already know where you work, honey. Somebody recognized you from the Forty.”
“How much of it is on there?”
“About eighteen seconds.”
“Is the other person's face in it?”
“Oh, darling. Everybody's face is in it.”
The cabin door opened. Cold dry air came down the aisle. June had imagined that if ever she was famous it might be for getting a busload of Christmas shoppers across town in eleven inches of snow without using a single word she couldn't repeat in front of a judge. She had done that twice. Nobody had recorded it.
“Would you send me the link?” she asked.
“I would. But before you open it, you ought to know what they put across the bottom.”
Somewhere in Portland a nine-year-old girl would be sitting with her hands in her lap, waiting to acquire a family name she had already been using for two years. Somewhere behind the curtain a sick man was being lifted onto a stretcher. June looked at the card with her name on it, which was only the second thing that day somebody else had written about her without asking.
“What does it say, Marsha?”
“‘Airline owner's daughter goes undercover. Watch staff realize who they've insulted.’”
June's father had repaired municipal elevators. He had died owning one house, two guitars and an uncollectible debt for fifty dollars owed to him by the neighborhood bookmaker. She wished fervently that he were alive to hear this.
“Do me a favor,” she said. “If you find the airline I own, see if you can get me to Portland.”
Chapter 2- The People Who Had to Wait 8999
The ambulance left without its siren. Half the cabin took this as an excellent sign and half as a terrible one. The captain told them the passenger had walked three steps under his own power when asked. June liked him for telling them that. It was a small piece of information a person could hold on to without having to be a doctor.
They had to wait for a fresh oxygen bottle and some paperwork. The door stayed open. A uniformed man appeared with a plastic crate of bottled water and the harried look of somebody who had been told to count it going in and count it coming out. June went to the bathroom. When she came back Daniel had a white napkin over his head.
She stopped beside his seat. “Are you at prayer?”
He lifted a corner. “The kid in row five is filming. I couldn't think what else to do.”
“Let me tell you something about wearing a napkin on your head. It does not make you less interesting.”
He pulled it off. His hair stood up on one side. She turned in the aisle. There was indeed a boy about sixteen years old, pointing his phone their way. “You got your shot,” she said. “I'd appreciate the rest of the day to myself.”
He put it down at once. A woman beside him, probably his mother, had a phone propped against the window at shoulder height. She did not put hers away.
June sat down and watched the eighteen seconds. It began with Meredith pointing at June's shoulder. It ended with Daniel closing his menu. The card was nowhere in it. Neither was Inez or the soup. A recorded voice that sounded like a teenager trying to sell an electric toothbrush pronounced that the world would shortly learn the cost of disrespect. There was stirring music, and the caption spelled airline with two L's.
June watched it twice because the woman on the screen seemed so much better at this than she had felt at the time. Chin up, eyes clear, a certain composure. She remembered being tired and a little ashamed. In the video you couldn't see her fingers working at the tomato in her cuff. For some reason the sight of her own fingers would have made the thing more bearable.