Meredith took it away and returned ten minutes later with a china plate under a stainless-steel lid. The chicken was awful. It had been warmed twice and possibly once more, and the sauce had formed a skin thick enough to put on a drum. June ate every potato. It felt important not to lie to herself about the difference between winning a point and having a good lunch.
On his return Daniel brought a sheet of paper folded into four. “I said I put in the green dot. You should know what else I did.”
“Do you work for them now, Daniel?”
“I work for the people who bought the meal management contract. I'm on my way to a conference in Portland. Until about ninety minutes ago I was going to give a speech about customer choice.”
“Going to change the title?”
“I don't think a new title will fix it.”
He opened the paper. It was an old photocopy of a form, soft with the wear of being carried around. A series of boxes was arranged in columns, with a little clock icon beside one of them. It was a sample of his mother's handwriting. SELECTIVE SERVICE at the top, with a line through it, and under that in blue pencil, SLEEPING PASSENGER / QUIET REQUEST. Under instructions: Let her ask for it. Keep hot & check before clearing. His mother had taken particular care to put the second line close to the first.
“She kept a copy of this because it was her first suggestion they put in the handbook,” Daniel said. “She was proud of it. I'd brought it along to show how a good idea from somebody loading carts could become part of the service. There's a photo of her in my slides.”
“Do you know when they cut off the bottom line?”
“No.”
“Before or after your little circles went in?”
“That's an excellent question.”
“It's a yes-or-no question. The excellent kind usually needs more room.”
He smiled. “I don't know, June.”
She thought of Inez and her odd request for the original card. “Are there a lot of those going around?”
“I called the kitchen manager in Denver. She said they're getting as many as thirty a day back in the waste drawer with initials written on them. Some have a line through the name. They photograph food that comes back unopened, to make claims against suppliers. She'll send me a sample with no passenger names.”
“Now you're collecting evidence?”
“I suppose I am.”
“You should know that what I want out of this is to get out of here.”
“I understand.”
“I don't believe you do. I don't want to be valuable to a company having a revelation. I want to make it to a kid's thing on time. If you're suddenly a man with influence, how about finding out when this door shuts?”
Daniel put the paper back in his pocket. Five minutes later he came back from the front with the only answer available. A fresh oxygen bottle was on its way by truck. Once it arrived, twenty minutes. No, they could not let June off to take a different flight without deplaning everybody. No, nobody knew whether the truck had left.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Doesn't help very much.”
“It's quite a lot of help to know what you can't change.”
By now her face was all over her phone. Marsha had reported the fake caption. So had June's daughter, Libby, nineteen and in her first semester of community college. Libby was furious in the quiet and highly organized manner of an Ellis who had access to spreadsheet software. She made a file of every account reposting the story with invented details. On one June owned three airlines. On another Daniel was her estranged husband. On a third the flight was over the Pacific and Meredith had refused her water for nine hours.
Her daughter's message was short. Are you okay, actual answer?
June answered, I'm heartsick about not getting there. I was embarrassed. Actual answer. Now tell me how YOU are.
Mad. Can I put something out saying you're a bus driver and you like chicken?
You can say I object to what was said and I've had a conversation with the person involved. Please do not tell anybody where I'm going or why.
Already thought of that, Mom.
She probably had. At nineteen June had believed the job of a mother was to teach a child absolutely everything worth knowing and then watch it all come back to her in a gratifying display of wisdom. Her actual experience of parenting was mostly being helped across pieces of the world that had been built after she was twenty. She wondered if Libby knew how often her mother was grateful for her.
There came a knock against the open aircraft door. A ground employee had a large green cylinder strapped upright to a luggage dolly. Half the cabin clapped. The man turned it around to display the enormous white letters across the back: COFFEE EQUIPMENT. This time everybody laughed. The man laughed too. June thought that was the first moment since the chicken that she'd been part of a cabin full of people instead of the subject of one.
Ruth got out a second book of a quite different character from the western. It was a little address book, with a letter of the alphabet stamped on each paper tab. She found a number, copied it carefully onto the back of a gas station receipt, and handed it to June.