Nate greeted each guest by name. The names had been printed for him on a card, but he had memorized them on the drive to the airport. A founder could be forgiven many failures of memory, perhaps, but not that one today.
At 1A he stopped and rested a hand on the seatback.
"Comfortable?"
Walter considered the question with unreasonable seriousness. "The chair's too clean. I'm afraid to behave naturally in it."
"We can have someone bring up a little hydraulic fluid."
"Don't tempt me." Walter patted the armrest. "I spent years looking through these windows from the belt loader and thinking the people inside lived in another climate. Turns out they do. It's called money."
Nate smiled. "The weather improves at altitude."
"So they tell me." Walter picked up his badge and turned it in his palm. "Your father hated this seat."
The statement came without reverence, which made it land more deeply. "1A?"
"Any seat he couldn't get out of when work needed doing. Samuel liked the ramp because he could see a problem coming—a tire, a loose panel, a boy driving a tug like he was mad at it. Inside, he'd say, a man had to trust other people and sit on his hands. It nearly drove him insane when your mother made him fly to Detroit for a wedding."
Nate had heard fragments of the story over the years, usually when his father came home unwilling to discuss a rough shift. "What would he have done today?"
Walter did not hesitate. "He'd have pretended to check the cargo hold instead. Twice. Then he'd have asked whether the seat came with food, and when they said yes, he'd have sat down and eaten everything they put in front of him. Including the little salad he claimed not to understand."
"The one with two kinds of lettuce?"
"He'd have eaten the lettuce and kept the roll for evidence that civilization was going too far."
Nate laughed, and for a moment Samuel Wright was not a name on a scholarship or a black-and-white photograph in an airport corridor. He was a man with cold hands and an appetite, a worker who distrusted ceremony until it proved it could carry weight.
Walter studied Nate over the top of the seat. "You look like him when you laugh. Around the eyes. The rest of you got polished by boardrooms."
"Carol says the polish is thin."
"She's a perceptive woman." Walter's thumb moved over the badge. "He talked about you out there. Not often; Samuel wasn't a man to turn his children into conversation. But when the company started, he'd say, 'Nate's trying to build an airline where the folks underneath the airplane count as much as the folks inside it.' Then he'd tell me to stop standing around and help load Spokane."
Nate looked out the window. Rain had thinned to bright mist. Below, Lena stood beside a baggage cart in her reflective vest, one hand raised uncertainly. Walter lifted two fingers from the armrest.
"She does good work," he said.
"I know."
Walter accepted a glass of water, then asked whether the people below were getting anything special or whether Cascade had spent the budget on flowers and chair leather. Nate assured him breakfast was coming for every shift, with bacon by ramp-crew demand.
"Good," Walter said. "A ceremony that forgets the working people is just theater with better chairs."
"We'll put that on next year's sign."
"Put it on this year's, if you can write small."
Nate wished him a good flight. Walter's hand, when they shook, was dry and warm.
"Tell your daughter I'll try not to touch anything important," he said.
"Captain and first officer will appreciate that."
"Which one is your daughter again?"
"Imani. First officer."
Walter nodded as if filing the information beside a load sheet. "Then I'll behave. I know what it costs a woman to get people to stop mistaking her for the announcement."
"She earned her seat," Nate said.
"They usually have to earn it twice." Walter settled deeper into 1A. "Go on. You're blocking the view of a rich man."
Nate stepped aside, smiling, and let the cabin continue around him.
On his way toward the aircraft door, Nate met his daughter coming from the flight deck.
Imani Wright wore her first officer's uniform with a tablet in one hand and a preflight checklist folded into the other. At thirty, she had her mother's composure and her father's habit of looking once more at a thing everyone else considered finished. She stopped when she saw him, professional before she was familial.
"Mr. Wright," she said.
"First Officer Wright."
For a moment they stood in the narrow space by the door, father and daughter observing professional forms while attendants moved around them. Each knew the other was thinking of Samuel.
"How's your passenger in 1A?" she asked.
"Threatening to behave."
"Then we're ahead of last year."
Nate glanced toward the flight deck. "Everything in order?"