Below him, in the rain that was coming down now in honest earnest, his airline was turning airplanes. A 737 sat at the gate with its belly open and its lights blazing in the wet dark, and around it moved the second airport, his father's airport, in reflective yellow and rain gear: the belt loader easing up, the lavatory truck, the caterers' lift rising slow and stately along the fuselage, fuel hose, pushback tug standing by. And at the front of it all, out on the glistening concrete with the wands crossed above his head and then sweeping down and out — there, and there — stood the marshaller, a young man of perhaps twenty, drenched to the elbows, bringing in the inbound from Portland with a concentration so complete it looked like stillness.
Nate stood with his coffee cooling in his hand and watched the boy work the way his father would have watched him: for the care of it. He watched him set the chocks. He watched him stoop, unhurried, in the rain, and pick up a piece of debris off the stand — a strip of plastic strapping, nothing, the kind of nothing that can end an engine — and carry it to the bin before he did anything else. He watched him check the hold door seal with the flat of his hand as it closed, the way you check a child's forehead.
The boy would never know that the founder of his airline had stood in the window above him on a rainy Tuesday in anniversary week and been, for a moment, almost undone by pride. That was as it should be. The work was the reward for the work; the watching was only Nate's private dividend, and he collected it in silence and took it with him down the concourse when his flight was called.
Flight 318 boarded by groups, orderly and unhurried, the gate agent — a woman named Delia, twenty years with the company, who had once rebooked half a concourse during an ice storm with the serene air of a woman dealing bridge — working the microphone with the ease of long practice. She did not know him. Almost no one in the operation knew him by sight anymore; the company had grown past the size where that was possible, which was the point of the rides, and also, if he was honest, their small private melancholy. He handed over his boarding pass — *WRIGHT/MARCUS, SEAT 1A* — and walked down the jet bridge with his paperback under his arm, a whodunit Carol had pressed on him with the review that the detective reminded her of him: *He notices everything and accuses nobody until he's sure.*
Seat 1A. Window, bulkhead, the wide leather chair his own airline had specced for its first-class cabin back when he'd insisted — against advice, against margins — that the front cabin of a people's airline should feel like being welcomed rather than processed. He hung the old jacket carefully, stowed the blue container, sat down, and felt the familiar settling: the hum of the auxiliary power, the faint clean smell of the cabin, the muted percussion of bags going into the hold below — *his* bags among them, handled by the boy in the rain, every one of them belonging to somebody going somewhere that matters. He put his hand briefly against his breast pocket. There he was.
The purser, a composed woman in her forties named — by her badge — Nair, moved down the aisle with a tray of orange juice and coffee for the front cabin, offering each with the exact, unstudied grace that no training manual had ever successfully written down and that Nate would have traded the whole quarterly report to guarantee. "Morning, sir," she said to him. "Coffee before we push?"
"Coffee would be a kindness," Nate said.
"We'll be a few minutes yet," she said. "There's a weather line over the mountains and they're metering departures. Make yourself at home."
Home, he thought, settling back with the coffee and the paperback as the cabin filled around him — a young woman with a cello case negotiating it into the closet with the crew's help, an elderly couple sharing a newspaper section by section, a businessman across the aisle already asleep with the total surrender of the truly experienced. Home was all around him: a company built by people who'd been shown the wrong door, carrying other people through the sky toward everywhere that mattered to them, in weather, on time, with care. Twenty-five years. His father's gloves in a drawer, his father's wings against his heart, his wife's sandwich in the overhead bin, his daughter somewhere out over America this very morning in the left seat's other chair, flying the other direction.
The purser's voice came over the cabin, warm and unhurried: "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard Cascade Air Flight 318, with service to Chicago O'Hare. We're delighted you're traveling with us during our twenty-fifth anniversary week. If there's anything at all we can do to make your flight more comfortable, please don't hesitate to let us know."
Nate opened his paperback. Up front, the boarding door was still open, the sounds of the gate drifting in on the cool air — a last announcement, rolling suitcases, the ordinary music of departure, not yet complete. He read the first line of the first chapter, and smiled at nothing in particular, a quiet man in a plain jacket, content to be exactly where he was.