"Figured I'd stay till she pushes."
Carl looked at him for a second. Then he nodded, once, and put a hand on the young man's shoulder as he passed, and said nothing else, and went up the air-stair.
Toby was waiting at the top. Carl shook his hand and looked at him the way a check airman looks at a first officer.
"You good?"
"Yes, sir. I'd like to run it from the top with you."
"We'll run it from the top. That's the only way I run it." He stepped into the cabin and looked forward, where Naomi had stood up from 1A to meet him, and he inclined his head to her, and she inclined hers to him, and that was their whole greeting, and then he looked aft.
Ruth Ward was sitting on the divan with a cup of tea in both hands and a plate of mango on the table beside her, and she was looking at him.
Carl Jenkins stopped in the aisle.
He could not have said what it was. Something in the set of her shoulders, and the cardigan, and the neat grey crop, and the way she looked at a stranger in a uniform without any deference at all, just assessment. He had grown up around women who looked at men like that.
"East Orange?" he said.
Ruth's eyebrows went up a quarter inch.
"Central Avenue," she said.
"Which block."
"Between Harrison and Munn. The brick one with the green door. Forty-one years."
"My mother shopped at the A&P on Central and Harrison every Saturday of my childhood," Carl said. "She used to make me carry the bags home. Eleven blocks."
"Then you went to Columbian School."
"I went to Columbian School."
"I was the librarian at Columbian School for nineteen years before they moved me to the high school," Ruth Ward said. "What year did you leave."
"Seventy-eight."
"Then you missed me by two." She looked at him over the rim of her teacup. "Were you a reader?"
"No, ma'am. I was a boy who wanted to fly airplanes and thought books were for people who couldn't."
"And what do you think now?"
He looked at her for a long moment, and the APU droned, and Naomi, standing in the forward cabin with her handbag on her arm, watched a sixty-one-year-old retired airline captain decide how honest to be with her mother.
"Now I think they're the same thing," he said. "You sit still and you go somewhere."
Ruth Ward set her teacup down. "Sit down and fly my daughter's airplane, Captain Jenkins. We can talk about Central Avenue in Florida."
"Yes, ma'am," said Carl, and went forward to the flight deck, and that was how the flight to Palm Beach began.
They ran the checklist from the top.
Naomi listened to it from 1A, the way you listen to rain. Two voices, one older and one younger. Battery. On. APU. Running. Fuel quantity. Checked, thirty-one thousand. Flight controls. Free and correct. She had heard it on this airplane forty times and never once thought about it, and now she thought about it, because an hour ago two men had been in that flight deck running the same list and one of them had been building a mistake behind his eyes the whole time and the list had not caught it. The list was for the airplane. There was no list for the man.
She thought about the cabin attendant on the other aircraft who had been told to stay in the galley where she was useful, and who had said no when asked whether she wanted to pursue it, and she wondered who had been in the room when she said it. She did not know the woman's name. She would, by Monday.
At 3:22 Toby's voice came over the cabin speaker, steady, with a new slot time of 3:40 and a door closing in five minutes, and from the aft cabin Ruth Ward said, loudly enough for the whole airplane, "I've been waiting an hour and a half on a ramp in New Jersey, young man. Fly the airplane," and Danielle laughed again, and somewhere in the flight deck Carl Jenkins laughed too.
Devon pulled the chocks at 3:27 and stood back and watched the door come up and seal, and the air-stair fold itself into the fuselage, and then the whine of the left engine starting, catching, settling into its hum, and then the right. He raised his hand, flat, the way the line techs did, and in the left seat behind the windscreen a Black man in a four-stripe jacket raised his back, and the airplane began to roll.
They lined up on Runway 24, and in 1A Naomi felt the brakes release and the push in her back as the airplane began to move, and she watched the grass go by, and then the fence, and then the Meridian building with a small figure in a reflective vest standing outside the glass door with chocks in his hand, and then nothing but sky.
Wheels up at 3:41.
The airplane climbed out over the Meadowlands, and below them the marsh gave way to the Turnpike and then to Newark, the port, the cranes standing over the container yards where her father had worked for twenty-two years.
Aft, Ruth Ward was asleep under the blanket, on her side, with her bad hip up, one hand under her cheek. Danielle had turned the cabin lights down to a low amber and was sitting across from the divan with a paperback open on her knee, not reading it, watching the old woman breathe.
Naomi had the cold-storage deck open on her phone. Forty-one slides. A board meeting at six. She did not read it. She held the phone in her lap on top of the handbag and watched the coast come up on the left, the long pale line of the Jersey shore running south, Sandy Hook, Asbury, the barrier islands, the water bright and flat under the April sun, and somewhere down there Toms River, and somewhere behind her a parking lot at Teterboro where a man was sitting in his car, and she did not think about him, because she had already thought about him exactly as much as he was going to get.
She thought about her mother's hand on her chest. She thought about the first line of a trip sheet, and her own name on it, and how the whole thing, start to finish, had come down to whether a man read one line.
The seatbelt sign went off with a soft chime.
"Folks, this is Toby in the flight deck." His voice on the PA was steady, unhurried, like a forecast for a mild day. "We're through fifteen thousand feet, climbing to forty-one. Smooth air the whole way down the coast. We'll have you in Palm Beach about six-oh-five local. Thanks for flying with us today."
A click, and then the drone of the engines, and the light, and the shore going by.
Naomi closed the deck without having read a word of it, and put the phone face down on the walnut table, and watched New Jersey slide away beneath her wing, and let it go. At 3:50 in the afternoon the Meridian Aviation Services parking lot held eleven cars, and one of them had a man in it who had not moved for twenty-four minutes.