"No," Carl said. "You didn't tell me the story. You told the flight attendant on the Vail trip, in the galley, while I was doing the walkaround. She told me later. You said the kid had no business in the seat."
Gerald closed his eyes.
"I'm not here for that," Carl said. "I didn't drive up here to make you sit in it. You've been sitting in it for a month and I can see it on you and it hasn't done you any good. Here's what I'm here for." He took a folded piece of paper out of his jacket, a page torn from a flight-planning pad, and put it on the table between the two plates. There was a name on it and a phone number and the word NEWARK. "Hal Brandvold. He runs the crew side for Trans-Coastal Cargo. 767s and 757s out of EWR, nights, Memphis and Louisville and Cincinnati and back. They're short captains. They're always short captains. They don't care about the trade-press story because they don't read the trade press, and they don't care about your file because I've already told Hal what's in it and he said, and I'm quoting him, so he yelled at a rich lady, I've got guys who've yelled at the FAA. He'll want a sim check and a face-to-face. You've got the hours and the type. You'll get it."
Gerald looked at the paper and did not pick it up.
"Why," he said.
Carl took his time. He finished the last of his toast and wiped his hands on the napkin and set it down folded.
"Because you can fly," he said. "Twenty-six years and two complaints that were about your mouth and zero that were about your hands. And because I'm sixty-one years old and I've watched a lot of men go down the drain over a thing they did in two seconds, and most of them deserved to lose what they lost, and I'm not saying you didn't. But I don't think the world's better with you selling boat insurance in Boca and telling that story in a bar for the rest of your life. I think it's better with you in a cockpit at three in the morning next to somebody who looks like me, where you can't tell the story because it's just the two of you and the checklist and Memphis. Captain's seat. Night freight. Nobody cares what you look like at 3 a.m. and nobody cares what they look like either. Figure it out there."
He put a twenty on the table and stood up.
"Call him this week," he said. "He won't wait."
Gerald sat in the booth for a long time after Carl had gone. He heard the Buick start in the lot and pull out onto 17. He put the piece of paper in his shirt pocket. He sat another ten minutes. Then he went out to his car and sat with his phone in his hand, and did not call, and drove home, and called at 4:30 that afternoon from his kitchen, standing up, and a man with a Minnesota-flat voice answered on the second ring and said, "Brandvold," and Gerald said, "Carl Jenkins gave me your number," and the man said, "I know. Can you be at Newark Thursday at nine."
Day 90 was a Wednesday in July, and it was hot on the ramp at Teterboro by nine in the morning, the kind of heat that came up off the concrete and made the far hangars shimmer.
Danielle Osei was in the galley of N417KW plating fruit. She had been doing this for eleven years, on five different airplanes, and she still did it the same way, the melon in a fan, the berries in a line along the edge, the two slices of star fruit on top because Ruth Ward liked star fruit and had said so once, on the second trip, and Danielle had never forgotten it. The APU was running. The cabin was cool and smelled of the lemon oil the detailers used on the walnut. Through the open main door she could hear Devon out on the ramp, talking to somebody, and the beep of a fuel truck backing up two aircraft down.
She had given her statement in April and signed it. She had not been asked about the two complaints before, the flight attendant and the line tech, because those were other people's. But she had known about them. Everybody on the airplane had known. That was what "handled" had meant: everybody knew and nobody above them had asked. Now there was a rule, on Altitude letterhead in May and in the management contract a week later: any complaint, any crew member, in writing, to the owner, twenty-four hours, no exceptions. She had read it twice and thought about the line tech from two years ago, a woman named Priya who had quit and gone to sell Hondas.
She finished the star fruit. She looked down the cabin once, at the cream leather and the walnut and the light through the round windows, and thought that it had never, in six trips and now seven, felt like it belonged to anybody but the woman who owned it.
Toby Reinholt came up the air-stair at 9:20 with his flight bag and his hat under his arm and four gold stripes on each cuff of a jacket he had picked up from the uniform supplier in Hackensack the day before and had not yet worn anywhere.
He had put it on in the parking lot and looked at himself in the Meridian lobby doors and taken it off again, because it had felt like showing off and because he was from Minnesota and his mother would have known somehow. Three weeks in the sim in Savannah, the oral, the check ride with a check captain who had failed two of the last four and who had shaken his hand afterward and said, "Don't let them make you fly the schedule instead of the airplane."
At his upgrade interview in April, Lena Voss had asked him why he had taken six seconds to unstrap. He had thought about lying and had said instead, "Because he was the captain and I was afraid of him," and she had written something down and said, "Good. That's the first honest answer we've had to that question in this building."
In the flight deck Carl Jenkins was already in the right seat with his reading glasses on and the release spread across his lap. He looked up as Toby came in and looked at the stripes and looked back at the release.
"They fit," Carl said.
"Little long in the sleeve."
"They're always long in the sleeve. Sit down, Captain. Weather's good. There's a line of buildups over the Carolinas that'll be gone by the time we get there. Fuel's on. I've done the walkaround, don't trust me, do it again."
Toby did it again. He walked around the G650 in the heat with his hand on the skin of it, the way he had been taught, nose to tail and back, and when he came around to the air-stair Devon was there at the bottom with the chocks, in a Meridian polo with sweat already darkening the collar, and Devon nodded at him and then at the stripes and said, "Captain," and Toby said, "Don't start," and Devon grinned and said, "Too late, man."