The first officer on N294TC that night was a woman, which he had not expected, and Black, which he had. She was in the right seat when he came up the ladder with his bag, thirties, close-cropped hair, the company's grey epaulets, the release open on her lap and her reading light on, and she looked up and he saw her see the stripes and then his face, and he saw her not know who he was. That was the thing. She had never heard of him. To her he was a new captain on a 767 at three in the morning, and what she felt about that was the ordinary thing a first officer feels, which is wait and see.
He put his bag down. He sat in the left seat. The rain came down the windscreen in sheets lit orange by the ramp lights, and out beyond the nose the cargo loaders were still working the main deck, the drone of the APU under everything, and his hands knew where everything was because they had known for twenty-six years and the hands had never been the problem.
He had rehearsed what he would say. He had rehearsed it for six months, in the one-bedroom in Elizabeth, in the car, in the right seat watching old men talk about grandchildren. He had tried a dozen versions, and most of them had been speeches, and he had thrown them out one by one because Carl had not given him a speech and that was the only reason he had been able to hear it.
So he did not give one. He turned in the seat, and looked at her, properly, the way he had not looked at a woman in the forward cabin of a Gulfstream a year and a half ago, and he said, "What's your name?"
She looked at him a moment. "Imani Okafor," she said. "Captain."
"Imani," he said. He said it back carefully, getting it right. "Gerald. Gerry's fine. I've got eleven hundred hours in this airplane and six months with the company and this is my first night in this seat, so if I do something you don't like, I want to hear about it before we're airborne, not after. Okay?"
A small pause. "Okay," she said.
"Okay." He turned forward. "Before-start checklist, please."
She read it. He answered it. The rain came down. At 2:52 they pushed, and at 3:14 N294TC rolled out onto runway 22 right and went, heavy and slow and sure, up through the rain and out over the dark water, and when they broke out on top at eleven thousand there were stars, and below them the Jersey shore ran south as a thin unbroken line of lights, Asbury and Toms River and Atlantic City and on into the dark, and Gerald Pruitt looked down at it for a second and then back at his instruments, and did not say anything about where he was from, and did not tell any story at all.
Over Harrisburg, Imani Okafor said, "You want coffee? I'm getting up," and he said, "Please," and she brought it, and that was the whole conversation until Memphis.
In East Orange the dining room still had the library in it.
It had been there since 1991, when Ruth Ward had come home from school with a trunk of books the district was going to pulp and told her husband she would not have it, and James Kessler had built the shelves himself over three weekends from pine he got on Springfield Avenue, floor to ceiling on all four walls, around the window and the door. He had not been a carpenter and they were not quite square and they had held for thirty-five years. He had died four years after he built them. Ruth had never moved anything.
It was a Sunday evening in May, the second May. The windows were open. Somebody's radio, somebody's grill, a kid on a bike going by and then back. Ruth was shelving, a stack of six on the table, a biography and two novels and a book about the Negro Leagues she had read four times, standing on the good hip, running a finger along the spines to find the place. The hip had been replaced in January. It was better. It was not what it had been, and she had made her peace with that by deciding not to discuss it.
Naomi sat at the table with her laptop open and a document on the screen.
It was nothing special. It was a signature page, the last of forty, for the Savannah facility's refinancing, and her lawyer had sent it that afternoon with a note that said no rush, Monday's fine, and she had opened it anyway because she did not like things waiting on her. Her name was typed below the line where she would sign. NAOMI KESSLER-WARD. Chief Executive Officer, Kessler-Ward Holdings, LLC.
She had signed ten thousand of these. She did not usually look at them.
She looked at this one. Perhaps it was the room, or the sound of her mother's finger on the spines behind her, or that it was a year and a month since a Thursday at Teterboro she had thought about less and less and then, lately, more. She put her finger on the screen, on the small horizontal mark between the two names, the one she had asked for at twenty-two at the county clerk's office in Newark when the clerk had said, with a hyphen or without, and she had said, with. So both of them would be on the door. So that anybody who read her name would have to read all of it.
A captain had not read it. He had read the line above it, the one somebody else had written, and stopped. She had concluded, in the first weeks, that this was the most ordinary thing in the world, and that this was the problem with it. People read the line they had already written in their heads, and looked up, and saw what the line told them to see.
So she had made them read. She had not shouted. She had made one call through the proper channel, and then she had written a rule, and then carried the rule into a boardroom in Charlotte, and the rule was not complicated. Read the whole thing. Read the first line and the second and the line at the bottom where the line tech signed his name. Verify.
Behind her, Ruth found the place for the Negro Leagues book and slid it home.
"You going to sign that or stare at it," Ruth said.
"Staring at it."
"Mm." Ruth picked up the next book. "Your father couldn't get those shelves square. I told him. He said, Ruthie, the books don't know."
Naomi laughed, a little, the way she did, mostly in the breath.
She took her finger off the hyphen. She signed. She closed the laptop and sat a moment longer with her hands flat on the table her father had refused to move and her mother had refused to move after him, with the last of the May light going amber through the window and across the not-quite-square shelves, and her mother's cardigan sleeve brushing a row of spines, and the kid on the bike going by outside one more time.
Ruth put the last book up.
"There," she said.