The banker had been at a firm on Park Avenue, in a conference room on the thirty-first floor, in the autumn of the year she was twenty-six, when Ninefold had just closed a Series B and she had come in to talk about debt. She had been the first one in the room. He had come in second, a man of about fifty with a good suit and a tan, and he had looked at her, and he had taken off his overcoat and handed it to her. Not rudely. Pleasantly. The way you hand something to the person whose job it is.
She had taken it. She had hung it on the hook by the door, smoothing the shoulder. She had sat down at the head of the table, and the rest of them had come in, and the banker's managing director had said "Naomi, thanks for coming in," and she had watched the banker's face do the thing that faces did. She had run the meeting. She had gotten her terms. She had not mentioned the coat, then or ever, and she had not done business with that firm again, and she had never told anyone why, and the not-telling was, she had decided, her own business and nobody's lesson.
"Mr. Jenkins flew out of here this morning," Devon was saying as he lifted Ruth's bag from the back. "Said to tell you hey if I saw you. Said you'd know who he was."
"Carl?"
"Yes ma'am."
"Tell him hey back." She came around the car. "Devon, this is my mother, Mrs. Ward."
Devon looked at Ruth, who was working herself out of the passenger seat with the book under her arm and the left hip doing what it did, and he did not move to help and he did not look away, and when she was upright he said, "Ma'am," and Ruth looked him up and down and said, "Young man," in exactly the tone that meant he had passed something.
Inside, Naomi held the espresso button down and did not let go. Ruth sat in a leather chair by the fireplace with the book open and did not read it; she watched the ramp through the glass. The G650 was parked a hundred and fifty feet out, nose toward the building, white with a thin green stripe that Naomi had chosen because it was the green of the lane markings at Port Newark, which nobody but her would ever know. The main door was open and the air-stair was down. The APU was running; she could hear the low drone of it through the glass, the sound of an airplane that was awake but not yet going anywhere. A fuel truck was pulling away. Two men in Altitude Private uniforms had come down the air-stair twenty minutes earlier for the walk-around, Devon had said, and gone back up.
"Is that it?" Ruth said.
"That's it."
"It's smaller than I remembered."
"It's exactly the same size."
"Then I've gotten bigger." Ruth closed the book. "What time is your meeting?"
"Six."
"And you'll be done by?"
"Nine. Maybe ten. There's a dinner."
"I'll be asleep."
"I know."
"With the pie."
"I'll have them send up the pie."
Ruth stood, and it took her a moment, and Naomi did not help. They went out through the glass doors into the bright flat April light and the smell of jet fuel and cut grass from somewhere beyond the fence, and they walked across the ramp side by side, not fast, with Devon ahead of them carrying the brown bag and Naomi's black roller, and the drone of the APU got louder as they came.
Danielle Osei was at the top of the air-stair.
She was thirty-eight, in the Altitude Private cabin uniform — charcoal dress, a small silver pin — with her hair pulled back and her hands clasped behind her, and when she saw Ruth at the bottom of the stairs she unclasped them and came down. All the way down. Eleven steps. She had flown with Naomi six times and with Ruth twice, and on the second of those flights, coming back from Palm Beach in January, Ruth had told her about the hip and the thirty-four years and the dining room, and Danielle had told her about her own mother in Accra, who had kept a shop and would not sit down in it, and they had understood each other as two women who had spent a great deal of their lives being told to sit down.
"Mrs. Ward."
"Danielle."
They hugged. It was not a professional hug. Danielle took the bag from Devon with one hand and kept her other hand on Ruth's elbow, not supporting it, just there, and they went up the stairs together at the speed of the hip, and Naomi stood at the bottom for a moment with her handbag on her arm and watched them go.
The handbag was black crocodile with a small gold clasp. The suit was emerald green, a skirt suit, with a fine line of crystal beading at the waist that caught the light when she moved and that she had almost not bought because it caught the light when she moved. Gold hoops, small. Her hair over one shoulder in the loose waves it fell into when she let it. She had dressed for the room in West Palm Beach and the man who would, she hoped, stand up. She had not dressed for the airplane. She never dressed for the airplane.
"Have a good flight, ma'am," Devon said.
"Thank you, Devon."
He went to get the chocks.
The cabin met her the way it always did: the cool of the air conditioning after the ramp, the smell of leather and the faint sweetness of whatever Danielle had in the galley, the honey-colored strip of light along the ceiling, the walnut veneer so glossy it held the round windows in it like a second row of portholes. The forward cabin: four club seats, cream leather, two facing forward and two facing aft, with a walnut table that folded out between them. Beyond, through an open partition, the aft cabin with the divan along the right side and two more seats, and beyond that the lav and the baggage. It was 2:05 p.m. The April sun came through the round windows on the left side in discs and lay on the carpet.
Ruth was already on the divan. Danielle had the blanket out — grey cashmere, the one Ruth liked — and was tucking it in at the far end while Ruth got the left leg up with a small exhale that she would have denied making.
"Shoes?" Danielle said.
"Off. I'm not an animal."
Naomi went aft and stood at the end of the divan and looked at her mother lying under a blanket on a thirty-eight-million-dollar airplane with a library book face down on her chest, and Ruth looked back at her with the expression she had used across the dining room for thirty years when Naomi was about to say something that did not need saying.
"Go sit down," Ruth said. "Read your slides."
"I know the slides."
"Then sit down and know them."
Naomi went forward. She passed the galley, where Danielle had set out a cutting board and a bowl of strawberries and was starting on a pineapple, and Danielle looked up and said "Twenty minutes to wheels up, they said," and Naomi said "Good," and kept going. She sat down in 1A.
Forward-facing. Left side. The principal's seat.