The day after it happened I had lunch with my daughter and her husband in London. My son-in-law is Black. I have known him for three years and I have spent all of that time being polite to him, which my daughter once told me was worse than if I had been rude, and which I did not understand until the morning I met you. I told them both what I had done. I told them why. I told my son-in-law that I had been doing the same thing to him since the day we met. It was the hardest conversation of my life. He told me it was not enough, and he was right. But they have let me back into their lives a little. My grandchild is due in March. I would like to be someone that child does not have to be careful around. I do not know yet whether I can be. I am trying.
I have also, for the first time, read your letter. The one at the back of the magazine. The one with your photograph. I have flown with your airline for eleven years and I had never read it. In it you tell a story about your grandmother, who cleaned airplanes in Atlanta, and about something she said to your father when he was a boy sitting in an empty first-class seat. I will not write it here, because it is yours. But I have read it perhaps a hundred times now. I keep it in the drawer of my bedside table.
I asked the agent at the gate at Kennedy, after I left the plane, why the flight was not leaving. She did not know. I think now that I do. I think it was not really about me at all, and that I was only the thing that happened to be standing in the doorway. I hope that whatever it was about, you were able to change it.
With sincere regret, and with respect,
Catherine Ashworth
Naomi read the letter twice. Then she folded it carefully along its creases and put it back in the envelope and sat at her desk for a while, looking out the window at the city.
She wrote back that afternoon. By hand, on plain paper, in black ink. It was much shorter than Catherine's letter. It took her a long time anyway.
Dear Mrs. Ashworth,
Thank you for your letter. I read it carefully, and more than once.
I'm not going to tell you that what happened didn't matter, because it did, to me and to everyone in that cabin who heard it. But I believe you when you say you are trying, and I know from my own life how much harder that is than saying sorry. Saying sorry is a moment. Trying is every day.
You asked whether I was able to change what it was really about. We've started. It will take longer than any of us would like. It always does.
I hope lunch in March goes well. I hope your grandchild grows up knowing a grandmother who is worth knowing. That part, I think, is up to you.
My grandmother's name was Ruth. You are welcome to the story. I think she would have wanted you to have it.
Sincerely,
Naomi Morgan
She sealed the envelope and wrote the address and put it in the outgoing tray on Lena's desk on her way out of the office. She did not tell anyone about it. She did not keep a copy.
* * *
In March, on a cold bright morning at the end of the month, Naomi Morgan flew to London again.
She booked the seat herself, in her own name, with her own card, with no code on the reservation. She did not do it to check on anyone. The new training program had been running for three months, and the reports from the floor were good, better than she had dared to hope; Graham and Tessa had turned out to be gifted teachers, and Andre Battle had turned out to be even better at talking to people who did not want to listen than he had claimed. Complaints about seat disputes in Signature had fallen by two-thirds. Sovereign membership had fallen by four percent, nearly all of it in the first month, and then, slowly, had begun to grow again, with new names that did not look like the old ones. The board had approved the expansion in February. The first of the eleven refitted aircraft would fly in the autumn.
She flew because her father used to, and because she had begun to understand why.