Naomi was forty-seven years old. She had been flying for Meridian Air for eleven years, a captain for five. Before that she had flown C-130s for the Air National Guard, sixteen years in the 179th Airlift Wing, two deployments, one of them long enough that her father had kept a calendar on his refrigerator and crossed off days with a red grease pencil from the bus garage. She was still in the Guard, a lieutenant colonel now, drilling one weekend a month and spending most of those weekends in a windowless room at the base teaching young aircrew how to investigate accidents so that the next accident did not happen. Her father used to say she had been born with a checklist in her hand.
The shuttle driver was Odette Pryor, who drove the overnight loop and who had once, during a February ice storm, pushed the shuttle out of a snowbank with Naomi and two baggage handlers rather than wait an hour for a tow. Tonight, sitting in the first seat behind the driver with a backpack on her knees and a pink bonnet over her braids, was a girl of maybe twelve who was very obviously supposed to be asleep and very obviously was not.
"Captain," Odette said. "Long day?"
"Long enough to count as two." Naomi heaved her bag up the steps. "And who's this?"
"This is my daughter, Jasmine, who has school in the morning and whose babysitter got the flu, and who is going to sit right there and not touch anything." Odette gave the girl a look that was mostly love. "Jaz, this is Captain Whitfield."
The girl's eyes went straight to the four gold stripes on the cuffs of Naomi's jacket, and then to her face, and then back to the stripes, as if checking that the two things really went together.
"You're the captain?" Jasmine said. "Like the actual captain?"
"The actual one," Naomi said, and sat down across the aisle. "The first officer's the other actual one. We take turns being in charge of the radio."
"Did you fly the plane that just came in? The one from Charlotte? I watched it land. Mama let me watch from the window by the bag belt." Jasmine was sitting up straight now, wide awake, the backpack forgotten. "It came in kind of sideways and then it straightened out right at the end."
"There was a crosswind," Naomi said, surprised and pleased. "From the right. You have to point the nose into it a little, like a boat crossing a river, and then right before the wheels touch you kick it straight. That's called a crab and a de-crab."
"A crab," Jasmine repeated, delighted.
"Don't get her started," Odette said, pulling away from the curb. "She's got a whole notebook. Tail numbers. She writes down tail numbers."
"So did I," Naomi said. "When I was about your age my father used to drive me out to the fence at the end of the old runway, the one they closed, and we'd sit on the hood of his car and I'd write down every airplane that came over. Make, model, airline, time. I had three notebooks by the time I was thirteen."