"Are you serious right now?" Yancey said. He said it softly, which was worse. "You know I'm going to have to write this up."
"I'd expect you to," Gunnar said. "I'm going to write it up, too."
He went back into the flight deck. Billie heard him say to Dariela, through the door before it closed, "Tell dispatch I'm not accepting the extension. If we're not airborne by seven, we come back to the gate and they can find another crew," and Dariela said, "Copy," and the door shut.
Hendrik Vandermolen looked at Laverne, and she looked at him, and he lifted his crossword about an inch, the way a man on a tractor lifts two fingers off the wheel at a passing truck on a county road, and went back down the aisle to 33E.
Esperanza came down the jet bridge at a trot with her radio already up to her mouth. "Ramp says the cell's at Parker. You've got about six minutes, then they close it. Are we going or are we not going?"
"We're going," Billie said.
"What was all that?"
"I'll tell you in Baltimore." She signed the paperwork against the edge of the galley counter, and Esperanza tore off her copy, and looked once more into the cabin, at row 2, and then at Billie, and something passed between them that did not need to be put into words between two women who had worked airports for a combined forty years.
"Good," Esperanza said, and pulled back the jet bridge.