At 5:24 p.m. Mountain the forward door of ship 3427 closed. Billie armed it herself, pulling the girt bar down into its floor brackets and the red strap across the window, and called the arming over the interphone, and heard Tomasz and Amberly answer from the back. At 5:27 the tug pushed them back off A41 with a hard little jolt and swung the nose out toward the taxiway, and through the windows on the left side of the cabin she could see the cell coming up from the south over the flat suburbs, its leading edge gone a deep blue-black, and the lightning inside it flickering like a bad fluorescent tube in a hallway. She did her safety demonstration, the same gestures she had made perhaps twelve thousand times. She did not look at row 2. She felt it the whole time, the way you feel a draft.
They took off to the north on 34L at 5:41, with the first big drops just starting to hit the windows, and the airplane bucked twice coming up through the gust front and then climbed out into gold. Twelve minutes later, at thirty-one thousand feet, over the eastern plains, with the storms behind them lit up from inside like paper lanterns, the seat belt sign went off.
There is a kind of normal that comes down over an airplane after a thing has happened on it, and Billie had learned to trust it the way you trust ice in March, which is to say, carefully, and never with your whole weight. The chime went, and the cabin breathed out. Seat belts clicked. In the back, Tomasz and Amberly started the carts. In the front, Billie took orders.
She started at 1A and worked back, on her knees in the aisle with her tablet, saying each passenger's name off the screen. The tablet's cabin list had updated sometime between Denver and thirty-one thousand feet. GRIER, LAVERNE A. 02A. She had looked at it for a moment before she started. It had taken the airplane until the wheels were off the ground to catch up with what Esperanza had done with her own two hands at a podium an hour and a half earlier.
"Mrs. Grier," she said, at row 2. "Can I get you anything? We've got a chicken or a pasta, or there's a cheese plate."
"Water," Laverne said. "Please. No ice."
"Nothing to eat?"
"I don't eat on a run." Her hand was still down beside the seat, her fingers still resting on the handle of the cooler. "I'll eat in Baltimore."
"Mr. Yancey?"