Garrison Yancey had his laptop open on the tray table and the airplane's wifi page up, and he was typing in long paragraphs. He did not look up. "Bourbon. Neat. And the chicken."
"Yes, sir."
She brought the water in a real glass, no ice, and the bourbon in a real glass, neat, and set them down at the same moment, so that neither of them came first. Laverne said thank you. Yancey did not say anything, but he angled the laptop screen a quarter inch away from her, and Billie, who had not tried to read it, saw the first line anyway. To the Office of the CEO.
At 6:22 Mountain the interphone chimed twice in the forward galley, the double chime for the flight deck, and she picked it up.
"Billie, it's Gunnar. I'd like to come out."
"Give me a minute."
She did it by the book, because the book was all there was. She pulled the first-class cart out of its stowage and rolled it into the aisle at the front of row 1, across the entrance to the cabin, and set its brake with her toe, so that the forward galley and the flight deck door were cut off from the rest of the airplane by two hundred pounds of aluminum and ice. She looked down the aisle at the faces in the first rows of the back and saw no one standing and no one looking at the door in a way she did not like. She checked the lavatory and found it empty. Then she picked up the interphone and said the words they used that week, and heard the bolts on the flight deck door slide back, and Gunnar came out, ducking under the lintel, with his hat off.
He looked older than he had at the gate. He looked, she thought, like a man who has been crying in a closed room and has washed his face in a tiny sink and has decided that it worked.
"Two minutes," he said to her. "I want to talk to her. If she'll let me. Then I'll use the lav and go back in."