"She let me," he said.
"What did she say?"
He shook his head. "Ask her. If you want to know. It's hers." The door closed behind him, and the bolts went home.
Billie rolled the cart back into its stowage and locked it. Her hands were not quite steady. She noticed it from a distance, the way you notice somebody else's hands. She held her wrists under cold water at the galley sink, and dried them, and went back to work, because there were sixteen people in the front of the airplane who needed their meal trays picked up, and a hundred and forty-four in the back, and the job did not care what had happened at the gate. That was the mercy in it. She had thought so for thirty-one years.
Over Missouri, somewhere around eight o'clock Central, Laverne Grier stood up.
She did it carefully, the way she had sat down. She bent and took the cooler out from under 1A by its webbing strap and held it against her hip, and she stepped over Garrison Yancey's legs, which he did not move, and came forward to the galley.
"I need to use the restroom," she said to Billie. "I'm going to take this in with me. I know that's strange. I'm sorry."
"It's not strange."
"It's a little strange."