"I once had a man take a live lobster into the lavatory," Billie said. "In a bag of ice. He was going to his daughter's wedding and he said he wasn't going to let it out of his sight. It was eleven pounds. He named it Mr. Pinch. This is not strange."
For the first time since Denver, Laverne Grier smiled. It changed her whole face, the way a light going on in a window changes a whole house at night.
She went into the lavatory and came out again after a few minutes, with the cooler in her hand and her reading glasses hung on their chain against the gray cardigan, and she did not go back to her seat. She stood in the galley beside the coffee maker with the cooler held against her hip, the way some women held a toddler, and looked at the folded-down jumpseat.
"Can I sit for a minute? I've been in that seat with my feet on either side of this thing for two hours and my knees are going to lock."
"Sit."
She sat on the jumpseat. She set the cooler on the galley floor between her shoes, and kept her hand on it. Billie leaned against the counter across from her. There were three feet between them.
"This is the forty-first time," Laverne said.
"The forty-first run?"
"Forty-first run. Since 2021." She looked down at the cooler. "I picked this up at one o'clock this afternoon at a collection center in Denver. I can't tell you where. I can't tell you who. I don't know who. I know there's a person at a hospital in Baltimore who's had all their marrow killed on purpose, and I know there's a bag of somebody else's in here that's going to go into a vein sometime tonight. Usually that's all I know. They give me the paperwork, and the box, and the temperature log, and a phone number, and I get on the plane, and I don't sleep, and I don't eat, and I don't take my hand off it, and when I get there I give it to somebody in scrubs with a badge on and they sign for it, and I get a hotel room and sleep for nine hours and fly home." She shrugged. "That's the job."