"How did you start?"
"I donated." Laverne looked up at her. "In 2013. I was fifty-one. I'd signed up at a blood drive at the high school, twenty years before. I taught chemistry at a high school in Littleton for thirty-two years. The kids ran a drive every spring, and one year somebody had a table for the registry, and I said, well, I can't very well tell a hundred and twenty sophomores to go get their cheeks swabbed and not do it myself. So I did it. And twenty years later, a woman calls me on a Tuesday afternoon while I'm grading lab reports and says, Mrs. Grier, you may be a match for someone. And I was."
"Who was it?"
"A man in Cleveland. Forty-four. A bus mechanic for the transit authority. Two little girls. Lymphoma." She said the words in order, like items in a list she had memorized a long time ago. "You're not allowed to know anything for a year. Then if both of you sign, they give you names. He wrote me a letter that started, Dear Ms. Laverne, I don't know how to say this. We wrote for four years. I went to Cleveland once, to his daughter's First Communion. He was a big white man with a gray beard and a Browns tattoo on his forearm, and he hugged me in the parking lot of that church so hard he lifted me off the ground." She was quiet for a second. "He relapsed in 2019. Five years, almost to the day. I went to the funeral. I sat in the back. His wife came and found me and sat next to me and held my hand for the whole service, and afterward she said, everybody here knows who you are."
The engines hummed.
"I was teaching then," Laverne said. "I couldn't do much. Then I retired in the spring of '21, and I called the registry, and I said, I can't give you any more of mine, I'm too old. What else have you got. They said couriers." She looked at the cooler. "So that's what I do. I carry other people's."
"I'm so sorry," Billie said, "about what happened at the gate."
Laverne looked at her for a while. The look had weight in it. It was not unkind.
"The captain told me about his wife," she said. "Is that all right to say? He said I could tell you. He knelt down there by my seat and told me she died waiting for one of these. He said the donor fell through after they'd already started her, and they tried a cord blood unit, and it didn't take. He said he saw the box under the seat and he didn't know what it was. He said he looked at me and decided what I was, before he ever looked at the box." She paused. "He said that. Those were nearly his words. He said, I decided what you were. I want you to know I know that."