"That doesn't make it not mine."
"No," he said. "I guess it doesn't." He put his hat on. "Sigrun would've thrown a shoe at me. Tonight. At the gate. She'd have taken off her shoe and thrown it at my head." He almost smiled. "She had very good aim."
He went up the jet bridge alone, a big gray man with a flight bag, pulling a roller with a wheel that squeaked.
The meeting was in September, in a windowless room on the second floor of the Bridgeline flight attendant base at Denver International, with a box of tissues on the table that nobody touched and a ficus in the corner that had been dead since the pandemic. The base manager was there, a careful woman in a blazer who read from a folder, and a person from Human Resources who had flown in from the company's headquarters in Dallas, and a woman from Employee Relations on a speakerphone, and Billie's union rep, a retired flight attendant named Gretl Ostergaard who had been negotiating for the union since 1998 and who brought her own coffee in a thermos because she said the coffee in management buildings was a tactic.
They had Garrison Yancey's letter, four pages, single-spaced, addressed to the Office of the CEO, which used the words theatrical and intimidating and disruptive and insubordinate, and asked that the lead flight attendant on Flight 1418 be removed from customer-facing duties, and mentioned, in the third paragraph, his annual spend with the airline. They had Billie's Cabin Event Report, nine pages, with times. They had Captain Vossberg's statement, which was two pages and contained one sentence that the base manager read aloud twice, in a slightly different voice the second time: I attempted to remove a passenger from her seat because of the way she looked, and the lead flight attendant stopped me, correctly, and I am grateful to her. They had a statement from Esperanza Tovar about the seat swap, and a short email from a Mr. Hendrik Vandermolen of Grand Island, Nebraska, that said in its entirety, I gave her the seat, the stewardess was right, the captain was wrong and then he said so, which is more than most. They had nineteen seconds of footage that a passenger in row 24 had posted to the internet that night, which showed mostly the back of a seat and part of a red windbreaker and a voice saying, very flatly, I am concerned, I need you in the galley, now; it had been viewed eleven thousand times and then nobody had cared anymore, because there was nothing in it to see.
And they had the Houston report, from April 2016, pulled out of a records system in Dallas, with Billie's signature at the bottom.
They asked her about it for an hour and forty minutes. Gretl Ostergaard sat beside her and drank her coffee and twice put her hand flat on the table, which meant stop talking. Billie stopped talking. At the end of it the base manager closed the folder and said that the company would be in touch, that Ms. Faraday would remain on the line in her current position in the meantime, and that she personally wanted to say, not for the record, that she had read the nine pages twice.
In the parking lot afterward, by the shuttle stop, Gretl lit a cigarette she was not supposed to have and said, "You'll get a letter. Documented counseling on the 2016 report, probably, with a note that you came forward on your own. That stays in the file three years. They're not going to fire a thirty-one-year lead who reported herself in writing with a captain backing her up and an angry rich man for an enemy. Juries love an angry rich man. Lawyers know it." She blew smoke at the mountains. "They might pull you off lead for a bid month to make Dallas feel better. I'll fight it. I might lose."
"And Gunnar?"