"Why would anybody in the front give her a hard time?"
Esperanza gave her a look over both pairs of glasses that was entirely without humor.
"Because," she said, "she's a sixty-four-year-old Black lady in a cardigan sitting in 2A, and you've got a guy in 2B with a two-million-mile luggage tag whose wife is number one on the upgrade list and has been standing at my counter every twenty minutes for an hour asking me if anybody's misconnected out of first."
"Ah," Billie said.
"Ah," Esperanza agreed. "His name is Yancey. Garrison Yancey. Wife is Marisa. He told me his name twice so I'd remember it, and I'm going to remember it. Here's her letter." She slid a second page across. "She showed it to me and said I could copy it for the crew. She'd rather not have to show it to anybody in the cabin. They tell them that. Discreet. You don't make a show."
Billie read it standing at the podium, with the board flicking over above her head to NEW TIME 5:25P and a groan going up from the carpet. It was on letterhead from the national marrow donor registry, and under that the letterhead of a transplant center in Baltimore, and it said that the bearer, LAVERNE A. GRIER, was a trained volunteer courier transporting a human hematopoietic progenitor cell product for transplantation into a patient for whom the product was the only available source, that the product must remain in the courier's physical possession at all times, that it must not be exposed to X-ray or irradiation, opened, refrigerated, frozen, or separated from the courier, and that the patient had begun a conditioning regimen and that delay in the arrival of the product could result in serious harm to the patient. There were phone numbers. There was a signature from a medical director with a long name. The last line said, in plain type, Thank you for helping us save a life.
Billie had seen couriers before, perhaps three or four times in thirty-one years. A young man with a backpack cooler on a red-eye to Seattle once; an older man going to Minneapolis who had told her, when she asked, that he'd done forty-one runs and had stopped counting countries. She had never read the letter. She read the word conditioning again and understood that it was a polite word, the kind of word medicine uses for a terrible thing. She knew what it meant because she had read Sigrun Vossberg's obituary, and the obituary had said that Sigrun had fought for fourteen months and had been hoping for a donor who was never found. Conditioning was the part where they killed your marrow on purpose, with chemotherapy and sometimes radiation, so that the new cells would have somewhere to live. Once they did that, you had no way back. You waited for the cooler.
"Okay," she said, and folded the letter in half and put it in the pocket of her apron, which she had already put on over her uniform because it was the only place she ever had to put things.
"Board when the hold lifts," Esperanza said. "Preboards first. She's a preboard. I told her she could go with the wheelchair."
At 4:35 the hold lifted for the third time, and at 4:41 Esperanza opened the door, and the airplane began to fill.