Billie stood at the forward door in the way she had stood at forward doors for three decades, half turned toward the jet bridge with her shoulder against the bulkhead and one hand loosely on the edge of the galley counter, saying good afternoon, hi there, welcome aboard, good afternoon, and watching. That was the part of the job nobody saw. It looked like smiling. It was watching. You looked at every face that came through the door, the hands and the eyes and the gait, the man who'd had three drinks in the concourse and the woman gripping her boarding pass like a rail on a ship, and you remembered them. You remembered who might need you.
The wheelchair came first, a tiny woman from Guatemala going to see a grandson, and Billie got her settled into 4C and her cane into the closet. Then a young mother with a lap infant, and then Laverne Grier.
She was a tall woman, taller than Billie, with close-cut gray hair and the long neck and straight back of somebody who had spent her life standing up in front of rooms. She wore dark slacks and comfortable black shoes and a heather-gray cardigan buttoned over a white blouse, and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she was carrying in her right hand, by a webbing strap, a hard-sided white cooler about eighteen inches long and a foot high, with orange labels on two sides. HUMAN CELLS FOR TRANSPLANT. DO NOT X-RAY. HAND CARRY ONLY. On the top somebody had put a strip of red security tape across the seam of the lid and signed it in black marker. Over her left shoulder she had a canvas tote bag from a public library in Littleton, and over her right shoulder a small purse, and she was carrying all of it as if the cooler weighed a hundred pounds and also nothing at all.
"Good afternoon," Billie said. "Mrs. Grier."
The woman's eyes came up. They were tired and very alert, and the alertness sharpened when she heard her name.
"The agent gave me your letter," Billie said quietly. "I've got it. Nobody else needs to see it. You're in 2A, right there, window. The space under 1A is clear, I checked. If you need anything at all, you come find me or you press the button and I'll come to you. I'm Billie. I'm the lead."
Something in the woman's shoulders came down a quarter of an inch.
"Thank you," Laverne Grier said. Her voice was low and precise, a voice that had said settle down, please, to ten thousand teenagers. "I won't need anything. I just need to sit."
"Then sit."
She sat. Billie watched her do it. She slid into 2A and bent down and placed the cooler under the seat in front of her, not shoving it but setting it, the way you set a sleeping baby down in a crib, adjusting it so that the label faced up and the lid was level, and then she put her feet on either side of it, and her tote bag on her lap, and the purse on top of the tote, and she put her right hand down at her side so that her fingers just rested on the cooler's handle, and she looked straight ahead at the bulkhead and did not move again.