"I know. I'm sorry. I was on with Pete. It was a whole thing." He bent and kissed her cheek. It was cool and soft and smelled of the powder she had used his entire life. "Did you get through all right? Did they give you trouble about Dad?"
"Oh, it was terrible. They said they couldn't see inside. They wanted me to mail him." Her voice wobbled. "I didn't know what to do. I was sitting there crying like a fool. And then this lovely man came along and he got the supervisor and it was all, she was so kind, and the man waited with me the whole time, half an hour, he must have had somewhere to be. And then when I got here I realized I'd left my purse." She gave a little helpless laugh. "My license, my pills, everything. I told the girl at the desk. She called down to security. She said a crew member picked it up and was bringing it."
Curtis was looking at his phone. Pete had texted. Did you call Hollis? He typed not yet, wheels up in 20, will call from the air, and sent it, and only then did his mother's words reach him, the way sound reaches you a beat late from the far side of a stadium.
"Somebody's bringing it?"
"That's what she said."
"Okay. Well, good. That's good." He put the phone in his pocket. "I'm sorry I wasn't there, Mom. I should've stayed. You know how Pete gets."
"I know how Pete gets," she said, and something in the way she said it made him look at her, but she was looking at the window.
The PA chimed.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is Marisol at the podium for Cordillera Flight 2216 with service to Seattle." The gate agent was a woman in her thirties with her hair pulled back tight and the composed, slightly fixed smile of someone who has given a great deal of bad news to a great many people. "Thank you so much for your patience. We do apologize for the delay this morning. Our aircraft is here and ready, our first officer is on board, and our cabin crew is on board. We are just waiting on our captain, who was unavoidably delayed in the terminal. We expect him at the gate momentarily and we'll begin boarding as soon as he arrives. Thank you."
A groan went up across the gate area, that collective sound of a hundred people being inconvenienced at once.
"Unavoidably delayed," said the man in the Seahawks jersey. "You hear that? The pilot. The pilot's late."
"Probably getting a breakfast burrito," someone said.
"I've got a connection in Seattle," said a woman. "To Anchorage. If I miss it there isn't another one until tonight."
Curtis heard himself laugh. It was a short, sour sound. It came out of the same place the shove had come out of, and he would remember it later with a particular kind of shame, because it was so small, and so easy. "Unbelievable," he said, to nobody, to the Seahawks fan, who nodded at him gratefully, a fellow sufferer. "You'd think the one guy who has to be on time."