"Curtis," his mother said.
"What? I've got a meeting in Spokane."
"You've got a meeting in Spokane on Tuesday."
He didn't answer that.
A minute passed. Two. He checked his phone. He checked it again. He thought about the window, and the sound the man's back had made against the glass, and he put the thought away, and it came back, and he put it away again. Captain Hale. Working a departure out of this concourse. There were a dozen Cordillera gates on B. Two dozen. There was no reason.
Then the crowd at the far end of the gate area began to part.
It did not part dramatically. Nobody gasped. It was just that people who had been standing in a loose mass by the podium began to step aside one or two at a time, the way people do for a uniform, and through the gap they made Curtis saw a tall Black man walking toward the gate in a navy captain's uniform. White shirt, dark tie, jacket buttoned, four gold stripes on each sleeve. Wings over the breast pocket. The hat with its gold-embroidered brim set square on his head. He was pulling a roller bag. He had a garment bag over his shoulder, empty now and folded.
And in his left hand, held a little away from his body, carefully, he carried a soft, boxy, tapestry purse, roses on a cream background, with a brass clasp and a strap that had been mended near the buckle with careful stitches in a gray thread that did not quite match.
Curtis knew that thread.
He knew it the way you know your own handwriting. It was the waxed gray thread his father had used to repair sail bags and canvas tool rolls on the ferries, the spool that sat on the workbench in the garage in Ballard and then in the garage in Highlands Ranch, next to the coffee can of mismatched screws. Arne Lindqvist had sat at the kitchen table one evening when Curtis was home from college, home for Thanksgiving, no, Easter, home for something, and had mended that strap with a sailmaker's needle and a leather palm while Curtis's mother laughed at him and said, you'll have it lasting longer than the purse, and his father had said, that's the idea, Dolly, that's the whole idea.
He had not thought about that night in twenty-five years. It came up through him now so suddenly and completely that he felt it in his knees.
The man in the uniform was the man he had put against the window. There was a scuff on his left cheekbone, already darkening. He walked past the podium. He walked past the Seahawks fan, who said, "Oh," quietly, and stopped talking. He walked straight to the end of the gate area, to the window and the potted ficus and the wheelchair, and he bent down, and then went all the way down on one knee on the carpet in his pressed navy trousers, so that his eyes were a little lower than hers.
"Mrs. Lindqvist," he said. "I believe you dropped this."
"Oh," said Dolores. "Oh, Captain. Oh, thank you." She took the purse in both hands and held it against the velvet bag in her lap. "I'm such a fool. I'm such an old fool. You must have run all the way."