"I did run a little," Desmond Hale said. "It's good for me. My wife says so." He smiled at her. "Your pills are in there. Your license. I didn't open it. The TSA officer saw it slide off the chair."
"You're late because of me."
"I'm late because of a lot of things this morning, ma'am. You were the best of them."
He stood up. He did it slowly, a big man unfolding, and as he came up to his full height he turned, and Curtis was standing right there, three feet away, where he had been standing the whole time, beside his mother's chair, with his hand on its push handle, because at some point in the last thirty seconds he had put his hand there without knowing it, the way a child grabs for a railing.
The captain looked at him. It was not a hard look. That was the worst of it. Curtis had braced himself for a hard look, for rage, for contempt, for the kind of look he would have given, and could have survived, could have argued with. This was something else. It was level and patient and terribly tired, and it held him the way the glass had held the captain, flat, with nowhere to go.
"Mr. Lindqvist," said Captain Hale.
"Curtis?" said his mother. She looked from one of them to the other. "Do you two know each other?"
Nobody answered her.
The gate area had gone quiet. Not completely. Somewhere a child was asking for juice, and the HVAC was humming in the ceiling, a sound Curtis could have identified by brand and tonnage, but the hundred and sixty-two people of Cordillera Flight 2216 had stopped complaining, and many of them had begun to look, and some of them, the ones who had come from the B41 end of the concourse, were whispering to the ones who hadn't. The science teacher from Kansas had come up the concourse behind the captain. She was standing by a pillar with her arms folded. She was not filming now.
Captain Hale glanced at the podium. Marisol, the gate agent, was looking at him with her hand resting on the PA handset, waiting, as gate agents wait for captains.
He walked to the podium. He did not ask Curtis to follow him, and Curtis followed him anyway, the way you follow a man down a hallway after he says can I see you in my office for a minute. Behind them, Curtis heard the soft squeak of the wheelchair; the science teacher from Kansas had taken the push handle without asking, and was bringing his mother along.
At the podium the captain held out his hand, palm up. After a moment Marisol unhooked the handset from its cradle and laid it across his palm, its coiled cord swinging, and Curtis understood with a slow, sick lurch what was going to happen.
The captain did not key the handset. He held it out to Curtis.
"Tell them why I'm late," he said.