He took out his phone and called Celeste. She picked up on the first ring. She was at the pharmacy; he could hear the beep of a register and someone asking about a flu shot.
"You're supposed to be pushing," she said.
"I know. I got held up."
There was a pause. Thirty-two years of marriage lived in that pause. She had heard something in the word held.
"Are you hurt?"
"A little. Not much."
"Are you safe?"
"I'm in the seat."
He heard her let out her breath. "Okay. Okay. Tell me tonight. All of it." Another pause. Then, quietly, the question she had asked him for thirty-two years, after every story, the question that was half joke and half prayer and had been his grandfather's before it was hers: "Did you walk light?"
Desmond looked out the windshield at the gray morning and the long rows of airplanes and the mountains beyond them, white already at the top, early snow.
"No," he said. "Not today."
"Good," said Celeste. "Good. I love you. Go fly your airplane."
He put the phone away. He held his hand out flat in front of him, palm down, and watched it, and after a while it stopped.