"Okay," he said to Tomás. "Before start checklist."
They pushed at eight-twenty-two, twenty-seven minutes late. The climb out over the eastern plains was rough for a few minutes, a little mechanical turbulence off the Front Range, and then it smoothed out at twenty-four thousand feet, and at thirty-six thousand the air was as still as glass. Desmond hand-flew the climb all the way to cruise, which he did not usually do, and he flew it like he was carrying eggs.
* * *
They were in row nine, Curtis on the aisle, his mother at the window with the velvet bag on her knees because she would not let the flight attendant put it in the overhead bin. Nobody had asked them to move. Nobody had said a word to him on the way down the jet bridge. A few people had looked, and then looked away, which was worse, and a flight attendant with silver earrings had handed him a cup of water without being asked, and he had not known what to do with that at all.
Somewhere over Wyoming his phone, in airplane mode, sat face-down on the tray table. He had not called Hollis at Ridgeline. He had not texted Pete. He had written a message to Pete at the gate, while they were boarding, and read it over, and deleted it, and written it again, and it was still sitting there unsent.
His mother had not spoken since the podium. She was looking out the window at the brown wrinkled land far below and the shadow of the airplane racing across it.
"Mom," he said finally.
"I'm thinking."
"Okay."
He waited. The engines hummed. A child two rows back was kicking a seat in a slow, steady rhythm. The flight attendant came by with the cart and his mother asked for tea and he asked for nothing.
"When you were small," his mother said, without turning from the window, "we lived on Northwest 56th, by the locks. You remember. And there was a boy on the next street who used to come and watch your father work on the boat in the driveway. Ten, eleven years old. Thin. His family had come over from Eritrea. You used to play with him."
"Samuel," Curtis said. He had not thought of the name in forty years. It came to him the way the gray thread had, all at once.
"Samuel. And one day the man across the street, Mr. Pruitt, called the police on him. Because he'd seen him in our driveway with your father's toolbox. And the police came, two of them, and they had Samuel up against the side of the car when your father came out of the garage with a cup of coffee in his hand." She sipped her tea. "Do you remember what your father did?"