When the airplane had parked at the gate in Seattle and the seatbelt sign had gone off and the cabin had emptied around them, Curtis helped his mother into the aisle wheelchair the ground crew brought down, and buckled the strap across her lap, and set the velvet bag and then the tapestry purse on her knees. Then he stood in the forward galley and waited.
The cockpit door opened. Captain Hale came out with his hat under his arm, saw him, and stopped.
For a moment neither of them said anything. Up close, in the small bright galley, the bruise on the captain's cheekbone was the color of a plum. Curtis looked at it. He made himself look at it.
"I wanted to say I'm sorry," he said. "Not on the PA. To you."
The captain considered him.
"All right," he said. "You've said it."
"I mean it."
"I believe you mean it right now." Captain Hale's voice was not unkind. "Mr. Lindqvist, I'm going to tell you something my grandfather told me. He carried bags at a train station in Atlanta for thirty-four years. He said a white man's apology is like a tip. It's nice when you get it, and it's nothing you can build a house on. You understand what I'm telling you?"
"I think so."
"An apology's a start. It's not a receipt. You don't get to walk out of here with it in your pocket and feel paid up." He put his hat on. "I'm still filing that report. You're going to have to go through whatever comes of it. I'm not doing that to punish you. I'm doing it because the next man you see running through an airport might not have a janitor who knows his name."
"I know."
"Good." The captain looked past him, down the jet bridge, where the ground crew was waiting with Dolores in the wheelchair. "Now go push your mother. All the way to the curb. Don't you take a phone call. Don't you check your email. Don't you let anybody else push that chair."
"I won't."