"I'm just telling you the options."
Desmond's badge reader beeped. The KCM officer, a heavy-set woman named Lorraine with reading glasses on a beaded chain, looked at his license, looked at him, and said, "Go on, Captain."
He went on. He went exactly as far as the end of the podium, which put him about twelve feet from the old woman and the blue velvet bag, and then he stopped walking, because his feet stopped. He would think later that it had not felt like a decision at all. It felt like the moment on a long final approach when the runway lights come up out of the murk and your hands have already started flying the airplane before your mind has finished saying there it is.
He looked at his watch. Six-forty-nine.
"Excuse me," he said to the young officer. "Can I help at all?"
The officer looked at him: a tall Black man in a pullover and jeans, with a garment bag and a roller bag, who had appeared on the secure side of the checkpoint from somewhere. His eyes went to the lanyard. Then back up.
"You with her?"
"No. I'm crew." He held up the badge. "Cordillera. Which flight is she on, do you know?"
"I didn't ask."
Desmond crouched down beside the plastic chair so that his eyes were lower than the woman's. It was a thing he had learned from Celeste, who had learned it from her mother, who had been a nurse in a county hospital in Alabama for forty years. Get under them, Celeste said. Nobody ever got hurt by somebody looking up at them.
"Ma'am," he said. "My name is Desmond. I work for one of the airlines here. Where are you headed this morning?"
She looked at him for a long moment. Her eyes were very pale blue and red-rimmed, and her hands were folded so tightly in her lap that the knuckles had gone the color of candle wax.
"Seattle," she said. "My husband was born in Ballard. He wanted to go back in the water there. Off the locks. He was very specific." Something that was almost a laugh. "He was always very specific. Arne could tell you the torque on every bolt on a ferry engine. Forty years on the Washington State ferries and then we moved to Denver for our son and Arne hated it, the dryness, he said his skin felt like a paper bag. He wanted to go back in the water."
"Which flight to Seattle?"