"I'll call Ridgeline from the plane," he said. "I'll get Hollis on the phone before we push. I'll lock it."
"Do that," Pete said, and hung up without saying goodbye, which was how Pete said goodbye.
Curtis lowered the phone and stood for a moment looking at his own reflection in the glass. Forty-seven years old. A good gray suit, a Halvorsen lapel pin, a haircut from a place in Cherry Creek that charged sixty dollars and served you a whiskey while you waited. He had gotten a little thick through the middle. His father's jaw. His mother's eyes, which everyone said were his best feature, pale blue, a thing he had used on more than one female purchasing director without quite admitting to himself that he was doing it.
Behind his reflection, out on the ramp, a Cordillera 737 sat at gate B42 with its jet bridge snugged against the forward door and a fuel truck under the wing. His plane. White fuselage, the airline's red-and-gold mountain logo on the tail. A man in a reflective vest was walking slowly around the nose with a flashlight, looking up at things.
He should go to the gate. He should find his mother. The wheelchair guy would have brought her by now. She'd be sitting there with Dad in her lap in that blue bag, telling strangers about the ferries.
He thought about the four missed calls and felt a familiar, sour little twist under his breastbone, a feeling he had learned years ago to step over the way you step over a crack in the sidewalk. She'd be fine. She was always fine. She called four times about everything. She called four times about the dishwasher.
He'd get a coffee first. He'd get her one of those lemon cake things she liked, the ones with the icing. He'd show up with a lemon cake and she'd forget about whatever it was.
* * *
The coffee kiosk sat across the concourse from B41, a few steps from the long window, and Curtis was third in line, reading an email from the Ridgeline facilities manager about chiller tonnage, when he heard the running.
People run in airports. Of course they do. But there is a particular rhythm to a person running for a flight, a clumsy, lurching, apologetic gait, bags banging off knees, a hand up in the air as if to say I know, I know, and Curtis's ear, without his permission, registered that this was not that. This was long, fast, even strides, a big man moving with purpose, coming down the concourse from the train escalators and weaving through the crowd without slowing.
He looked up.
A Black man, tall, in a gray pullover and jeans. A garment bag over one shoulder. A roller bag in his right hand, its wheels rattling over the carpet seams. And over his left shoulder, bumping against his hip, a woman's purse. A soft, boxy, old-lady purse, flowers on a pale background, the kind of purse nobody under seventy had carried since Reagan.
Curtis's body went cold and bright and very fast.
He would try, later, many times, to describe what happened next in a way that made sense, and he would find that every version he could build fell into the same two halves. In the first half was the thing he saw: a man running, a purse that was not his. In the second half was the thing he did. And between them, where a thought should have been, there was only a kind of white noise, like the hiss of a radio between stations, and inside the hiss, if he listened very carefully, a single memory playing on a loop.