The Gate Agent Who Saw What I Couldn’t

Cameron Comes Home

He flew back the next morning, alone, on the first available seat, while his wife stayed in Phoenix to see about getting the deposit refunded, most of which, it turned out, was recoverable, since nothing about that particular plan had gone as far as either of them expected it to.

I picked him up myself at Prairie Front Regional, in the same gravel lot where I had left my truck the morning before, and Althea, who was working the afternoon shift, came out from behind the counter long enough to shake his hand and say, plainly, that she hoped he understood she had not done what she did to embarrass him.

“I did it,” she told him, “because six years ago nobody stopped my grandmother at her gate, and I decided a long time ago that if I ever recognized what that looked like again, I wasn’t going to let it happen twice on my watch.”

Cameron did not have much to say to that in the moment. He shook her hand, thanked her in a voice that did not sound entirely like his own, and did not speak again until we were most of the way down Muddy Creek Road, past the coulee where his father used to run cattle every summer of Cameron’s childhood.