The Seat She Took From My Grandmother

I watched it happen. Her mouth was open to say something and nothing came out. She looked at Grandma’s face for a long second. Then she took her reading glasses off the chain and put them on, which I have never seen anyone do to look at a person.

“I’m sorry,” Patty said. Her voice had changed entirely. “This is going to sound peculiar. Have you and I met?”

“I don’t believe so,” Grandma said. “I’d remember that pin. That’s a thirty-year pin, isn’t it? They used to be silver.”

Patty’s hand went up to the little gold wing on her collar and stayed there.

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody told me, dear. I had one.”

“What’s your name?” Patty asked. She said it very softly. “Ma’am. Please. What’s your name?”

“Rose Kline.”

Patty did not move.

“Before you were married,” she said.

Grandma tilted her head. I think it was the first moment she understood that something was happening.

“Kessler,” she said. “Rose Kessler. But goodness, nobody’s called me that since…”

“Since 1970,” Patty said.

She put her hand flat against her own chest. Her eyes had filled up, and she was not a woman who looked like her eyes filled up easily.

“Miss Kessler,” she said. “Your picture is on the wall in our crew room. At the Omaha base. It’s been on that wall the whole time I’ve worked here. I’ve walked past your face every morning for thirty-two years.”

Nobody in row fourteen said anything.

“That old thing,” Grandma said, after a moment. “I had my eyes half shut in that picture. I asked them to take another.”

Patty laughed, and it came out as half a sob. “You’re standing on the stairs of a Convair with your hand on the rail. There’s a brass plate under it. It says, Rose Kessler Kline, 1962 to 1993. She taught us how.”

I had to put my hand on a seat back.

Thirty-one years. I did the arithmetic standing there in the aisle with a stranger’s baby bottle still in my fist. My grandmother had not been a stewardess when she was young. She had been one until she was fifty-three years old. She had retired four years before I was born.

“I started in ninety-four,” Patty was saying. “I just missed you. But Brenda Olson trained me, and you trained Brenda. Miss Kessler says you never run in the aisle, you only walk like you’re late for something nice.”

“Brenda Olson,” Grandma said, and her whole face lit. “She couldn’t pour coffee to save her life. Is she living?”

“She’s in Lincoln. She’s going to faint when I tell her.”

“Well, tell her to sit down first.”

The woman in 14B had been looking back and forth between them. The iced coffee was dripping onto her pink knee and she had not noticed.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “What is happening?”

Patty turned to her. I braced myself. I will admit that I wanted it. I wanted Patty to let her have it, in front of everyone, with both barrels.

Patty only said, pleasantly, “I’ll need those bags in the overhead, ma’am,” and lifted the tote off my grandmother’s lap herself, and put it in the bin, and put the shopping bag in after it, and shut the door with the flat of her hand.

That was all. That was every bit of what was done to the woman in 14B that whole day.

“Don’t you move,” Patty said to Grandma. “Please. Don’t you go anywhere.”

“Where would I go?” Grandma said. “You haven’t closed the door.”

Patty went up that aisle toward the front, and she was not hurrying, but she was walking like she was late for something nice.