The Seat She Took From My Grandmother

“I’m asking now,” I said.

So she told me about the blizzard of 1975, when they put down in North Platte with forty-one passengers and no hotel rooms, and she had them singing in the terminal by midnight. She told me about a boy of nineteen in uniform, flying home from somewhere he would not name, who held her hand from Denver to Omaha and never said a word, and how she let the other girl work the whole cabin alone so she would not have to let go.

“That one I think about,” she said.

The crew came back one at a time, like people coming up for communion.

The young one was first. Her tag said Katie, and she was maybe twenty-three, and she knelt in the aisle and said she had only been flying six months and could she ask something.

“Ask away.”

“How do you not take it home? When people are awful. I had a man last week throw a cup at me.”

Grandma considered it seriously.

“Most of them aren’t awful, dear. Most of them are frightened, or they’re grieving, or they’re late to something that matters. An airplane is where people are when their lives are happening. You’re seeing them on the worst day or the best one.” She patted Katie’s hand, twice, the bread dough pat. “You look for what they’re scared of. Then you’re not being pushed around. You’re just helping somebody who’s scared. It’s much easier on the feet.”

Katie wiped her eyes with her wrist and said, “Can I get a picture with you?”

“If you’ll let me fix my hair.”

Patty came last, with two coffees in real cups and a plate of the first-class eggs anyway.

“1A sent these back,” she said. “She said she couldn’t eat them all and you were to have half. She’s asleep, by the way. They both are. She was out before we leveled off.”

“Good,” Grandma said. “That’s what it was for.”

Patty sat on the armrest across the aisle, and the two of them talked shop for twenty minutes. It was like listening to two farmers discuss rain.

“Can I ask you something?” Patty said finally, low. “Why’d you ring? That woman was being ugly to you. I heard what she said, by the way. Half the plane heard. You could’ve told me.”

“What would you have done?”

“Talked to her. Moved her, maybe.”

“During boarding, with the door open and the clock running, and her already spoiling for it.” Grandma shook her head. “You’d have had a scene in your aisle and a late departure on your record. I wasn’t going to hand you that. The only thing actually wrong was the bags. So I told you about the bags.”

Patty looked at her.

“And she was scared,” Grandma added. “Did you see her hands?”

“I didn’t,” Patty said.

“White as paper on that armrest, before we’d even moved. Some people get mean when they’re afraid. It’s the only way they know to feel big enough.” She took a sip of coffee. “I wasn’t going to let her talk to me that way. But I didn’t need her punished for it, either. I only needed my lap back.”

I looked up the aisle at the back of that pink collar, sitting so stiff and so alone, and for the first time all morning I felt something for her besides the wish to see her squirm.

It was not a comfortable feeling. I had preferred being angry.