The Wrong Terminal and My Sister Fern

“That’s your boarding pass, Mom. Don’t unfold it. The sweat from your hands will smear the numbers. Keep it dry.”

I remember how precise that was.

“I’m going to park the truck and find Kayla and the kids. They’re checking bags at the other end. I’ll come right back and we’ll go through security together. Sit right here by the windows. Don’t wander, this place is a maze.”

Then he kissed my forehead, and his eyes were wet, and I took it for love.

He had not done that since the day we buried Elmer. I felt it all the way down.

“Ten minutes,” he said.

He went back out through the glass doors. I watched him get into the truck and pull away from the curb. I thought, there goes my son. I thought, how lucky I am.

It was ten till nine.

I sat.

At ten, I looked at the big clock over the doors and thought, they are probably standing in a line.

At eleven I thought, Randy always did run late.

At ten till twelve I looked at the paper in my hand, which I was not supposed to unfold, and then at my own hands, and something cold started up the back of my neck.

At noon I knew. Not the way you know a fact. The way you know a stove is hot after you have already touched it.

I made myself stand up, with my suitcase, and walk to the big board over the counters where the flights were listed. I read down it twice. No Honolulu, and not my flight number anywhere. There was a young man at the nearest counter in a clean uniform, and I could not make myself walk up and ask a stranger to say it out loud. Fern would have asked. Fern always asked. I had spent eighty-one years being the sister who did not need to. I went to the ladies’ room by the doors and came straight back to the same bench, in case he had.

I took the phone from my purse. It is a flip phone. Fern made me carry it. I pushed his number. It rang four times, and then a woman’s voice said the mailbox was full.

I called again. Eleven times, I counted, and each time that same voice.

Here is the question I know you are asking, because my sister asked it later, and it is a fair one. Why did I not call Fern?

I had her number memorized. My thumb knew the way. And I could not.

Because back at Easter she had said, ask to see the ticket, and I had said, he’s my son. To call her was to say out loud, on a bench in a strange airport, that she had been right and I had been an old fool. I could not make my mouth.

So I put the phone back in my purse and sat with my back straight and my suitcase on my knees, and I looked like a woman waiting on a ride.

Around one o’clock I became aware of the way people look at an old woman who has been sitting too long. They look and they look away. A man in a cowboy hat ate a soft pretzel two benches over and glanced at me and then at his phone. A young mother steered a stroller around my suitcase.

The crowd did not ask. People step around an old woman like a puddle.