The Wrong Terminal and My Sister Fern

But one person did. A woman in an airline vest stopped in front of my bench, a woman with red reading glasses on a beaded chain, a gray streak she had left alone, and a face that had spent a lot of years being polite to strangers on bad days. Her name tag said Marcy.

“Ma’am, are you all right? Can I get you anything?”

“I’m waiting on my son.”

“Has he got your number, hon?”

“He does,” I said. “He said ten minutes.”

She looked at me a moment longer than she needed to. Then she walked off, and she came back with a paper cup of water and set it in my hand. I took my blood pressure pill with it, there on the bench, in front of God and the whole lobby.

“I’m at that counter right there,” she said. “I’ll check on you. You wave if you need me.”

She did not push, and I loved her for it, and I hated it too, because I was not ready to be pushed.

I stayed where I was. If he came back, I wanted to be where he had left me. You may call that foolish. A person will do almost anything to keep from being finished with a hope.

By four the water was long gone and my mouth was dry as flour. I had a roll of butter mints and nothing else, and I was too proud to go looking for a fountain.

And then Marcy was in front of my bench again, as she had said she would be, with her glasses pushed up in her hair.

“Ma’am,” she said. “It’s been three hours since I brought you that water. I said I would check.”

“I’m still waiting on my son.”

“Is he coming soon?”

“He said ten minutes,” I said. “That was some time ago.”

She crouched in front of me, and her knees popped like a bag of corn, and she laughed at herself, and I felt something go loose in my chest that had been wound tight for seven hours.

“Can I see what you’ve got there, hon?”

I held the paper out. My hand shook so hard it rattled.

Marcy reached into her vest pocket and brought out a packet of peanut butter crackers.

“Eat these first,” she said. “Then we’ll look.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’re white as a sheet and that little cup was hours ago. Eat.”

I ate two. They were the best thing I have ever put in my mouth, and I hated that, how little it takes when you have been alone long enough.

Marcy sat down beside me, close, our shoulders touching. She unfolded the paper in thirds, slowly, the way you open a letter you suspect.

She read down the page.

Then she looked up at me, kindly, and said it plain.

“Hon, what’s your name?”

“Oleta Teague.”

“Oleta, there is no reservation on this page in your name.”

“He said it was a boarding pass.”

“It’s a confirmation page. A reservation. For a flight that left Terminal 1 at eleven-fifty this morning. To Denver, connecting to Honolulu.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s ours.”

She held the page where I could see it, and with one finger she touched the lines that had been folded under.

There were four names. Randall Teague. Kayla Teague. Hannah Teague. Cody Teague.

Mine was not one of them.

I want to tell you I cried out or said something grand. I did not. I read the four names twice, the way you read a column of figures you are sure you have added wrong. Then I said, in the voice I used on the school board: