He did email her mother. Adise read it on her phone in a hospital corridor and had to go stand in a supply room for the second time in 14 months, which she felt was a very poor batting average for supply rooms. Margarite Vance moved in her third year after the flight not far across town to a smaller place because the stairs had started to be a consideration and because the house had gotten quiet in a way that the smaller place would not solve but would at least stop announcing. She packed a drawer in her kitchen and found the letter from Kestrel Air. Three paragraphs certified mail folded twice.
She sat down on the floor with it. She had over 3 years arrived at a stable position on the whole thing. And the stable position was this. It had been a piece of cake. She had made a stupid remark.
A flight attendant with something to prove had escalated it into a federal matter, and she had lost 11 years of Tuesdays over 4 seconds of bad judgment. That position had cost her a great deal to build, and it held her weight most days. It did not hold her weight on the kitchen floor with the letter in her hand because underneath it, underneath where she almost never went, was a thing she had never said to her attorney or to the two security people or to the coordinator who called on a Wednesday or to her son who by then took maybe one call in three. The thing was this. She could remember the flight attendant's face.
She could remember the walk to 11D and the man in row 7 who looked at her the whole way. She could remember the letter and the second letter and the third letter. She could not remember the children's faces. She had spent 3 years being the injured party in a story about two children she could not picture. She sat on the floor for a while.
Then she got up and she put the letter in the box with the other papers and she finished the drawer because there is only so long a person can stand at the edge of a thing before they either go in or go back. And Margarite Vance had been going back for 58 years and was not going to start now at the bottom of a kitchen cabinet. She never apologized, not because she was prevented from it. Kestrel's file had contact procedures. Her attorney had mentioned once in passing that a letter through council was technically possible.
She never did it. She thought about it maybe 40 times across three years and each time got as far as the first sentence. And the reason, the actual reason which she never got to, was that an apology would have required her to look directly at the fact that on a Tuesday afternoon at 4:41, watching a stranger say happy birthday from your mom to somebody else's children, she had felt a loneliness so enormous that she had reached across an aisle to make it stop. That's all it was. That's all it ever is mostly.
It doesn't make it smaller. It just makes it sadder. And sad and small are not the same thing. Dileia Marsh worked Kestrel Air A12 again four years later. Same flight number, same route, different aircraft, a Tuesday in autumn.
She noticed the number on her schedule about 3 weeks out and looked at it for a second and then didn't think about it again. There were no unaccompanied minors on the manifest. It was an entirely ordinary flight. Somebody's headphones didn't work and there was mild chop over the mountains and a man in 4C had opinions about the coffee. At about the point in the route where it would have been 4:41, she found herself in the forward galley with nothing particular to do.