Layover at Lindbergh

On a Tuesday in November his phone buzzed with the news, and the whole Delta terminal at O'Hare went quiet in that specific way airports do, like a big dog lying down. Billy was a data analyst from outside Denver, and his flight to San Diego had just died on the board with a flat little CANCELLED next to it. He stood there with his carry-on between his feet and thought, well, that's that.

What he noticed, because noticing other people's business was half his job, was that everybody around him had their phone out. Everybody. A guy in a Bulls jersey was filming the departure board like the board needed documenting. Two college-age women were on speakerphone with somebody's mother. But one woman, maybe ten feet to Billy's left, was just standing there with her arms crossed, staring straight up at the board with her jaw set tight, like she was reading the cancellations out loud to herself and didn't like the answer.

She was forty or close to it, Black, short natural hair, scrubs-style jacket over jeans, the kind of soft-sided suitcase nurses travel with. One of its wheels was done. Dead. It dragged behind her at an angle like a broken shopping cart, and she was hauling it toward the Delta service desk when the wheel caught on a floor mat and the whole bag tipped over sideways.

"Shoot," she said.

Billy picked up the far end before he'd really decided to. "I got it. It's the front left, right? It's seized up."

"It's been seized up since Cincinnati," she said. "It seized up in Cincinnati and it has been punishing me ever since. Thank you."

They dragged it to the desk together, which took a while because the line was twenty deep and everyone in it had the same dead flight. She exhaled through her nose.

"You know what's funny?" she said, not really to him. "I called the airline in September about this wheel. They said bring it in. Bring it in. To O'Hare. On the one night the whole system falls apart."

"Good timing."

"I'm a very lucky person, is what I'm learning tonight." She turned and offered her hand, which was small and had a hospital-band tan line on the wrist. "Cheryl."

"Billy."

"Billy. Are you cancelled too or just sad?"

"Cancelled. San Diego." He shrugged. "A conference, of all things. A data conference. I was going to sit in a ballroom and look at slides about spreadsheets, so honestly the airport is a lateral move."

That got the first real laugh out of her, short and surprised, like it came out before she checked it. "A data conference. You do data?"

"I do data. Spreadsheets mostly. Other people's spreadsheets, mostly."

"Nobody dreams of that job."

"No," Billy said. "Nobody dreams of it."

The desk agent told Cheryl her Atlanta flight was pushed to 4 a.m., maybe. Billy's San Diego flight was rebooking to tomorrow, maybe. They stood there while she got her bag tag reprinted and the wheel squeaked the whole time, and then the crowd took her, sort of, and she said something like "good luck with your spreadsheets" and went off toward one gate and he went off toward another, and that should have been the end of it. Five minutes, a broken suitcase, done.

* * *

Billy got a coffee from the one kiosk still open, a bad coffee, seven dollars, and sat down with a paperback he'd bought for the flight, some history of the interstate highway system, and could not focus on it at all. He kept reading the same paragraph about the Eisenhower administration and thinking, did she get a hotel or not. Every hotel shuttle in a five-mile radius was probably backed up. She might still be here. Half of Terminal B was dark. The carpet had that airport smell, coffee and floor cleaner, and it was going on nine o'clock and he was forty-four years old and divorced two years and he was sitting here wondering about a stranger's hotel situation.

The book was not working. He put it away.

Here was the thing he'd tell nobody: his ex-wife, white, from Kansas, had used the word ghost at the end. She said living with him was like living with a ghost, present and not present, and he'd been so busy being fine for two years that it had taken a sentence over a kitchen table to land. He did not plan to think about that in Terminal B, and he thought about it anyway.

He walked for a while. He found the old concourse, the part of O'Hare that time forgot, where a 24-hour diner was still open under too-bright lights, the kind of place with laminated menus and a pie case. And there, in a booth alone by the window, was Cheryl, with a plate of eggs in front of her that had clearly gone cold a while ago. She was looking at the eggs, not eating them.

He hesitated about four seconds too long, and she saw him.

"You again," she said. She didn't smile. But she moved her bag off the seat.

"That seat's free?"

"It's free."

He sat down across from her with his bad coffee, and a waitress who had stopped bothering with pleasantries somewhere around the year 2019 dropped a menu without being asked. "I'm Billy. We did that part."

"We did that part." She pushed the eggs around with her fork. "I ordered these an hour ago. You're not supposed to eat cold eggs, it's a rule."

"So why order them?"

"Because sitting here with nothing in front of you in an airport diner at nine p.m. is a whole different kind of sad." She glanced at him. "What's your excuse?"

"I couldn't read my book."

"Bad book?"

"Good book, actually. Interstate highways. I just kept not reading it."

She snorted and finally ate a cold bite of egg, deliberately, like she was proving a point. "Fine. Tell me about the data. You look like a man who wants to not think about something, and I am an excellent not-thinking audience."

So he told her a little, and it came out more honest than he meant it to. "I'm a data analyst. Forty-four, if you want the whole picture. Companies hire me to look inside their spreadsheets and tell them what their spreadsheets are hiding. Somebody's department is bleeding money, somebody's numbers don't add up, and I sit inside other people's spreadsheets all day until I find the lie."

"And then what?"

"Then I write a report. Then somebody gets mad at me for finding it."

"Terrible."

"It pays fine," he said. "It's quiet. I've been quiet a long time."

She looked at him a second longer than the joke required, then let it go. "You want to hear worse? ICU nurse. Twelve years. Atlanta-bound, but the contract was here in Chicago, three months of it, finished this morning. I have spent twelve years watching people die on schedules."

"That's a hell of a thing to say so plainly."

"I'm tired. Tired me has no filter." She turned her coffee cup a slow half-circle on the table. "You know what I mean though. Nine out of ten, you do everything right and they go anyway. You can be the best nurse on the floor and the best nurse on the floor loses nine times out of ten. The one who makes it, you remember that one for years. Little old man last spring, code blue at two a.m., everybody ready to quit, and he walked out of that hospital in May. I still think about him. He brought us cookies."

"The cookies are the reward?"

"The cookies are absolutely the reward." She laughed, and her voice had changed from the desk, lower and slower, the tired version of it, and Billy noticed that and noticed himself noticing. "What time does your nothing-flight leave?"

"Whenever it leaves. They said morning."

"So we're both stuck."

"Looks like it."

"Well." She sat back. "You're the only person in this airport who's said more than six words to me tonight, so you may as well stay. If you want. I'm going to order fresh eggs and I'm going to interrogate you about spreadsheets until my flight exists again."

"That's the best offer I've had all year," Billy said, and the waitress was already hovering, pad out, and Cheryl ordered two of everything, eggs and toast and more coffee, and pointed at Billy with