Layover in Terminal 4

The board flipped to CANCELLED at 8:47 pm, and I stood there with my boarding pass still in my hand like an idiot, watching the word sit there in red letters as if staring long enough might shame it into changing back. Hassan came up beside me, looked at the screen, and made a sound like he had just watched his car roll into a pond.

"No," he said. "No, come on!"

"Yep," I said. "That's us. Denver, the conference, the whole thing, gone."

We were 29 and 31 respectively, which meant the airline owed us nothing and knew it. The gate agent, who had clearly been rehearsing her apology in a mirror, told us the next flight with seats was departing at 2:40 in the morning. Six hours. Six hours in Terminal 4 with a dead phone charger and each other.

And Hassan Barclay was not my choice of travel companion. He worked sales for the same coffee company I roast for, which meant he spent his days telling customers things about roast profiles that were wrong in ways I had personally corrected at least four times. He was handsome in the way of a man who knows it and tall in the way of a man who uses it, and I had lost exactly one arm-wrestling match to him at the holiday party and never forgiven the universe for it.

I started venting before we even got away from the desk. "I'm losing a day of per diem. Do you understand that? I budgeted this trip down to the dollar. I have a spreadsheet. There's a line for snacks, Hassan, a whole line, and now it's all stretched one extra meal thin because some airplane has a hydraulic problem."

"Your snacks have their own line item?"

"Snacks are the line item. Everything else is a rounding error."

He laughed at me, this easy little laugh he does, and steered us toward the one bar still open, the one with the laminated menu and the $11 beer. We took two stools at the end and he bought the first round, which I noted for later leverage, because Hassan keeps score and so do I.

"So," he said, wrapping both hands around his glass like it was a warm mug. "Can I ask you something? Feel free to tell me to mind my own business."

"You will ask regardless."

"Your carry-on. It's suspiciously heavy. I watched you haul it through security. You're a roaster. What does a roaster need that weighs that much for a two-day conference? Samples? A second laptop? What's in there?"

"Green coffee gets heavy," I said, and took a long drink of my terrible beer.

"That bag is not full of green coffee."

"How would you know what green coffee weighs?"

"Because I've been to the roastery, Jana. I've carried the bags. Your carry-on weighs about as much as a small dog and it clinks."

I told him to mind his own business, and I said it with enough force that a guy two stools down glanced over, and Hassan just grinned into his beer as if he had found a thread he intended to pull for the rest of the evening. We argued about work for a while, then about whether the airport pretzels counted as dinner, and I could tell the whole time that some part of his brain was still picking at the bag.

It was on the second round, when he was paying and I was pretending not to watch him count out bills, that he set the trap.

"Here's my offer," he said. "You show me what's in the bag. If it's boring, if it's samples and a spare sweater, I buy the next round, no argument, and I'll even carry it to the gate for you."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you don't get a free round, and instead you owe me a story. A real one. Something from your life I don't know, told properly, no editing."

Let me explain my thinking here, which was mostly not thinking. I had known Hassan for a year and a half and in that time he had won a trivia night, an arm-wrestling match, and an ongoing argument about whether light roast belongs in offices. I was not going to hand him a story. Also, and this is the part I did not examine closely at the time, some small vain corner of my brain was sure the bag would bore him and I would get a free beer out of it.

So I said fine, got up, fetched it from the row of seats where we'd dumped our stuff, and brought it back to the bar. He turned on his stool to watch. I popped the latch, feeling briefly like I was opening evidence, and lifted out the folded thing on top.

Except it wasn't a thing. It was clothes, and not conference clothes. A navy skirt, folded into that flat square you only get from years of practice, creases sharp enough to lodge a complaint with. Under it a white blouse in a plastic sleeve, starched within an inch of its life. And on top of that, coiled neat as a sleeping snake, a silk scarf, the airline's colors, red and gold.

Hassan went quiet, which for Hassan is basically a fire alarm.

"Is that," he said slowly, "a flight attendant uniform?"

"Keepsake," I said. "From my first job out of college."

"Keepsake. Jana. You packed a full uniform, ironed, in a garment sleeve, for a two-day coffee conference."

"It doesn't take up much room."

"It clinks, apparently."

"The scarf clip. Shut up." I shoved the clothes back down and latched the bag, and my face felt warm in a way I blamed entirely on the beer. "It was my first real job. I liked it. I kept the uniform. Plenty of people keep things."

He was quiet a second longer, and then he did the thing that ruined my whole night. He leaned back, looked at me over the rim of his glass, and said, "Put it on."

"Absolutely not."

"There's a bathroom right there. Five minutes. If you put it on and walk back past this bar, I buy the round, I carry the bag, and I never mention the clinking again."

"Hassan."

"What are you afraid of? That it fits?"

And that was the shot that landed, because we both knew it fit, and he knew I knew, and the little competitive animal that lives in my chest stood up and cleared its throat. I finished my beer in a manner I would describe as dignified and stood up.

"Four minutes," I said, "and if anyone from the company sees me, you're telling them it was your idea."

"It was my idea."

"I know," I said, and picked up the bag.

The family restroom at Gate 14 is the size of a small courtroom, and I mention that only because I had room to pace. The uniform came out of the bag the way it always does, the skirt dropped into its own shape like it had been waiting, and I stood there in my socks and underwear with a cancelled flight announcement crackling overhead and asked myself, sincerely, what I was doing.

But the blouse still fit. That was the answer, really. The buttons across the bust took some encouraging, the way they did on day two of every training rotation, and the skirt sat a little lower on my hips now than it had at twenty-two, but the scarf knotted itself under my collar from muscle memory alone. My hands did it without me. Four years of tying that knot before five a.m. shifts will do that. I looked in the mirror at a woman I hadn't been in two years, and the woman looked back like she still remembered how to walk an aisle with a tray and a smile and nothing showing.

So I walked back.

I want it noted that I did not hurry and I did not strut, whatever Hassan tells people. I walked like a professional, heels-first, the skirt doing its tight little pencil thing around my thighs because that is what the skirt was designed to do and I had no say in it. The gate area was empty enough that my footsteps went down the aisle ahead of me like a formal announcement. I came around the row of seats to the bar and Hassan was mid-sip, and he saw me, and he forgot to swallow for a second. I watched his throat work. Because the whole point of this story is that I'm being honest: watching him swallow was worth the walk. He set the glass down too carefully, the way you do when you don't trust your hands.

"Well?" I said, stopping a few feet away with my hands clasped in front of me, old habit, tray position without the tray.

"You look," he said, and then took another run at it. "The four minutes. Very efficient."

"Efficient. That's what we're going with."

"That's what I'm going with, yes." He gestured at the seat next to him, and I sat, crossing my legs the way the training manual insisted, knee over knee, ankle back. Some things live in your spine forever. "Okay. Since you're in costume anyway. Do the safety demo."

I laughed. I actually laughed, a real one, before I could stop it. "Absolutely not."

"Come on. Seatbelts, exits, the whole thing. You must still know it."

"Nobody remembers the demo, Hassan. That's the entire point of the demo."

"Then improvise." He had his elbow on the bar and his chin in his hand and that look, the one from trivia night, the one that means he intends to win and has already decided the winning is a formality. "Humor me. I bought you beer."

"You bought yourself beer. I witnessed it."

"Do the demo, Jana."

And the thing I keep circling in this whole account, the thing I would edit out if I edited, which I do not. There is a version of me, the twenty-two-year-old version, who did that