They applauded.
Not for long.
Delphine put a hand up and it stopped, the way it does when the person in the three stripes puts a hand up.
But it happened, and I want to describe what it sounded like from Row 14, three rows behind my daughter, holding a six-week-old who had somehow slept through all of it.
It sounded like a hundred and forty people apologizing.
That’s what it was.
Not celebration — apology. From every passenger who’d sighed in that boarding line, who’d muttered about the departure slot, who’d watched a woman with a newborn get moved away from her ten-year-old and had thought, privately, just sit down, lady, so we can go.
They’d all thought it.
I’d have thought it, in their seats.
And a fifth-grader had stood up and told them what they’d actually been watching, and the applause was a hundred and forty people saying, all at once, we didn’t know, and we should have asked.
