At the door, Delphine was standing where pursers stand, saying goodbye to a hundred and forty people, and when we reached her she stopped the line for four seconds — four seconds, which on a turnaround is an eternity — and she shook my daughter’s hand.
“Maya. Twenty-six years. Nobody’s ever cited me the policy.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry.” Delphine let go of her hand. “Be exactly like this at thirty. That’s the whole instruction.”
And behind us, three rows back, a woman in a middle seat waited for a hundred and forty people to get off before she could.
PART 5 — FINAL
Bonnie Larkspur lost her travel privileges.
Nineteen years of them, permanently, along with a written finding that she had “misused system access to reassign a revenue passenger” — which is, Delphine explained in a follow-up call, a specific and serious thing at an airline, because a gate agent with seat-map access who assigns herself into sold seats is a gate agent who could be doing it every week.
