The airline clerk searched the system for Grandma’s reservation twice before looking up, her expression carefully neutral in that specific way customer service employees learn when they’re about to deliver news that isn’t going to go well.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. There is no reservation under Hazel Carter.”
Grandma turned to my father, still smiling, still entirely trusting. “Richard, where is my ticket?”
He didn’t check his phone. He didn’t open the document folder Aunt Monica was holding against her chest like a shield. He only sighed, the specific, put-upon sigh of a man who has somewhere better to be, as though Grandma had genuinely inconvenienced him by simply existing at that counter.
“I forgot your ticket,” he said. “You should just go home.”
The clerk froze, her fingers still resting on her keyboard. My mother suddenly found something urgent to examine on her phone. Aunt Monica looked over Grandma’s shoulder, at the departures board, at anything that wasn’t Grandma’s face. My cousins studied the floor with the particular intensity of teenagers desperate not to be asked a question they’d have to answer honestly.
