“I can carry your bag if you like,” he offered.
“Very kind,” said Martha Jefferson, but she kept it on her. He was the one she didn’t like the looks of. All right.
Together they trudged off toward the security line.
A smattering of people funneling into line. They paused and shuffled, eyeing phones or conversing in low voices. Steering their luggage, casual but alert, along the switchbacks. East and Martha Jefferson came to a stop just outside the cordoned area.
A few of them watched the old, stern-faced Negro lady and her ragged boy. East was bilious. Acting sleepy was the best he could do.
“You can’t go through, you know. Through the security. Not unless you have a ticket,” Martha Jefferson reminded him.
“I know,” he responded dully. “Walter said.”
How long was the fat boy going to be?
He understood that he was standing by her now not to be quiet and kind, but to hide behind her. He was raw. He could barely stand. And Walter was dashing about, carrying things. Out in the parking lot now without him, a set of keys in his hand. Inventing things. He was standing by her to be the sort of boy who traveled with his great-aunt, who didn’t have blood on his shoes. Late coming to the play, but happy to be in it.
As long as Walter came back.
A black couple inched forward in the line, one midsize son with his face in a video game and a little girl in braids, up on her father’s shoulder. She eyed East with dread.
“I hitchhiked one time,” Martha Jefferson reminisced. “I’ll never forget. Course, it was in Louisiana, long ago.”
East was going to say Oh, but he hiccupped instead.
“You okay?” said Martha Jefferson.
“Fine.”
“You don’t look fine,” said the lady. She stepped back, and East lacked the strength to argue. There wasn’t anywhere to go. The little girl stared sideways. She closed her eyes and became the Jackson girl.
His stomach flipped, and instinctively he turned toward a trash can. He fought his jaw muscles, but they pried themselves apart, and he vomited into the cups and wrappers with a long, despairing cry.
“Oh, Lord,” the lady was saying. “Look at you now.”
Yellow heat in his mouth. He spat out the rest and felt in his pockets for something to wipe his face. Nothing. Just a granola bar wrapper, a key, a fold of twenties, and a gun. He cleaned himself with the back of his hand.
“I told you,” said the lady. Though she had not told him anything. But he saw that she was not speaking to him; she was speaking to the people in line, now gazing from their cordon at this small misfortune. He saw that she was not going to help him out like a grandmother might. She stood back, marking their distance.
At last, Walter. Bright fat idiot angel, he carried the box of doughnuts with its golden seal before him like a prize. “Here you are,” he sang, flashing Martha Jefferson’s key chain and helping her guide it back into her purse.
He looked around, seeing that something had happened. It was on everyone’s faces. “What’s wrong?”
“Your cousin is sick,” announced Martha Jefferson.
Walter touched East’s forehead, his hand there heavy and soft.
“I’m okay,” East said.
A guard was coming up to see. The line slipped forward. The little sideways girl on her father’s shoulder watched East again.
Walter said, “Well, maybe we should go then, Andre.”
Martha Jefferson agreed silently, stirring toward the line with her eyes. She was eager to be rid of them. Even Walter. She knew how to do it: she did it with such public sweetness. “You have been good to meet. Such lovely young men.”
She and Walter beamed brightly, falsely.
“So happy to have met you,” Walter said.
She fluttered. “And I, you.”
Walter handed the box of doughnuts over and then gasped at it. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “But, Mrs. Jefferson, are they going to let you take this on board?”
Mrs. Jefferson smiled, a final smile, not for them. “Well, it isn’t allowed. But don’t worry. They know me. Everyone in the sky knows me.”
East, bleary though he was, saw different. Nobody knew this lady at all.
—
Walter: “What is it?”
East’s stomach was tumbling to a halt. “Like food poisoning. Something.”
“You’re panicking, man. Your body’s fooling with you.”
East let this go. In the vast men’s bathroom they washed with squirt soap and dried with brown paper. Morning businessmen made hurried passes under the seeing-eye faucets. East stood there a long time. In the mirror he was a different mess than he’d ever seen before: an eye still dark and swollen from Michael Wilson. He’d forgotten about it; he hadn’t had time to hurt. Now, clean, the eye was fat and tender. No wonder Martha Jefferson had looked at him funny. His skin, even after he scrubbed it, was puffy, black, and greasy. The cold water brought his focus back a little.
“I was going to pass out,” he grumbled.