Somebody Has to Stay
An old man delayed overnight finds the airport's kindest host has been deciding, all along, who doesn't get to leave.
"It won't lift before six," Corrigan said, for the third time. "Never does. You'd think a man your age would stop hoping by now."
"Hope's cheaper than whisky," Istvan Reyer said, and didn't order the whisky, because seventy-four years had taught him exactly which comforts he could still afford.
Kesteven International kept one lounge open past midnight when the fog came down — the Courtesy Desk, three tables, six chairs, one host who never seemed tired. He'd brought Istvan's tea exactly as he liked it, strong, no milk, before Istvan said a word about how he liked it.
His name tag read A. RENSHAW.
"You'll have taken my file at check-in," Istvan said, more statement than question.
"Something like that, sir," Renshaw said, refilling a cup nobody had finished yet. "We do like our regulars comfortable."
"I've never flown through this airport before in my life."
Renshaw only smiled, the smile of a man paid to let a small mystery sit unresolved rather than spoil it, and moved off to see to Corrigan's coffee.
Istvan had come this far to make peace with a son he hadn't spoken to in six years, a short flight and a long apology away, and he had told himself on the tarmac at his last airport that he would not waste tonight's delay resenting the fog for something it hadn't personally arranged. Two hours in, he had already broken that promise twice.
"They used to weigh you," Corrigan said, apropos of nothing, a lonely man filling a delay with whatever fact was nearest to hand. "Passengers, I mean. Nineteen-thirties, little grass aerodromes — you and your bags both, right there on a public scale, so the pilot knew where to put you for trim. Whole flight's balance depended on getting the weight right, back before the instruments could tell you."
"And now?" Istvan asked.
"Now the instruments do the guessing," Corrigan said, "which I've always found less comforting, not more," and Istvan, despite himself, laughed, which surprised them both.
The tannoy called a name at half past one — not his — and Renshaw excused himself quietly, the way a door is eased shut on a sleeping room, gone four minutes, back at the same steady walking pace he'd left at.
"That's the third one tonight," Istvan said. "You always fetch them yourself?"
"I like to see my guests comfortable right to the very end," Renshaw said. "It's the one part of this job I don't hand to anybody else."
Istvan's own flight reopened boarding at half two — he saw it change on the board himself, watched the amber flip to green — and he was three steps toward the gate corridor before Renshaw's hand found his elbow, light, apologetic, immovable.
"Ah — dreadfully sorry, sir. Just closed again. You've a knack for catching these at the worst possible second."
"I watched it change."
"Boards do that," Renshaw said, kindly, already steering him back toward his chair with tea he hadn't asked to be refilled. "There'll be another. There's always another."
It happened again at ten to four, and this time Istvan was quick enough, or thought he was, to see the board flicker his own gate number into something that wasn't a gate number at all — two words, gone before he could be sure he'd read them right, that had looked, for half a second, exactly like STANDBY, COMPLETE.
He read Renshaw's badge properly then, the whole of it, after a night of glancing past it without taking it in. The photograph was Renshaw's face, unmistakably, down to the same patient half-smile. The badge number underneath it was four digits long, and the little printed issue date beneath that read a year Istvan was quite sure predated the airport itself by the better part of two decades.
"How long have you worked this desk, Mr. Renshaw?"
"Since before the runway had lights, sir," Renshaw said, pleasantly, pouring a tea nobody had ordered, "if you want the honest number rather than the polite one."
Corrigan's name came over the tannoy at ten past four, clear and singular, and he rose with the loose, grateful haste of a man who has been waiting exactly this long and not one minute more. He shook Istvan's hand at the doorway, said something kind about hoping the fog broke for him too, and was gone into the corridor without once looking back to see whether it actually had.
The lounge, with only the two of them left in it, felt suddenly much larger than three tables and six chairs had any right to feel.
"He's not coming back," Istvan said. It wasn't a question either.
"No," Renshaw agreed, with what sounded, appallingly, like genuine warmth. "He wasn't the one the fog needed tonight."
"And I am."
"Every foggy night wants exactly one name that isn't going to make its flight," Renshaw said, setting the pot down with the care of a man laying something to rest rather than serving it. "Somebody has to be the seat that balances the manifest, sir. Somebody always has, since long before radar made it look unnecessary."
He turned the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer and filled it again. "It goes easier for everyone — the airline, the other passengers, even the name itself — when that somebody has spent the night comfortable, and listened to, and never once made to feel like cargo."
"You're not airline staff."
"I never claimed to be, sir. I only ever poured the tea and told you the truth of it, every time you asked me plainly. You simply never asked me plainly until now."
Istvan was moving before he'd finished deciding to, case in hand, straight for the corridor door that had stood open, unremarked, all night — and found, where the doorway should have been, only the reflection of the runway lights coming back at him off glass that gave no more than a wall would have, no handle, no seam, no give at all under two hands and everything seventy-four years had left him to put behind them.
"It only opens outward," Renshaw said, not unkindly, from exactly where he had been sitting the whole time, "for the ones it's letting through."
Istvan stood with his forehead nearly against the cold glass until his own breath had fogged a patch of it, watching his reflection watch him back, and when he finally turned around his voice had gone quiet in a way it hadn't been all night.
"My son's expecting me," Istvan said. "Just — get word to him. That I meant to come. That I was on my way."
"That I can absolutely arrange, sir," Renshaw said, and something moved in his face that looked almost like sorrow, or a very good copy of it.
Renshaw refilled the cup, out of pure habit, and said, "The tea was never about the thirst, sir. A seated man asks fewer questions than a pacing one. It only ever bought me the whole night to let you grow fond of me before you needed the truth of me."
Istvan looked down. Six empty cups stood in a neat row at his elbow, every one his own, and he could not honestly remember refusing a single pour.
The tannoy called his flight one final time at half past four, his name spoken clearly, correctly, each syllable given its full length — the way, he understood now, a name is only ever spoken that carefully for someone who has already stopped listening for it.
Renshaw set a seventh cup down at the chair Istvan had left empty, unasked, already cooling to exactly the temperature at which somebody, eventually, might come to drink it.