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any of my kids.” She was still rooting around in her bag, being careful
     not to look at me, because her story damn well did have a point, and she was poking Rose Mae’s craw with it. “Oh dear, I hope
     I have my ticket with me. Did you see me get my ticket?”
    I glanced down, and I could see that ticket right in the middle. She was digging all around it, though it was one of the three
     biggest things in her jam-packed handbag. I reached over and jerked it out of her bag and threw it into her lap. I toted her
     big trash can down to the curb every Tuesday. I fed her cat when she was out of town. In return, she talked to me about her
     knitting club and her reader’s circle at her church, and she made it a point to never ask me why I wore long sleeves all summer.
     She was deal breaking, I felt like. She was ruining something.
    “Thanks, honey,” she said, so warm, showing me her lipstick teeth again. I looked at her frail shoulders, her soft lady belly
     setting on her lap, and mad as I was, I knew I had to help my friend. There was no way she could manage those three suitcases
     alone, even across Amarillo’s teeny airport.
    I could feel my tightly scheduled Tuesday start to pull ahead and leave me behind, and that made me madder. I put my blinker
     on and swapped lanes again, taking the fork that led to hourly parking.
    “I’ll walk you in,” I said, snappish.
    “Oh, no, honey. You can just drop me,” she said.
    “I want to take you in. Really. I like airports,” I said, like I’d been born stupid. No one likes airports.
    But she brightened and said, “I like them, too! I love to see folks so busy and going places.”
    I parked and got the trunk unloaded in one-sided silence while Mrs. Fancy hummed and peered about, blind to the smoke leaking
     out of my ears. I got a cart and trundled all her luggage in. Onceinside, she stood blinking, round-eyed as an owl, then started digging in her bag for her ticket again.
    “You need to be in this line,” I said, impatient. I’d already given up groceries. I could feel dinner and the shower escaping,
     and I wondered if Joe would still think I could outsell his best floor man if I smelled like a walking armpit. On the other
     hand, it might get me out of doing the damn shift. “Come with me.”
    I got her into the right line, but then she couldn’t find her ID. I decided I better stay and make sure she got properly checked
     in. I dug her wallet out from under her travel-size tissue and a herd of Trident gum packs and handed it to her.
    She took it absently, peering all around her, and then she poked me with her elbow and whispered, “Look, that’s me! That’s
     me at thirty!” She nodded sideways at a slinky brunette who was standing two lines over.
    I looked at the brunette, mystified, and then back to Mrs. Fancy.
    She said, “It’s a game, silly. Mr. Fancy and I used to play it all the time, in airports. We would try to find us, how we
     would be in twenty years, or thirty, and maybe eavesdrop and see if we were going anyplace interesting. He liked to tease
     me with his picks! He’d find old crabby couples bickering, and he’d say, ‘There we are in fifty years!’ Or he’d play sweet,
     and find the prettiest girl you ever saw and say, ‘Now that one is almost you, only not so cute, not so cute.’ These days
     I don’t travel much, but when I do, I try to find me when I was a young mother or a newly married lady. I can’t hope to find
     me older, unless someone is being flown home in a box!”
    She laughed, but I shifted my feet, uncomfortable. I said, “You have plenty of kick left in you, Mrs. Fancy.”
    She waved that away. “Only thing older than me in this airport is God,” she said. “But I’m telling you, I looked a lot like
     her when I was thirty.”
    She nodded her head at the dark-haired lady, a leggy object witha hint of a cleavage and a saucy way of standing. Mrs. Fancy’s powdered cheeks hung down off her face in ladylike