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jowls. She
     wore walking shoes with high-waisted polyester slacks and a blouse in a fussy floral print, but under, I could see good bones
     and the ruins of a tight and curvy figure.
    I sized up the brunette and said, “Welp, you at thirty is…” I paused. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say “dead sexy” to
     someone who smelled so strongly of talcum powder, so I ended with, “a looker.”
    “I turned some heads,” she said, matter-of-fact, and then peeped at me through her lashes, like she knew I’d been thinking
     dead sexy. Then she spun in a slow circle, peering around until something stopped her.
    “I found little you, I think.” She tilted her head over to the water fountain where a black-haired girl was standing with
     her parents. The child was about nine, wearing a stiff, frilled dress that told me there was someone to impress waiting at
     the other end of the flight. The dad looked relaxed, slouching beside the bags in chinos, but the mother was gussied up in
     a full face of makeup, and she had teased and sprayed her hair into a shining hump. My guess was she was flying toward in-laws.
     The mother kept sending one nervous hand down to smooth her girl’s pigtail, but it was more like a love pet than grooming.
    I looked away. The mother’s hair would fall on the plane, and the child’s girly dress would be a mass of crumples and likely
     stained with juice by the time they arrived.
    I said, “That’s me all right,” tight, still too annoyed to play with her. In truth, she’d got me all wrong. At that age I
     had a long rat of unbrushed hair and hand-me-down clothes from the church box. I spent all my free time with a book, up trees
     or under the crawl space, reading and hiding from all the chores my mother wasn’t there to do.
    “Let’s find you older,” Mrs. Fancy said. “Let’s find you, say, twenty years from now.”
    She rocked faintly up onto the balls of her feet, lifting herself, having a fun time playing line games like she was no older
     than that starchy little girl.
    She couldn’t find an older me, and I didn’t look, just stood by her as we wound our way slow to the head of the line. The
     man in front of us had been called to check in when I saw Mrs. Fancy wasn’t looking anymore either. She was staring straight
     at the me I was right then, and her eyes had gone dangerously soft. It was a look so close to pity that I could feel my mad
     cresting again even before she spoke.
    “Maybe there’s a reason we don’t see you older, Ro,” she said.
    “Don’t. I told you,” I said, but her eyes stayed all melty chocolate colored. I blinked hard and said in a fierce whisper,
     “Don’t say things. You’ll wreck it. You can’t wreck it. You’re my only friend.”
    She darted out her hand and put it on my cheek. I could feel her age in the folds and creases of her palm. She said, “Then
     I’ll only say, I pray better things for you, like I used to do for Janine.”
    An airline girl called, “Next,” right then, so I didn’t have to decide if I was going to yank her hand away so hard that the
     hollow bird bone in her wrist would snap, or drop my head down on her shoulder and bawl like a toddler. I bent down and jerked
     up her luggage, practically hurling it onto the scale, piece by piece. The girl checked it, and I watched it roll away down
     the conveyor.
    Mrs. Fancy said, “I land at eleven o’clock on Friday.”
    “Fine,” I said. Three days, and by then I would have put this conversation away. I could be Ro Grandee next time she was in
     my kitchen, helping her get enough cans for her church’s food drive with my skirt swirling around my knees and my happy smile
     tucked firm into place. “That’s fine.”
    I turned to go, but she said, “Wait, Ro! There you are, at last! The face is you in twenty years to a dime, although I can’t
     imagine you would ever wear those clothes.”
    I was already walking back toward my life, ready to pick it up and keep