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only. Family members, like the announcement says. The rest of you will have to wait outside.”
    For a moment, Michelle feared there would be a small riot. “I’ve waited over an hour,” the teenager said. She looked barely old enough to drive—probably on her first ever pickup trip to the airport. “My best friend is on that flight.” Several people raised exasperated arms, either in sympathy to the girl’s plight or angry about their own pending dismissal. They looked to people on either side for allies. Michelle had earlier conceded Wade’s point about privacy, didn’t want intruders to witness the coming grief. But she blushed now, aware of how this situation would look, how they’d assume her tacit approval of Wade’s ruling as she stood there with her clipboard and highlighter, a pitiless gatekeeper who measured each supplicant, denied entrance to those deemed unworthy. As if their budget airline, already stingy with in-flight drinks and snacks, couldn’t spare the extra coffee or doughnuts.
    Then the crowd settled down, the collective mood flattened by the more important subtext to Wade’s statement. She could see the realization slowly dawn on their faces, their eyes glazing over, jaws dropping slowly, hands lifting in almost choreographed unison to cover mouths that needn’t say what they’re all thinking, have been trying for a long while not to think:
If they’re allowing only family members, it must be something terrible.
    Michelle’s eyes blurred, shifting the two lines of people out of focus so she didn’t have to distinguish their expressions. The announcement repeated from the airport speaker: “Families awaiting the arrival of Flight 1137…” The tin voice, sterile and mechanical before, now sounded smug. It knew. It knew, and it withheld the truth deliberately.
    A faint tug pulled the clipboard away from her chest. A tall man stood next to her, too close, really, but gentle as he looked over her shoulder and drew a slender finger down the list. “Robert is my…my partner,” he said. “The last names won’t match, I’m afraid.” He reached the bottom of the page without success, and Michelle absently lifted it to reveal the second sheet.
    “This one?” she asked, pointing to a Robert Braynard, listed with a local address.
    “Yes.” The man’s eyes pleaded with her—as if she could not only admit him into the conference room, but also had some power over his partner’s fate.
    Was her boss listening? Wade seemed busy with his own crowd, the pregnant mother trying to coerce answers from his vague, avoiding mouth. Wade was a stickler for rules, especially when he made them himself. Family members only, as legally defined—and their conservative legislature wasn’t anywhere close to approving same-sex marriage. Wade wouldn’t let this guy in.
    Michelle thought about her friend’s brother who’d gotten sick a few years back—pneumonia as a complication from AIDS—and remembered how Alice’s parents wouldn’t allow her brother’s lover to visit the hospital room. Alice still hated her mom and dad for that. Her brother was dying, and it wasn’t their place to judge. Grief is what it is; love is what it is.
    And Michelle knew the others in her line were watching, waiting to see if she followed her boss’s example. Their airport served a small city, mostly white, mostly Southern Baptist, and many of them would agree with the strict legal definition of family. At the same time, people who traveled by plane tended to be more worldly than the town itself—recruits connected with the downsized military base, for example; international students attending Graysonville University and professors who moved here from out of state. She’d like to think—even here in the middle of the Bible Belt—she’d like to think people would be more compassionate in a time of shared crisis.
    She barely looked at the driver’s license the man held up. “Go ahead in,” she told