**I Caught a Flight Attendant When Our Plane Dropped. Then She Asked If I Was Traveling Alone**

**The plane dropped so hard the flight attendant missed the seat back and fell straight toward my armrest.**
**I caught her, and before she could get her feet under her, the floor dropped away again.**
**When she came back down the aisle, she looked at the guidebook in my seat pocket and asked, “Are you traveling alone?”**

## PART 1 – The Woman Who Came Back

The first thing I heard was a can hitting the floor. It rolled uphill past my shoe, or at least that was how it looked, because for a second my eyes and the rest of my body disagreed about which way the airplane was moving. The woman standing beside row fourteen reached for the top of my seat and caught the loose edge of the headrest cover. I saw the cover come away in her hand and managed to get my forearm between her shoulder and the armrest just before she hit it.

My belt caught me across the hips. Her palm came down hard on my shoulder, and I had just enough leverage to hold her there when the cabin lurched again. From the other side of the aisle a man said, “Oh, Jesus,” very quietly, as though he had promised himself he wouldn’t say anything at all. I remember the flight attendant looking down at her shoes, waiting until she felt both soles on the carpet before she put her weight on them.

“Are you hurt?” she asked me. I could feel the tremor in the hand she was still using to brace herself, and somehow she had asked first. I told her I was okay and let go of her arm as soon as she had her balance. The captain came over the speaker and told everyone to remain seated, and she thanked me once, quickly, before making it to the crew seat where she could buckle in.

The man across the aisle had lost a shoe. His little aluminum can lay under the seat ahead of us, and he stared at it with the resigned expression of somebody who had suddenly reconsidered which of his possessions were worth reaching for. I put my hands flat on my thighs and watched the wing through the window on his side. The air coming out of the vent was cold enough to dry the sweat on my neck.

Several minutes later the man got his shoe back, a child two rows behind me asked for the crackers she’d dropped, and the cabin filled with the noises people make when they realize they can carry on with the afternoon. I flexed the hand I’d used to catch the woman and found I could move everything. The skin along my forearm had a faint pink stripe where I’d taken the edge of the armrest. By the time she came back, I had pulled my sleeve down over it.

She stopped with one hand resting on the seat in front of me and asked if I was sure I’d come through it okay. I said I was, then pointed at the headrest cover, which someone had tucked back into place at an angle. “I think the chair’s going to want a minute,” I added. Her eyes followed my finger and she laughed, a quick, surprised sound that gave way to a breath she must have been waiting to take.

I asked about her shoulder, and she rolled it once to show me she could. Up close, I could read DILEIA on the badge above the pocket of her navy uniform. There was a tiny piece of lint caught under the pin, and for some reason I was grateful to have something that ordinary to look at. Then her gaze went to the Charleston guidebook protruding from the pocket in front of my knees.

“Are you traveling alone?” she asked. I said, “Yeah, just me. I was expecting a little more room in my seat, though.” She pressed her lips together in an attempt to keep a professional face, lost the fight, and asked if I was headed to Charleston for work. When I told her I was on vacation, she said, “Good. You look like you could use a couple of days without turbulence.”

She’d have gotten the same answer if she had asked me before we left the ground. I’m Alden Mercer, and at thirty-two I had spent the better part of spring persuading three groups of people that the same patch of dirt could be a useful place for all of them. I work as a landscape architect in Columbus, Ohio, and our latest project had gone all the way down to the placement of a drinking fountain before anybody could agree to let us build it. The night I booked Charleston, I’d opened the refrigerator at ten forty-five, eaten shredded cheese over the sink, and realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten lunch outside.

I’d picked a city with good food, old brick, and enough waterfront to walk until my phone stopped feeling heavy in my pocket. I had a camera, a carry-on with a clean shirt in it, and the guidebook I had bought after getting frustrated with the number of tabs open on my computer. There were little pencil stars beside the houses I wanted to see. Dileia spotted two of them before I could put the book away and asked how many destinations I’d marked for my supposedly unscheduled trip.

“I’m giving myself options,” I said. “Is that what the different colors are for?” she asked, and I looked down at the yellow highlighter bleeding through the back of the page. A passenger a few rows up lifted a hand, and Dileia told me to give her a wave if my arm started bothering me. I watched her stop to speak to a woman who was gripping both sides of her tray table, and by the time she moved on, the woman had loosened one hand enough to pick up her cup.

I knew what it cost to be pleasant all day when other people were anxious, tired, or looking for somebody to blame. Whatever spark I thought I’d felt belonged to a woman in the middle of a shift, with a whole cabin to look after. I put my earbuds in, found a song I’d been meaning to listen to, and made it a full minute before realizing I’d never pressed play. On her way back to the galley, Dileia caught my eye and lifted one eyebrow at the guidebook I’d opened again.

About forty minutes before we landed, she passed through offering water. I’d unfolded the map on my tray table, where a creased seam ran right through a street I was trying to find. She tapped a spot a few blocks from the busiest part of the historic district and told me the side streets there were worth a walk after the tour groups thinned out. I asked how much of Charleston she’d seen, and she thought about it long enough that I expected a generous answer.

“An airport, a hotel, and the stretch of sidewalk between the hotel and somewhere that serves dinner,” she said. I told her that still put her ahead of me, and she tipped her head toward the window. “You get to go somewhere and decide how long to stay. Sometimes I look out of a hotel room in the morning and have to read the stationery to remember which city I’m in.” The man across the aisle asked for water, and she handed him a cup before I could tell her how much that stuck with me.

As we descended, I looked out at the water wherever I could see it through the windows across the aisle. By then I had collected a few odd scraps of information about her, the sort I would have forgotten about another stranger before I made it to baggage claim. I knew she had strong feelings about quiet streets and that she had worked long enough to recover her balance in front of a hundred people and go right back to asking if they needed anything. I wanted to know what she did with an hour that actually belonged to her.

A few people clapped when the wheels touched down. The man across the aisle put his recovered shoe squarely beneath his knee and clapped hardest. I had a small, foolish urge to catch Dileia on the way out and say something that might give us a reason to finish the conversation. Then I saw how many people were waiting behind me, each with a bag and a place to be, and decided I could manage a decent goodbye without making her do any more work.

She stood near the aircraft door with another crew member, giving people directions and thanking them for flying. When I reached her, she said, “Enjoy Charleston, Alden,” and it took me a second to remember I’d given her my first name when she came back to check on me. I told her I’d put in a request for steadier ground. “Usually pretty good around here,” she said, stepping aside so a man could get a garment bag through the doorway. I thanked her for the tip about the side streets and kept going.

At baggage claim my suitcase took two trips around the carousel before I recognized it. I’d tied a strip of blue ribbon around the handle for exactly that reason, and I still watched it go past me once. It was a little after two, and the hotel had already texted to say they’d let me know when my room was ready. I wheeled my bag to a coffee shop near the main exit and picked a table by the window, where the sun had warmed one side of the chair.

My iced coffee left a wet ring on the table as I pulled up the list of restaurants I’d saved. I was reading two reviews of the same lunch place, one complaining the portions were too large and the other that they were too small, when a voice across the table said, “Please tell me you’re leaving some time for an emergency landing.” I looked up so fast my knee hit the underside of the table. Dileia had a small black bag over her shoulder and had taken off her name badge, and I could see the two tiny marks its pin had left in her uniform.

“Can I sit for a minute?” she asked. I moved my suitcase out of the way, and she set down her bag and went to order a coffee. For the first time all afternoon, she had somewhere else she could be and had chosen to come over anyway. I wiped up the ring my cup had made with the corner of a napkin, which gave me something to do besides watch her in the reflection of the window.

When she came back she sat down, stuck out her hand, and said we deserved a proper introduction. I told her my full name and said I was available for emergencies involving unusually low ceilings and poorly secured headrest covers. “Dileia Sutter,” she said. “Usually much better at staying on my feet.” Her grip was firmer than I expected, and a second after we let go, we both reached for our coffee at the same time.

Her work was finished for the day. She was staying overnight at a crew hotel and had an afternoon long enough to eat somewhere with real plates, provided she managed to stay awake. I asked if layovers were usually that generous, and she told me about the time she’d changed out of her uniform, sat on the bed to look up a restaurant, and woken up an hour later with one shoe on. “There’s a picture of the best barbecue in Kansas City still open on my phone somewhere,” she said. “I had crackers from the vending machine.”

I told her about the Saturdays I started by announcing to myself that I would get out and do something, then spent in my living room with a sandwich and a baseball game I barely watched. She said that sounded like a good Saturday, especially if the sandwich was decent. I made the mistake of showing her my list of Charleston stops, and she counted twelve before I took the phone back. “Did you leave yourself a bathroom break between the historic houses?” she asked. I said I’d fit one in if we had a rain delay.

She wanted to know what I did for a living. I explained landscape architecture using the project I’d finished, then watched her attention sharpen when I described a little park we’d built in an empty lot between two streets. On the drawings there was a low wall for retaining soil, and on the first warm day after it opened, a group of people ate lunch there with their knees out toward the grass and their lunch bags lined up between them. “Did you put it there for that?” she asked. I said I’d put it there to hold up the dirt, and she looked as pleased as I had the first time I’d seen someone sit on it.

Dileia lived in Charlotte, North Carolina, and had been flying for several years. She liked the independence, the way a day at work could start with a cup of coffee in her kitchen and end with a view she’d never seen before, even if it was sometimes a view of the back of a parking garage. I asked if there were things she’d brought home from the job, habits she couldn’t switch off. “I check seat belts in my friends’ cars,” she said. “Quietly, these days. I was making enemies.”

Someone with a roller bag clipped the leg of our table and muttered an apology. Her coffee jumped in its cup, and both of us looked down, then at each other, before either of us smiled. Dileia turned the paper sleeve a little and said, “You know, I really could have hit that armrest hard.” I told her I’d been thinking about how fast it happened, too. She let out a long breath and said the part that had frightened her was the moment after the first drop, when she’d planted her feet and felt the second one coming anyway.

I had wanted to make the whole thing easier for her by making it funny. Sitting across from her, I was glad she’d trusted me with the part that still felt bad. We sat quietly for a few seconds, letting the woman at the next table argue with her husband about which carousel their bags were on. Then Dileia told me she’d held on to the headrest cover all the way to the jump seat before realizing it was still in her hand, and I laughed because I’d spent ten minutes wondering where the thing had gone.

Her phone lit up with a message about the crew shuttle. She read it, took another sip of coffee, and asked whether I really intended to do the whole trip by myself. “That was the idea,” I said, and moved my thumb off the corner of my phone so she could see the list was closed. She said she could sleep for a little while, come back downtown, and meet me near the historic district if I wanted company. She made it sound like the simplest thing in the world, although she had folded her napkin into a square small enough to hide under her thumb.

“Are you asking me out?” I said. “I think I am,” she said, “unless you’ve got something serious going with one of those old houses.” We picked a little café as a place to meet, settled on six thirty, and exchanged numbers. A few seconds later a text appeared on my screen that said, “Try not to catch anyone else before dinner.” She extended her hand with the grave courtesy of a woman seeing me off an airplane and told me it had been a pleasure to meet me properly.

After she left, I caught myself about to look up the café’s menu, the walking route from my hotel, and the backup option in case the place closed early. I put the phone away and watched a van pull up outside instead. A woman stepped out, saw someone through the glass, and made the same face I’d probably made when I looked up and saw Dileia standing by the table. I drank the last of the coffee, which had gotten watery, and took my suitcase outside to find a cab.

I dropped my bag at the hotel, changed my shirt, and went out with the camera. Charleston’s late-afternoon light made the painted houses look warm even where the porches were in shadow, and roots had pushed the bricks up along one sidewalk so high that everybody took the same little detour into the street. I bought a late lunch and took a picture of a gate that had been rubbed shiny in the spot where people put their hands. When my phone buzzed around six, I was halfway down a block I hadn’t marked in the guidebook, walking slowly enough to smell somebody’s supper through an open window.

At six thirty Dileia crossed the street toward me in dark jeans, a cream-colored top, and a light jacket she had pulled close against the wind. Her hair was down, and when she caught me staring, she called, “You didn’t think I owned regular clothes?” I told her I had been prepared to be polite about it if she showed up in uniform. She laughed and hugged me, and I managed to tell her she looked beautiful before I could think of a cleverer thing to say. “Thank you, Alden,” she said, with a little pause before my name that made me glad I’d said it plainly.

We walked away from the busiest streets, past iron fences and gardens wedged into spaces no wider than a parking spot. Dileia wanted to know if we were following a route, and I told her I’d looked at a map and left it in my room. “Very brave,” she said. I told her I was even willing to keep my professional opinions about the flower beds to myself for the duration of our date. She looked sideways at me. “Good,” she said, “I was hoping that’s what this was.”

In a courtyard behind a row of shops she stopped to take a picture of an old fountain. There was a crumpled leaf stuck in the water where it ran down the side of the stone, and she waited until the breeze moved it before taking the picture. When she showed it to me, she asked whether I’d have changed the plants around it. I told her I’d walked past that same opening earlier and missed the whole courtyard. She slipped her phone into her pocket looking more pleased with that answer than she would have with a critique.

We got hungry about an hour into the walk, and she suggested a small restaurant she’d tried on a previous layover. The exposed brick behind our table held the day’s heat, and whenever the front door opened, the flame in the little glass candleholder bent toward her side of the table. I saw her follow a server to the door with her eyes before she picked up the menu. Later, when she told me she automatically looked for exits in restaurants, I told her I’d seen her do it. “You pay that much attention to everybody?” she asked, and the look on her face when I said, “Only when I want to,” made me reach for my water a little too quickly.

Over dinner I learned she’d grown up in North Carolina, loved live music, and bought more airport paperbacks than she ever finished. She was good at packing for work because she knew exactly what she would need, and terrible at packing for a trip she had chosen because she’d stand in front of an open suitcase imagining every possible version of the weekend. I asked what she would bring if she had two whole days to herself. She picked up a piece of bread, thought for a moment, and said, “Probably one book I actually want to read.” Then she added that the best part would be turning the alarm off.

When she asked to see a photo I’d mentioned winning a small contest with, I showed her a picture of a picnic table in a park just after rain. She held my phone very close and announced that she could do better. I asked what she’d change, expecting an answer about the angle or the light, and she touched one finger to the part of the image where wet leaves had stuck to the tabletop. “I’d have sat down right there,” she said. She handed the phone back and asked why I’d liked that park enough to go out in the rain, which was a question nobody at the contest had thought to ask me.

Our plates had been cleared before either of us noticed how late it was getting. When the server brought the check, I reached for it and Dileia put her palm down on the edge. She reminded me she’d asked me out, so we split it, and I told her I’d remember that when it was my turn to ask. “Already thinking about another one?” she said, and waited while I had the chance to pretend I’d been joking. I said I was, and she looked down at the receipt with a smile she didn’t bother hiding.

Outside, a group of tourists had stopped in a cluster on the sidewalk, somebody’s grandmother at the center of the whole thing trying to take a picture of a house across the street. Dileia found a gap between them, reached back for my hand, and pulled me through. On the other side there was room for us to walk without touching, and her fingers stayed between mine. She looked straight ahead with a little smile, and when I squeezed her hand, she took a step closer to me.

We came out by the harbor, where the breeze was cool enough to make her tuck her chin into her jacket. She leaned lightly against my arm and said she was glad she’d come out tonight. I looked down at our joined hands on the railing and said I was glad, too, and for the first time all day I had the sense that I could take as long as I liked to say something. Her phone lit up in her other hand. She glanced at the screen, turned toward me, and said, “Alden, I have to leave in the morning.”

## PART 2 – We Had Until Morning

“How early?” I asked, and Dileia turned her phone so I could see the crew message with the report time. I had known, in the way you know a restaurant will close while you’re still halfway through dinner, that her time here belonged to somebody else in the morning. Seeing the hour brought back the sight of her moving down the aisle, her name still pinned to her uniform. My hand loosened a little on the rail, and she slid hers farther into it.

“We’ve got a little while,” she said. A boat was making its way across the harbor with its lights on, and from where we stood I could see the wake a few seconds before I heard it reach the wall. She asked whether my first day in Charleston had gone anything like I’d planned. I said I’d expected to make it farther down my list before I needed to be rescued from it. She laughed, then rested her head briefly against my shoulder, and I wished she’d leave it there.

We followed the water to a low stone wall where she could lean without having to raise her voice over the people behind us. She asked whether I’d ever dated anyone who traveled for work as much as she did. I said I hadn’t, and that at the moment my main qualification was knowing how to get through an airport. That got a smile, but she kept rubbing her thumb over a seam in my cuff. “I live in Charlotte,” she said at last, as if we were finally allowed to hear how far away it was.

I told her I knew, and I could drive or fly if we found a weekend that worked. She looked out at the harbor and said she’d spent part of dinner wondering whether I’d still want to see her when I got home. She had said goodbye to enough people at airports to know how easy it was to say you’d keep in touch while both of you were standing there. “Sometimes you mean it while you’re saying it,” she said. “Then you get home and everything you meant to do is still waiting for you.”

I thought of the plans I’d made over the years that had died somewhere between a parking lot and my front door. My first instinct was to say something big enough to make her certain, but I had known her for one afternoon and she would have heard me reaching. I told her I’d spent the first part of dinner wondering what she’d say if I asked her out again. “And then you put your finger on my phone and told me where you’d sit at that picnic table,” I said. “I want to take you to a place like that, even if the only view is a wet table in Ohio.”

She looked at me for a long moment. Farther up the walkway a man was trying to take a picture of the boat, holding his phone over his head while somebody told him to hurry. Dileia asked if I’d really go sit outside with her after it rained. I said I’d probably bring something to wipe the bench with, which made her laugh into my shoulder. When she raised her head, the light from the harbor caught the freckles across her nose.

I had reached for her on the plane before I had time to think. Now my hand hovered near her waist long enough that she glanced down at it and smiled. She stepped closer and rested her palm flat against my shirt, in nearly the same place she’d caught my shoulder hours earlier. “Alden,” she said, “you can kiss me if you want to.”

She met me halfway. Her fingers tightened briefly in the fabric of my shirt, then relaxed, and I could hear the sound of somebody’s shoes on the walkway behind us. When we drew apart, she looked up at me with a smile so close I felt it against my cheek. I kissed her again, and this time her arm came up around my shoulder before either of us thought about where to put our hands.

We stayed there until a gust made her hair catch in the corner of her mouth. She pulled it free and made a point of looking down at both her feet. “Still upright,” she said, and I laughed harder than the joke deserved because the sound of her voice that close to me was doing something to my judgment. We started back toward the hotel with our hands together, taking the next turn slowly enough that a woman with a little dog passed us twice.

I asked when she might have a weekend to herself. She said she was supposed to get two days together later in the month, and she’d been looking forward to spending them in Charlotte with the alarm off. I was about to offer to come down when she looked at me and said, “I could come to Columbus.” Her tone was casual, but she stopped walking to see what I would say.

“I’d really like that,” I told her. She said the roster had to come through first, and I said I’d keep the weekend clear when she knew which one it was. That was a small thing to offer, and it felt more serious than anything I could have said beside the water. She squeezed my hand and asked if Columbus could survive the kind of ambitious sightseeing I’d planned for Charleston. “I can show you where I go when I need to get out of my own head,” I said, and she said she’d like to see that.

Near the hotel we stopped under the light outside a restaurant that had already closed. Someone had stacked the chairs on the tables, and I could see our reflection in the dark glass between their upside-down legs. Dileia thanked me for the evening, then teased me for asking if she had enough time left to get some sleep. She put both hands on my shoulders and kissed me once more. When she turned to go, I kept my feet where they were and watched her look back from the hotel entrance.

By the time I got to my room, she’d texted that she was upstairs and getting ready for bed. I told her I’d made it back and hoped she’d stay on her feet for the whole of her next flight. She sent a laughing face and said she was planning to. I put the phone down beside my guidebook, where the little colored marks still told me exactly how I was supposed to spend tomorrow.

I opened the window an inch and stood there listening to a delivery truck idle on the street below. In the morning, she would get dressed while I slept, and by the time I went out for coffee, she might already be in the air. I’d asked when I could see her again, but the next thing I wanted was smaller and somehow harder to ask for. I wanted to hear her voice after an ordinary day.

I picked up the phone and typed, “Can I call you when you’re done tomorrow?” I waited a minute, set it down, then reached for it as soon as the screen went dark. The room had grown quiet enough for me to hear a couple laughing as they went past my door. I turned out the lamp and lay awake with the only question I’d been too afraid to ask her in person still unanswered.

## PART 3 – The Next Time She Landed

I woke to the sound of a truck backing up somewhere below my window and reached for my phone before I remembered where I was. There was a message from Dileia, sent from the airport while the room around me was still dark. “Yes, you can call me,” she’d written, followed a minute later by, “Please let me get off the plane first.” I smiled into the pillow and asked whether she’d made it to the gate without falling into anybody’s arms. She wrote back that she’d successfully navigated several moving walkways and expected to be trusted with an airplane by the end of the morning.

Downstairs, I ate eggs and toast by a window while a man on the sidewalk swept yesterday’s leaves into a pile he kept having to start again. I had a few more days in Charleston, and I wanted to give them the attention I’d come all this way to give them. I took my camera out after breakfast and went back to the street with the uneven bricks. In daylight I could see that somebody had laid a narrow piece of wood over the worst of the gap so the wheels of a stroller could make it across.

A little bookstore was tucked between two places getting ready for lunch, and I walked in because I could hear a ceiling fan and because the door was open. On a low shelf I found a paperback with a cracked spine and a photograph of a woman sitting on a bus on the cover. The woman had one hand on the glass beside her, and you could see the reflection of a town passing the window. I stood there and read two pages, then took it to the register. By the time I went out again, I had three pictures I wanted to send Dileia and a small paper bag warm from being held under my arm.

She texted later in the afternoon, after she’d landed and finished work, to see how many interesting sidewalks had delayed me. I sent her the pictures, including one of the piece of wood over the bricks, and she asked if I’d watched anybody use it. I said I’d stood around long enough to see a man with a grocery cart go over it without looking down. “There’s your review,” she wrote, and a minute later my phone rang before I’d had a chance to decide whether it was too early to call.

Her voice sounded a little rough, and I heard water running in the background. She’d gotten home, had her shoes off, and was trying to rinse out a coffee mug she’d forgotten in the sink two days before. I went to the window so I could watch people crossing the street while she told me about a passenger who had brought a single enormous houseplant onboard and referred to it as Kevin. “What kind of plant?” I asked, and she said, with such genuine indignation that I laughed, “Alden, I had forty minutes to find somewhere for Kevin to sit. I barely had time to learn his name.”

I told her about the bookstore and the woman on the cover of the paperback. She asked if I liked the book, and I said I thought so, although I had spent more time looking at the picture than reading it. She dried her mug while I told her about the little board somebody had put over the bricks, and then there was a stretch of quiet in which both of us seemed to have reached the end of the day’s news. I could hear a refrigerator hum on her side of the call. “That’s most of what I’ve got today,” she said, and I liked how quickly I could answer, “You can stay on anyway.”

The following afternoon I sat down at the waterfront with a paper cup of lemonade. I could see the part of the railing where we’d stopped, and I let myself look at it a while before I opened my book. A little later Dileia sent a picture of the sandwich she’d bought on her layover, with one slice of meat folded so carefully that it looked like someone had been trying to hide it. She called it the most disappointing meal she’d eaten in months, and I sent her a photo of a crooked park bench that tilted downhill at an angle. She said the bench was probably still more comfortable than her jump seat, then asked if the far end had room for a second person.

On my last afternoon I went to a garden I’d wanted to see since I booked the trip. At the end of a path I came across a plain bench set back from the gravel, just far enough under a tree to be shaded, and sat there until two people I had passed near the entrance caught up to me. The woman pointed out a bird to the man beside her and waited until he found it for himself. I stayed a few more minutes after they left, then went back to my room and packed. The guidebook went into the bag with its pencil marks and several new dog-eared pages.

Dileia and I talked again before I went home. I learned that on a rare quiet morning in Charlotte she liked to sit at the kitchen table without turning on the television, and that her younger brother had once borrowed a skillet and returned it with a different lid. She asked how many mugs I owned after I admitted I’d bought one at the airport on a previous trip because it was easier than remembering which box I’d packed mine in when I moved. I told her I had an embarrassing number and could never find a clean one. “You travel with color-coded notes and live out of a dish rack,” she said, sounding delighted to have discovered this.

On Monday in Columbus I went back to work and found a stack of revisions on my desk held down by a sample of concrete paver. The first person through the door wanted to move a tree, and the next wanted to know if we could make the shade reach farther without changing where the trees went. At five thirty I was still at my desk, staring at a diagram of the turning radius for a maintenance cart. My phone lit up with a picture of Dileia’s kitchen table, two socks on it that she said she’d pulled out of the dryer in exactly that mismatched condition. I called her while I walked to my car, and she told me to finish explaining the tree after I’d opened the door and gotten somewhere warm.

That was when I started to understand what I’d wanted when I stood at the hotel window in Charleston. There was a particular sound my shoes made on the stairs down from the office, which she had now heard, and I knew the little metallic tap her spoon made against the inside of a mug. She had never seen my desk and I had never seen her kitchen except for the corner with the socks. We were learning our way around the edges of each other’s days.

On Wednesday evening she called while I was trying to decide whether a jar of mustard had enough left in it to justify washing a knife. Her roster was up, and she had the Saturday and Sunday we’d talked about, with enough time to get back to Charlotte on Monday morning. I asked if she still wanted to come. She let a beat go by before she said, “Alden, I’ve got three arrival times written down on the back of a grocery receipt. I’d hate to think I did all this research for nothing.”

I sat down at the kitchen table and we compared the flights. She picked Saturday afternoon, late enough that neither of us would have to be at an airport before sunrise, and booked a flight home for Monday morning. I told her she was welcome to stay with me and that there was a separate guest room with a door that closed, a spare charger, and a lamp I’d have to check for a bulb. She said the guest room sounded great and that she would turn around at the airport if I met her with a laminated visitor schedule. I promised to keep the welcome materials to a reasonable weight.

After we hung up, I went to the guest room and turned on the lamp. It worked, which was good, because my next move would have been to take the bulb out of the kitchen and forget where I’d put it. The room had accumulated the things I postponed doing something about, a pair of old boots in a cardboard box and a picture frame with the store photograph still in it. I moved the box into my closet, pulled clean sheets from the dryer, and sat on the edge of the bed while they were still warm in my lap. It was the first time I’d looked at that room and imagined the sound of someone opening its door in the morning.

In the days before she came, I thought of at least six places I could take her. One of them was a park I’d helped design where I knew exactly what I would tell her about every plant we passed. Another was a small bookstore I had been going to for years, where the owner knew that I always put one book back after carrying it around for twenty minutes. I made a dinner reservation in German Village and left the rest of the evening open. Then I bought coffee because I could remember the color of hers at the airport and wanted to be able to get it right if she asked for a cup.

I got to John Glenn Columbus International Airport fifteen minutes before her flight was supposed to land. I checked the board twice, although the second check accomplished exactly what the first one had. Near baggage claim a man was holding flowers wrapped in brown paper, turning them in his hands whenever the doors opened so the stems stayed out of sight. I had brought my car keys and very little idea what I’d say to Dileia when she walked through those same doors. I’d been fine talking to her across hundreds of miles, and now I could hardly stand still across twenty feet of polished floor.

When she came through she was wearing a burgundy sweater, jeans, and white sneakers, with a small overnight bag over her shoulder. She saw me just as I lifted my hand and headed straight across the floor. The bag dropped beside one of her shoes and she put both arms around my neck, and for a moment I could smell the cool air she’d brought in on her sweater. She drew back just far enough to kiss me. “Hi,” she said afterward, and I realized I could have skipped every single thing I’d practiced saying to her in the car.

I picked up her bag and asked how the flight had been. She looked down at her shoes and said, “Entirely under control, thank you.” We followed the signs to the garage with her hand in mine, and near the doors she had to slow me down so she could get a better grip. I glanced over at her, and she smiled as if she remembered just as clearly as I did which one of us had reached back through the crowd in Charleston.

In the car I told her I’d made a dinner reservation and had a few ideas about what we could do until then. She waited until we were out of the garage and the sky came into view beyond the windshield. “Take me somewhere you’d go if you had a couple of hours to yourself,” she said. I asked if she wanted to see any of the places I’d marked. She shook her head and said she’d rather know what I did with a Saturday when nobody was visiting.

We went to the bookstore. A bell on the door gave a tired little scrape when we came in, and the owner looked up and asked whether I’d finished the one I’d bought last month. Dileia stood behind my shoulder while I had to admit I’d made it about halfway. When we reached the shelves in the back she said, “I thought I was the one who came home with books I don’t finish.” I pulled a title down from the shelf and told her I finished almost everything I read in that store, which was one reason the owner took so much pleasure in getting me to buy something.

She went quiet for nearly twenty minutes while she looked through the shelves, and I wandered a little way down the aisle and let her have the time. At the register she showed me a novel she’d been meaning to read, holding it open at the first page with her thumb. “I think I might actually get through this one,” she said. Outside, she tucked it away in her bag with the receipt still marking the place and asked if I came there often enough to have a favorite spot to read. I told her there was a place by the river where I went when the office had gotten too loud in my head.

We walked along the Scioto Riverfront while the sky went pale over the water. Dileia asked me about a path that curved away from the river and then back, and I gave her the answer I would have given a client about following the slope. She listened, then asked where I usually sat when I came down here by myself. I showed her a place where the backs of the benches caught the late sun and admitted that on some workdays I’d come down here just to sit until I could hear something besides the meeting I’d left. She took my hand and said, “Show me which bench.”

We sat there for a while. A cyclist passed with a little silver bell that rang twice at the bend, and Dileia told me that from where we were sitting it was possible to watch him all the way along the water until he disappeared. I had come down on plenty of evenings and looked straight at that stretch of path without ever following somebody to the end of it. We watched the cyclist vanish behind a stand of trees, and then she put her head against my shoulder again, the way she had in Charleston. This time she left it there.

At dinner in German Village she asked how much of Charlotte I’d seen. I said I’d passed through a couple of times and could give an extremely limited tour consisting of a terminal and the view from a highway. She said she could do better than that and asked whether I’d like to come down on a weekend when we could both get free. “I can take you to the place I go when I’ve got a morning to myself,” she said, and she reached for her water without looking away from me. I thought about how much I’d liked hearing the hum of her refrigerator in Charleston and how much more I wanted to see the rest of the room.

I told her I could make a trip the following month if we could find the dates. We got our phones out, spent a few minutes talking around the deadlines I already knew about and the schedule she still had to wait for, and found two weekends worth keeping an eye on. One of them I’d have to move a site visit for, and I knew which colleague to call about that on Monday. She held her phone up so I could see which dates she’d put a star beside. “You’ve got me doing it now,” she said, and I laughed because I could see she’d used two different colors.

At my apartment, she paused in front of the photographs on my shelves. She wanted to know where I’d taken one of a man dragging a folding chair down a beach and why another, a picture of a tree with a crooked trunk, had a whole frame to itself. Then she noticed the small plant by the window, leaned closer, and put one finger against the rim of the pot. “How long’s it been like this?” she asked. I told her it had been having a difficult spring, and she gave me a long look before asking if the landscape architect knew where he kept his watering can.

I showed her the guest room, set her bag just inside, and left her to settle in while I made coffee. She came to the kitchen in her socks, leaned against the counter, and watched me pour a little milk into her mug. “When I asked if you were traveling alone,” she said, “I had no idea I was going to end up in your kitchen.” I said I’d expected a quiet trip and a few good pictures, and handed her the cup. She took a sip, set it down, and slipped her arms around my shoulders. “I think we both got something better,” she said.

I kissed her there with the coffee cooling on the counter and the light over the stove the only one I’d bothered to turn on. After a while we took our mugs to the couch and talked about Sunday, whether it might rain, and how late she wanted to sleep. She said she’d leave the alarm off and suggested that if it rained, we could still go out if I brought something to wipe a bench with. I told her I had just the thing, although she’d have to live with the fact that it was an old kitchen towel with a picture of a pear on it.

She laughed, and a little later she reached for her coffee and seemed surprised to find it had gone cold. I’d had a seat belt around my hips the first time I’d put my arm around her, and I’d needed every inch of it to hold us steady. Now she was on the couch in my apartment because she’d sat down with a grocery receipt and made room for me on a Saturday she could have spent anywhere. We had a Sunday ahead of us and two weekends with stars beside them, and I was beginning to understand how much I wanted to know what came after that.

Her phone was face down on the coffee table, next to mine, and for a little while neither of us reached for them. Then Dileia took my hand and said she’d been thinking about Monday, about going back to Charlotte and opening the door to her own kitchen. I could hear the refrigerator start up behind us, the same ordinary sound I’d listened to over the phone while we tried to think of a reason to stay on. She looked down at our hands, held mine a little tighter, and said, “Alden, what do you want us to be when I go home?”