sit were nerve wracking, like being a new student at a new school and trying to find a welcoming place to sit.
“Dang it,” I mumbled under my breath.
I couldn’t find an open table. Every place I looked was already occupied. I considered taking my food to the airline’s lounge and eating there, but my eyes fell to a small table in the center of the chaos. I recognized her. The woman who had unintentionally bought my meal. The woman from seat 3B.
My feet started moving in her direction before my brain could catch up. She didn’t notice my approach. Her eyes were down, focused on the screen of her phone.
“Excuse me,” I said.
She looked up from her phone at the sound of my voice.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” I asked, motioning to the vacant chair at her table for two. “There doesn’t seem to be anywhere else to sit.”
I watched her do a quick scan of the tables in the surrounding area as if to confirm the truth in my words. Finally, she grabbed her oversized leather bag off of the vacant seat across from her to make room for me.
“Thank you,” I said, tucking myself behind the small table. “I’ve never seen it this busy before.”
She hummed, but didn’t really engage or make eye contact.
“I suppose I should thank you for the meal, too,” I added.
She looked up at that. Her dark eyelashes were impossibly long; each time she shut her eyes, I marveled that she was able to open her eyes again without her eyelashes becoming entangled.
“The worker at the salad place said you paid for the next five meals?” I clarified.
“Oh, that. It’s nothing. Just a superstition of mine. I see it as an offering to the Flight Gods,” she explained. “They get me to Philadelphia, I give them thanks in return.”
“That’s an awfully kind superstition,” I observed.
She shrugged again. She’d been so chatty, almost flirtatious, on the plane earlier; her reluctance to speak now felt like a little like rejection. I briefly considered apologizing for not personally delivering her cranberry juice, splash of seltzer, but that would have required a lot more explanation about switching duties and internet celebrities and bingo cards than I was comfortable with sharing.
“Do you fly a lot?” I asked instead.
She nodded while she chewed her food. I’d caught her mid-bite. “Probably almost as often as you.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m an HR consultant.”
“And what does an HR consultant do?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t a dumb question.
“Well, you know what HR does, right?”
“Hiring, firing … making sure I get paid?” I listed off.
She nodded. “That and more. Payroll and personnel is a big part of the job, but HR also deals with things like sexual harassment complaints and job discrimination. As an HR consultant, I get brought into companies to help their own Human Resource division.”
“Help them do what?” I asked.
“A few things. If it’s a new company—a tech start-up, for example—I might come in to help them write policies and procedures and make sure they’re complying with U.S. labor laws. Larger, more established companies might call in a consultant to help mediate an employee grievance. Usually though, I help employers update their company’s infrastructure to make sure they’re being as efficient as they can.”
“Efficient,” I repeated. “Like firing people.”
She nodded, unashamed. “Yes, that’s part of the job. When a company is too chicken shit to do their own dirty work, sometimes I get called in to do it for them.”
“That’s got to be hard,” I observed.
“I try not to think about it too much,” she said in earnest. “That may come off as callous, but they were going to get fired anyway. Better it be by me who actually has training than some bumbling middle-manager type.”
I made a humming noise. “I suppose I wouldn’t mind being fired by you.”
It sounded a little flirty, but I hadn’t really meant it like that.
“I’m Anissa, by the way,” she introduced herself.
“Alice,” I returned.
She reached across the table and shook my hand. Her grip was firm, but her skin was unbelievably soft. I wondered what kind of moisturizer she used.
“Do airlines still have all those crazy regulations about what you have to wear and how you need to fix your hair?” she asked.
“I’ve heard from some veterans that it’s relaxed a lot over the years, but we still have a lot of rules—probably more than most kinds of jobs,” I confirmed.
Many of the realities of my job necessitated certain things, regardless of airline