I spent sixty-one years learning that, and I learned it, finally, from a rude man eating chips who taught me the exact words that set me free without ever meaning to.
If you’re not using the space, what’s the problem?
There was no problem, it turned out.
I just had to start using it.
Henry would have laughed until he cried.
I think he’d have been proudest not of the knitting on the tray table or the purser putting that man in his place, but of the simplest part —
that his wife, who used to say sorry to furniture, flew home from meeting her granddaughter having apologized to no one at all.
And when little Grace is old enough, I will tell her about the flight.
Not so she’ll learn to be unkind.
So she’ll learn that being small, and being quiet, and being sixty-one, and being a woman, have never once meant she deserves less room to exist.
She can have every inch that’s hers.
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