A nice-looking couple, not as young as you might expect - the woman in wide black pants and an arty black-and-white top of a geometric design, her short hair streaked with gray the man a big, beaming, jovial type with a stubbly blond buzz cut, his bald knees poking bashfully from voluminous khaki Bermudas.Īnd not only were there MOM and DAD there were GRANDMA and GRANDPA, twice over - two complete sets. MOM, the button on the woman’s shoulder read - one of those laminated buttons such as you might see in an election year. The man next to her clasped an infant’s velour-upholstered car seat close to his chest. A woman spoke into a tape recorder in an urgent, secretive way. At least half a dozen people held video cameras, and many more had regular cameras slung around their necks. A man gripped the wicker handle of a wheeled and skirted bassinet as if he planned to roll it onto the plane, and a woman stood ready with a stroller so chrome-trimmed and bristling with levers that it seemed capable of entering the Indy 500. The entire waiting area for the flight from San Francisco was packed with people bearing pink- and blue-wrapped gifts, or hanging on to flotillas of silvery balloons printed with “IT’S A GIRL!” and trailing spirals of pink ribbon. Step around the bend, then, and you’d come upon what looked like a gigantic baby shower. And a latecomer, a woman in a yellow dress, was rushing toward the gate with an armful of long-stemmed roses. You could see an overexcited child spinning herself into dizziness in the center of the corridor, and then a grownup popping forth to scoop her up and carry her, giggling and squirming, back into the waiting area.
Their signboards were blank and their rows of vinyl chairs unoccupied and ghostly.īut you could hear a distant hum, a murmur of anticipation, at the far end of Pier D. Most of the gates had admitted their last flights. The wide gray corridors were empty, and the newsstands were dark, and the coffee shops were closed. AF is pleased to excerpt the first chapter of Digging to America - our top pick for summer reading.Īt eight o’clock in the evening, the Baltimore airport was nearly deserted. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Tyler takes on international adoption, immigration, what it means to be an American, and other weighty topics in one extraordinarily entertaining novel.
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