“Come here a sec.”
Working on the set, her dad practically looked like a member of the theater company. He was in his mid-forties, but didn’t look his age at all. He still had the floppy blond hair and trashy-hipster thrift store clothes of the art student he had once been. The older Spencer got, the more the two just looked like brothers, something that Scarlett found fascinating and strangely unnerving. Sometimes—okay, most of the time—her dad just didn’t seem like someone who should be running a business. Nothing against her dad. Not everyone was born to run a hotel in New York. The job had been thrust on him. He’d fought it for a while when he was just out of college. But then he married his true love and had four kids, one of whom developed cancer. After that, like it or not, good at it or not…the hotel became his life’s work.
“You know about the dinner plan for tonight?” he asked, releasing the last hold of the fabric and sending it drifting to the floor. “Dinner at Lupe’s.”
“Lupe’s?” Scarlett said, pleased to hear the name of her favorite Mexican restaurant.
“Lola set it up. You four are going. Your mom and I are having a date night. It’s sort of a back-to-school treat, and a welcome back for Marlene. So be back around five.”
This last bit of information took some of the shine off of things. For ten wonderful days each summer, Marlene, the youngest Martin, went away. Her cancer survivor group had a camp in the Catskills where they threw one another into the lake and ate marshmallows, and peace would reign on the fifth floor of the Hopewell. Scarlett loved her little sister, of course, but she was not prepared to lie and say she was fun to live with.
Her dad climbed down from the ladder and stared up at the chandelier, which was still crooked after being released from the wire that had been pulling it deliberately out of joint.
“Has it always been like that?” he asked.
“Kinda. It’s a little worse now.”
He hmmmed, and the matter seemed to pass from his mind.
“Listen,” he said, wiping dust from his hands onto his pants, “your mom and I were thinking…since Mrs. Amberson has moved out, and you have school starting…you have enough on your plate right now. We don’t expect you to have to take care of the Empire Suite or any of the other rooms.”
“I don’t?”
“Well, Lola is around pretty much full-time this year, and Spencer’s been doing a lot. And we won’t have as many guests.”
He tried to make that sound like it was a good thing that would just save them all a little time.
“And you have your job,” he added. “How has your job been going?”
“It’s fine,” she said. “We’ve worked it out. It’s just a few afternoons a week, a few hours here and there. It’s not bad.”
“Do you want to do it? I know it’s college money, but that shouldn’t be your big concern.”
It was college money. It was a lot of college money. Somewhere out there, a bank account with her name on it was growing.
“All I’m saying is, you can quit. I want you to quit if it feels like too much. The show is done. You don’t have to—”
“No,” Scarlett said. “I want to do it. I…like it.”
A piece of glass fell from the chandelier and landed on the silver fabric, like a dirty, loose tooth. It punctuated their conversation, bringing the matter to a close.
In Biology I, Scarlett had been taught that carbon was the building block of life. They forgot to mention the other element: Element M. Money. Money determined everything. You needed money for your health—they’d learned that lesson when Marlene’s medical bills came in. (Though they were never supposed to talk about that. It was a Martin Family Rule.) You needed money for school. You needed money to get across the city, and to do things on weekends. You needed money to go away for the summer, like most of Scarlett’s friends had. Summer in the city was hot and terrible, and outside of the city there were opportunities. If you had the money. Which most of Scarlett’s friends did. Dakota, for example, had been in France at a language immersion program. She had arranged this little picnic in the park to celebrate the fact that they were all back and together. Only Scarlett had been here all along, because she was the most stone broke out of the group.