The men would smile when they saw her, and they were always men. They would tip hats that they only thought were on their heads and stare at her as if she were someone else, someone they knew, someone they once cared for more than anyone in the world.
“Can I help you to your room?” she’d asked. She wasn’t supposed to leave the desk, but it was the night shift. And besides, she was assisting a guest.
“Well, that would be lovely,” they’d say. And she’d slip her arm through theirs, feeling them right themselves, stand straighter with her on their arm. They’d mumble to her in the elevator, asking with whiskey-soaked breath her name and how long she’d been working at the hotel. She’d keep her smile professional and polite, holding the elevator door as they exited, as they thanked her for her time. Sometimes they’d slip her a bill—a ten, a twenty. And she’d keep the elevator door open long enough to see them enter their unlit rooms.
And she’d feel kindly toward them later when she left the desk again. When Curtis’s stare followed her down the hall. When hers were the only footsteps in the hotel. When she took the elevator up to the floor she’d escorted them to. When she got off and walked down the hall to the room they had entered. She’d feel kindly to them when she sunk the key into the lock and opened the door, hearing their snoring coming as steadily as the surf. When she walked past them as they lay on the bed in their underwear, their pale bellies exposed, their arms at their sides. When she found their wallet in their pants pocket, when she pulled out several crisp bills, feeling their texture between her fingers.
They would wake the next morning after a sound and drunken sleep, not knowing what happened to the money. Thinking that they overtipped. Thinking that they bought a round for the bar. And they would remember the girl with the black, black hair, the girl who helped them, who slipped her lovely arm through theirs, making them feel like the men they once were, if only for an elevator ride. And for that, they would have paid anything.
Thirty
1989
Mary came home from Sea Cliff with more money than she should have. She bought Hannah a backpack. She bought a used couch from Goodwill and a mattress from an ad in the newspaper. It had belonged to an old woman who lived in a beautiful Victorian, an old woman who slept in the twin-size bed next to the twin-size bed in which her husband had died, in the twin-size bed in which she would die. The queen-size bed was never used. Her kids put an ad in the newspaper for most of her things. There was a piano and a dining-room set. Mary got the bed.
The girls didn’t know if they’d be able to fit it up the stairs into the apartment, but Mary found a boy in the Laundromat, a boy she recognized from the hotel. The one who watched her from the bar and worked at the golf course. He usually arrived at the greens when Mary was leaving, and he’d slow at the sight of her, looking for a reason to stop, for something to say as she brushed past. She smiled at him and he carried up the bed.
The first night they had it, they slept in their sleeping bags on the bare mattress. The next day, they took the Blazer to a discount home store in a big town fifteen miles away to buy bed linens. Mary let Hannah pick them out. She walked up and down the aisles, pondering the neat rows of plastic-wrapped sheets, as if confronted with the most pleasant but important of deliberations.
“Do you like these ones?” Hannah asked, holding up a set of seafoam green sheets with tiny white seashells.
“Yeah,” nodded Mary. “Those are pretty. It’ll be like sleeping in the ocean.”
They purchased the matching comforter and went home and put the sheets on the bed, right from the package, then spread the comforter on top. Hannah looked at it, at the crisp lines in the sheets where they had been folded, and she smiled. “I like it here,” she said. It had been so long since she lived in a home. And if Hannah’s devotion had an apex, if Mary’s omnipotence did, it was on that day, looking down on the sheets that were the sea, in the town that was beside it.
IN THOSE EARLY WEEKS, it became clear that Hannah enjoyed school. She was a competent though not a standout student, faring well in English but continuing to struggle in math.
“I don’t understand, Bunny,” Mary would say, reviewing her corrected homework, which was slashed with red lines and corrections. You totally got this kind of stuff when I was teaching you.”
“Mrs. Jentiff goes really fast.”
“Tell her to slow down.”
“I can’t, Mare.”
And sometimes Mary would be in bed, underwater, but there would be other voices—not hers, not Hannah’s—and she’d force her eyes open and swim to consciousness and they would be gone. All that there’d be was the sound of the radio, tinny and garbled.
“Bunny, you need to turn it down,” she’d say, her voice dry and bare. “I’m trying to sleep.”
“Sorry,” Hannah would reply. Lying on her belly, she’d groan slightly as she reached for the knob that controlled the volume.
It wasn’t long before Hannah asked to have a friend over. “Her name is Nicky,” said Hannah. “She said you might know her mom. She works at Sea Cliff, too.”
Mary was still in bed, and she pulled the covers up to her chin. It was getting colder, and they hadn’t turned on the heat in the apartment. “What does she do there?”
“Nicky says she works in events.”
“I don’t know her.”
Hannah waited expectantly. “So can she come over?”
Mary’s lips were a perfect bow as she looked at Hannah. “I guess so,” she said. “Just tell me when.”
Nicky came on a Thursday. She was pretty in a common way, an unchallenging way, with brown hair and a fine nose. She tossed her hair over one shoulder and extended her hand toward Mary. “Nice to meet you,” she said. And Mary noticed the admiring way Hannah looked at the girl.
Mary made herself smile and took the girl’s hand. She found little reason to be charming outside of work. “Nice to meet you, too,” Mary said, looking from Nicky to Hannah back to Nicky. “What do you guys have planned?”
Hannah grabbed Nicky’s hand. “We’re just going to hang out,” she said. “Come on.” She pulled her into the bedroom and shut the door.
Mary sat on the couch, let her head fall back, and she listened. Nicky’s and Hannah’s voices rose like a piano scale, the words indiscernible but lilting. And Mary let her gaze rest on the white of the ceiling, and she let her breath come and go, her arm draped across her stomach. It drained her, staying in a place, as if roots drew life from her rather than gave it. Then she closed her eyes. They opened only when she heard Hannah and Nicky emerge from the room.