Maya put her hand in its pocket. A small slip of paper had got caught in the seam. Lemon soap on a scrap of pink voucher. The handwriting was her mother’s.
Taking your grandpa to finish an errand. Come when you wake up.
Eli put the note in his pocket and blew his nose on the bottom edge of his pajama shirt. He had reached a point in his distress that no ordinary matter of hygiene could touch. “We’re awake,” he said.
They dressed and went down in the service elevator. Arthur had gone home and come back. He was asleep upright on a chair, quite professionally arranged, like a man paid to offer an example of the correct posture while resting your eyes. Maya covered him with the green throw from the reading room and left him there.
Teddy gave them a bag of rabbit pancakes and told Eli precisely where to find the extra strawberries in the bottom. They went out through the kitchen door, across the loading yard, along the street and around the corner to the little blue awning with the single clean letter near its center. On the inside of the plate glass, facing outward, someone had hung an old cardboard sign with the word OPEN on it.
The bell above the door still made the same two notes Maya had heard every weekday afternoon of her childhood. The shop smelled of floorboards, warm dust and lemon verbena. On the counter stood a mug with two pencils stuck through its handle and a saucer containing the kind of hairpins nobody willingly threw away. The shelving had gone. At the back of the room, in the place where they had sold the tinned goods with the longest dates farthest from the front, stood an upright piano with a line scratched into one leg at the height she had been when she turned five.
Evelyn had the top open. On the bench beside her sat Ruth with her pink barrettes. Helen, the woman Maya had seen sleeping, was in the window, untangling a sheet from a curtain rod. A little dust hung in the sunny air. The jam jar sat on the piano, safe and tightly closed.
“Think you can reach?” Evelyn asked the girl.
Ruth put one thin brown arm down inside the dusty wooden case. There was a small metallic clank. Up came a brass key on a piece of faded ribbon. It was bigger than the hotel keys, with a rectangular bit and the number eleven stamped over the bow.
“Grandpa’s in a glass jar,” Eli told her, by way of expressing his gratitude.
Ruth took this seriously. “Is it his first time in here?”
“Probably his first time since he became ashes,” Evelyn said. “He was in here quite often before that. If you children go through the back curtains, you’ll see a square black box. The house rule is nobody gets a finger stuck in anything. Most of what I own is too old to give it back.”
They went. Helen folded up the sheet. She was perhaps forty, with a raw crease on her face from the little mattress. In the night she had looked exhausted. In the morning she looked exhausted and unimpressed by how much she was expected to do about it.
“I got a message from my sister in Charlotte,” she said to Maya. “Somebody put a video of you firing the desk woman on the internet.”
Maya closed her eyes.
“Does it show the child?”
“Only the back of his head. They don’t have what you said to her at the start. It opens with her saying you own the place. Then you fire her. Everybody seems to have an idea why.”
She held out the phone. The clip had eighty thousand views and a caption suggesting that a rich woman had fired an employee for refusing an unauthorized upgrade. Directly beneath it was another clip cut from exactly the same footage, captioned to suggest that an outspoken hotel owner had instantly ended racism in the service industry. The comments under both were accumulating faster than she could read them.
“Can you speak to the person who posted it?”
“I clean floors at a distribution center. My personal relationship with the news media is they put things on screens above my head in the break room and I wish they’d put on something with dancing.”
“It’s Saturday.”
“Where I work, that means the coffee machine gets cleaned.” She gave a tired grin. “I can introduce you to a couple people who were in the lobby. I can also make a pot of coffee for us if your mother will let me use the good beans.”
“Use the good ones,” Evelyn called. “Sooner or later we’re all going to be ashes in a jam jar. Anybody wants to go there having spent their last good Saturday drinking something that came out of a bag with no date on it, they can go across the street.”
Eli came back carrying the prize he had found inside the safe. It was a little red plastic dinosaur with a chipped yellow horn.
“Grandpa kept toys,” he announced. “He was really good at being a kid.”
Vouchers, files, photographs and a small cardboard box followed. The last thing Ruth brought was a thin envelope, sealed and stamped and addressed to an office at the county courthouse. Across the back her father had written PLEASE REGISTER ENCLOSED DEED AND RETURN CERTIFIED COPY TO EVELYN BENNETT. The postmark where a date should have been was empty.
The envelope had never been mailed.
Chapter 7 — Eleven Dollars
Evelyn slit the envelope with the key. Inside lay a deed transferring the hotel land to the Circle, another sheet describing its boundaries, and a receipt for a filing fee. The receipt bore a stamp. It had been paid in November of 1996.
Maya read the covering letter twice. “He asked for a second copy.”