Peter resigned. The independent inquiry recorded what he had done and what he had helped uncover. Julian left the hotel company. He agreed to provide his records to the insurers and to answer whatever questions followed in his own name. Maya went with him on his next visit to Beatrice. They took a photograph of the lake house and a bunch of carnations, which her aunt ate before anybody could stop her. On the way home they managed, for the first time in years, to get through a whole car ride without either of them saying her father would have wanted something.
Seven weeks later, the first families went home. Luis hung the green curtains with the birds in the kitchen. He had got them out on Saturday morning, washed them twice and fixed a little tear with a square cut from a hotel pillowcase. They were a fraction too short once the plaster was replaced. Marisol put two pots of basil on the sill and declared that anybody who noticed could come and help her wipe the windows.
There were seven people who had been left off the original list. The Circle offered all seven leases or assistance finding a different place. Helen chose the flat above the shop. She paid a rent she had negotiated with Evelyn after two hours of hard bargaining in which each woman tried to persuade the other to accept twenty dollars less. Ruth resumed her piano lessons on Saturdays. She mastered the fourth note and went on to torment the neighbors with a piece involving the right pedal and a great many pirates.
On the first night back, Luis opened the bedroom window and heard somebody crying in the courtyard. He went down in his slippers. It was the retired man from upstairs, sitting on the edge of the sandpit in a jacket over his pajamas. His wife had gone to her sister’s for the weekend. He had forgotten how loud his kitchen clock could be when there was nobody else in the apartment.
Luis offered to take the battery out. The old man shook his head. What he wanted, it turned out, was company while he wound the thing. His wife usually held the chair steady. They went upstairs together. Afterward the old man put a pot on the stove and made coffee strong enough to keep both of them awake until daylight. When Marisol asked where he had been, Luis told her he had been helping a neighbor set the time.
It was July before Maya and Eli got their weekend in the presidential suite. Arthur had been promoted to guest services. He sent up a bowl of peppermints and a bill for eleven dollars. At the bottom he had written FULL AND FINAL SETTLEMENT. Maya paid it in single dollar bills. He framed the last one and hung it behind the desk, where it could puzzle visitors for years.
She saw Claire just once that summer, on a bus outside the care home. Claire was wearing a green polo shirt with a garden center logo. Her father sat beside her with his polished shoes on and a potted red geranium balanced on his knees. The two women recognized one another. Claire raised her hand. Maya raised hers. Then the lights changed and the bus moved on. Neither would have known what to say in any case. A wave was something they could both manage.
On Sunday morning Maya and her mother took Eli down to the courtyard. The bench had been repainted. Teddy had left the watering can behind its left leg, exactly as requested. A small new peach tree stood near the brick wall. Its label said it might produce fruit in two years if two summers went reasonably well and somebody remembered to water it.
Eli took the jam jar from the pocket of his good shorts. He had written Grandpa on a strip of masking tape and drawn a picture underneath of a man whose arms came out of his ears. He looked at his grandmother for permission.
“You can put a little bit here,” she said. “I want to keep some for the lake. Your grandfather used to drop things out of boats. It seems only fair.”
He opened the jar. A breeze rose and fell. For all that he had guarded his grandfather through two elevators and a missing morning, Eli now tipped the ashes out matter-of-factly, the way he might have emptied a pocket of sand after a good afternoon at the beach. Maya watered the ground. Evelyn put the lid back on the jar.
“Were you really going to give us that big room the first time?” Eli asked.
“Yes,” Maya said.
“But somebody needed it.”
“Yes.”
He examined the tree. “I liked the room with the ice machine. You knew when people were awake.”
While her mother took him in for breakfast, Maya stayed beside the bench. She could hear dishes in the restaurant and somebody at an upstairs window practicing the first difficult bar of a tune over and over. From the loading yard came the sound of a delivery driver asking where he ought to leave the bread. These were the sounds her father had heard when he kept a chair in the courtyard and came out with his coffee in the morning. She had expected his absence to make the place quiet. Every week it surprised her how much the people he left behind had to say.
A young woman holding a toddler opened the courtyard gate and looked around uncertainly. She had a pink voucher in her free hand. The paper was worn almost to cloth along its folds.
“Excuse me. I think this used to be a way into the hotel?”
“It still is.” Maya held the gate for her. Inside, Arthur was already clearing space at the counter. She could already smell the buttered pancakes. Her son had begun to whistle, very badly, with entire confidence that he was getting the tune right.
“Is there somebody I have to ask for?” the woman said.
“Just give them your name.”
THE END