The first thing she saw was that someone had painted over the print. The second was the woman on the other side of the door.
The key had worked. Maya had pressed the latch and opened the door six inches before the security chain caught. A woman with wet hair and a baby over her shoulder looked out at them. On the floor behind her lay a cardboard box of diapers and a pair of men’s boots dusted with plaster.
“I’m sorry,” Maya said, stepping back. “They gave us the wrong key.”
The woman shifted the baby higher. “Please don’t tell them you saw me.”
Arthur put down the suitcase. Whatever he had expected to find upstairs, it hadn’t been this. The baby had a round red crease on his cheek where it had rested against his mother’s collar. He looked at Eli. Eli looked at him.
“I can get you another room,” Arthur said to Maya.
“Who do you mean by them?” Maya asked the woman.
“The ones who come on Friday.”
“Today is Friday.”
“I know what day it is.” Then the woman closed her eyes. “Sorry. That was rude. We’re supposed to have until six. I’ve got the email. My husband’s on his way with the car.”
“You can take your time.”
“That’s what the last lady said. Then she billed us.”
“How much?”
“Twenty-seven hundred dollars.”
Eli tugged his mother’s sleeve. His detective’s key envelope was trembling between his fingers. She bent down.
“I need the bathroom,” he whispered. Grand things happened to other people’s children in grand hotels. Hers had been standing politely through a succession of adult mistakes while urgently needing to pee.
“Arthur, can you show us an empty room with a bathroom before we do anything else?”
“Across the hall,” said the young mother. “Door sticks. You have to lift it. I used to clean this floor.”
The room across the hall turned out to be a linen closet with a staff lavatory at the back. Arthur stood guard while Eli used it. Maya waited among shelves of folded white towels and thought about the ridiculous room her father had named after a president who had once come for dessert and gone home before coffee. She had promised her son two nights in that room, one Saturday morning in the kitchen, and pancakes shaped like rabbits. She had come to scatter a little of her father’s ashes in the courtyard where he had proposed to her mother. She had brought the ashes in a jam jar wrapped in his old scarf because the funeral director’s velvet bag had made Eli think they were carrying a dead cat.
None of that had featured in the papers announcing her visit. In the papers it was all about the sale.
“Arthur,” she said, “who told the woman across the hall she could live there?”
He let out a breath. “You know what I hate about a question like that? I get one answer and it has to last me the rest of my job.”
“You can tell me you don’t know.”
“I know a piece. Which might do more damage than not knowing anything.”
“Tell me your piece.”
“The family’s name is Alvarez. They used to live at the Linden Court apartments. Pipe went in the ceiling. Their insurance was paying for a room. They got moved here when the other rooms filled up. The husband fixes things. He’s fixed a lot of things in this building for free.”
“Why free?”
“Ask him. And when you do, try asking without a manager present.”
Across the hall the baby began to cry. Another sound joined it, the harsh zip of packing tape being torn from a roll.
“I don’t want them packing,” Maya said.
“Then somebody better explain to them how you can fire a woman at four o’clock and leave another woman alone till Monday.”
There was no disrespect in his voice. It would have been easier to forgive him if there had been. He had asked her for an explanation because he expected her to have one.
Eli came out drying his hands on his jeans. “The soap smells like Grandma.”
“Lemon verbena,” she said. “She picked it.”
“Does the lady who was mean get to keep her room?”
“She doesn’t live here, honey.”
“Then why does she have a toothbrush?”
He pointed to the shelf by the sink. A red toothbrush stood in a chipped mug beside a box of cheap tea. Someone had put a label on the mug in black marker. C. MERCER. Beneath the shelf, on a hook meant for mop heads, hung a garment bag with a second receptionist’s jacket inside.
Arthur took the bag down. “This belongs in the staff room.”
“Does Claire live here?”
“She did for a week,” he said. “Everybody’s got a story. Doesn’t make what she said okay.”
The elevator chimed. Peter Lang stepped out with an older man Maya knew better than she wanted to. Her uncle Julian wore his usual good suit and the expression he had worn at her high school graduation, her wedding and her father’s funeral. At all three he had looked like a man about to ask the caterer for a discount.
“Maya, darling. Quite a welcome.” He reached for her. She let him kiss her cheek. “Why don’t we find you someplace comfortable? There’s a little issue with the inventory.”
The green door opened again. The Alvarez woman had put the baby in a sling. She handed Maya a folded piece of hotel stationery through the gap.
“Before you decide anything,” she said. “Read the part at the bottom.”
Julian stopped smiling. On the stationery, beneath the itemized bill for twenty-seven hundred dollars, was a handwritten instruction in blue ink.
If guest objects, refer to owner.
Below it, in the narrow, forward-leaning hand Maya had watched address her birthday cards for thirty-seven years, was her father’s signature.