Maya remembered the Sunday. She had made eggs. Eli had poured too much maple syrup on a piece of toast. Evelyn had worn her coat through lunch and left early. A month later Maya had found a pink voucher tucked into a cookbook and used it to mark the page where her mother had written down her recipe for peach cobbler.
There was a knock. It was Julian. He carried half a roast chicken on a plate that had clearly begun its evening under much more ambitious circumstances.
“The buyers went,” he said. “I’ve bought you until Monday at ten to decide whether you want to answer their last question. They wanted a signature tonight.”
“What was their question?”
“How many people need to vacate the property before we can deliver it empty?”
“Forty, by your count.”
“They weren’t talking about the hotel.” He set the chicken on the desk. The plate rattled against the ice bucket. “They meant the land behind it. The land the Linden apartments are standing on.”
Evelyn gave her brother-in-law a look that would once have sent eight-year-old Maya directly to her room. He sat down anyway.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
“We’ve ordered fries,” Evelyn told him. “You’ve got the time it takes to cook a potato.”
Julian looked at the photograph on the bed. “They’re going to build a second entrance for the hotel where the Linden building stands. The hotel’s loading bay is too narrow for the delivery trucks they use. They also want an event hall, parking for ninety cars and space for residential units. Some of those would be offered to people coming back from Linden.”
“How many is some?”
“Eight apartments. Two bedrooms. Better kitchens, level access, functioning heat.”
“Eighteen families.”
“The rest would get a relocation payment.”
“Would that relocation payment bring them back here in ten years when their children have been priced out of everything within twenty miles?”
“I’m not here to make you like it, Evie. I’m here because the boiler’s paid for and the chiller isn’t. Because the roof’s got another winter if we’re lucky. Because the interest on the loan goes up in June. Because I have spent half my waking life trying to balance your husband’s gifts against the bills they generated. Do you want to know what happens on Monday if Maya turns these people away?”
“Yes,” Maya said.
“We miss payroll on Thursday.”
Evelyn’s hand, resting on the photograph, stayed perfectly still. Maya began to think about numbers in the unpleasantly clear way her brain reserved for emergencies. One hundred and nineteen employees, some part-time. A full payroll running to considerably more than one hundred thousand dollars. Reserves that had been reported at half a million, thirty days ago.
“What happened to the reserve?”
“It’s secured against the construction loan on the Linden work. The bank swept it into a holding account on Wednesday. Perfectly entitled, under the agreement. I was working on getting it released.”
“Did you sign away access to our payroll reserve without telling me?”
“I signed the construction agreement when your father was still alive. It was his decision. He wanted Linden repaired. The contractor wanted a deposit. The financing was arranged on the strength of insurance payments that never came.”
“What about Winter Quay?”
He flinched. The movement was so slight Maya would have missed it if she had been watching his mouth. It was his shoulder that came up and went down again.
“My company,” he said.
“Does it receive the insurance payments?”
“It receives reimbursements for expenses incurred managing the displacement. Some of them, yes.”
“Which are either nonexistent or large enough for you to have a separate company receive them. Pick one.”
He turned to look at his sister-in-law. “When did she start speaking to me like Martin?”
“When she couldn’t get an answer any other way.”
Before he could reply, the door opened and a paper cone of fries entered the room at the height of a six-year-old’s nose. Eli had been allowed to distribute the salt. It turned out he had liberally salted the corridor, his trousers and several of the lower floors. Arthur carried a second cone intended for adults who wanted to live a little longer.
“The baby’s dad is here,” Eli said. “They said he can’t have his van back.”
“Who said?”
“The man with the hook. He says they have to pay him. The baby’s mom is crying and the baby’s dad is trying to get the car seat. I told him my daddy knows how to put one in a car, but he said the car’s the part he needs first.”
Maya was out of the room before he finished. Arthur hit the service elevator button with his elbow. The ride down felt like an hour. When the doors opened onto the loading level, she saw the back of the yellow tow truck first, then the small white van attached to its boom. Luis Alvarez stood in front of the truck with both hands spread flat against its grille. Marisol was holding a baby seat in one hand and Ben in the other. A security guard had one hand on his radio. The driver of the tow truck was asking everyone, with the patience of a man charging for his time, to be reasonable.
“Let him have his van,” Maya said.
The driver looked around. “Which one of you hired me?”
“I did,” said a woman in an expensive green coat standing just behind the guard. “This loading area is under temporary site control from six this evening. Residents were notified to remove all vehicles before the contractor arrived.”
Maya recognized the woman from the papers on her desk. Simone Ward, managing partner of the firm buying the hotel. “I thought you had a train.”
“I saw a driver in the way of our survey crew. I stopped.”