Page 20 of The Drifter

"Would you walk me up?" I said.

She hesitated.

It wasn't coy. Nothing about the woman was coy. It was a hitch, half a beat. Her eyes went for one flick toward the empty stretch of marble on either side of her.

I read it wrong at first. I thought she was working out how to say no, which meant she'd been taught she couldn't, which put a foul taste in my mouth.

"I'll be right back," she said.

She went through a door behind the concierge stand and came out with a kid, maybe twenty-two, straightening his jacket and trying to look like he'd been standing there all along. She said something to him with her hand on his sleeve. He nodded, and she came back around the end of the counter.

She didn't come near me.

She kept a good three feet of air between us the whole way across that lobby, and she did it without ever once making it look like she was doing it. Not a flinch. Not a hurry. She simply walked a line that was hers and left mine to me.

I gave her every inch of it.

I've spent my life crowding people. It's most of what the job was. A woman who puts three feet on the table without saying a word has told me a great deal about how she's been walked at. The least I owe her is to not be the next one.

We went to the elevators. She pressed the button. The doors opened. We got in, and they closed.

"Where would you rather be?" I asked.

She turned and looked at me like I'd spoken Farsi.

"I'm sorry?"

"Downstairs. I asked you what you'd be doing if you weren't standing behind that desk." The car started up. "You said, I'd be somewhere else."

Her lips parted.

And I watched a thing happen to her face that I didn’t expect and would be a long time getting rid of. She looked surprised.

Two floors went by while she got her face back.

She got it back. She pulled a breath in through her nose, and her chin came up. I could see her deciding.

"I haven't taken a vacation," she said, "in years."

"They won't give you the time?"

"No." She shook her head hard, and something like anger came through. It was the first honest thing she'd let me see. "No, that's not—I have the time. I have months of it. It's banked. It just sits there. Every year, they send me a little statement about it, like a bank telling you about money you're never going to spend."

"So, spend it."

"On what?"

She said it fast and flat. Then she heard it, and I watched her hear it.

The car hummed.

"Work is what I've done," she said. "It's what my family does. My mother worked in this building. I've worked in it—" she stopped. "A while. That's the whole thing. This place is me."

She was looking straight ahead at the doors.

"I don't think I know how," she said.

It came out of her like something coming out of a wound. Fast, and surprised, and with too much force behind it, the way a thing comes out when it's been in there under pressure a long time.