Page 25 of The Drifter

I sat down on the stool behind the desk. I held my phone in both hands and I looked at that number.

I had weeks. Not days. Weeks. Sitting in a spreadsheet. I had never touched one hour of it, and every year, the same email came with the same exclamation point. Every year, I read it and felt a warm flush of something I had always assumed was pride.

Look at that, I'd think. Look how much they need me.

But that number wasn't a trophy. It was a receipt.

I'd been paying into something for fifteen years and never once drawing on it. I had let myself believe that the not-drawing was the point, and it wasn't. It was just a very orderly way of disappearing.

And nobody had done that to me.

That's the part I had to sit with, on Otis's stool, in a dark lobby. Nobody had ever stood over me with a whip. Every one of those hours was one I volunteered. I picked up that phone in the shower. I drove back over that bridge at midnight in stocking feet with a wrench. I said of course and I said I've got it and I said go home, baby, and every single time I said it, some old, hungry, beautiful thing in me sat up and purred, because being needed is the cleanest drug there is.

I liked it.

I did. I still do. I don't know how to want to be a person who doesn't.

But there is a difference between a woman who is needed and a woman who has been spent. I had crossed that line somewhere, quietly, without any ceremony. Probably on an ordinary evening while I was upgrading somebody's anniversary.

And I had been standing on the wrong side of it long enough that a man in bad boots could see it from across a lobby.

I thought about Rashad.

That good, funny, patient man, and I had spent months telling myself the truth was scheduling. And it was scheduling, that part was real—but I had also never once, in eleven months, picked up that phone and said, I'm taking Thursday. Tell me where to meet you.

I could have.

Oh, I thought.

It wasn't Rashad. It was never Rashad. I could have found a night for anybody I wanted to find a night for, and I hadn't found one for him. The reason was not the building.

Okay.

I put my phone face-down on the marble.

And then, I did something I have not done since I was nine years old.

I went up the front stairs to the second floor. I walked down the corridor past the ice machine to the door of the linen closet. I opened it, and I stood in it.

It smelled the same. That's the thing about a building. It doesn't have the decency to change. Bleach and lavender and hot cotton and the faint dead-sweet smell of the dryer sheets they've been buying since before I was born, and the shelves going up the wall, and the stack of duvets on the bottom left where a small girl could sit with a coloring book and be very quiet and not let them see her.

Don't come out unless it's me.

I stood in there in the dark with my hand on a stack of towels and I let my head go back against the shelf.

She would have been so proud of me. That's the truth. She'd have come in that lobby and looked at me in that pink blouse behind that marble and her whole face would have come apart. She'd have gone home and told everybody she knew, and she'd have said my daughter, and she'd have meant my daughter runs it.

And she also would have taken one look at that email with the exclamation point in it and slapped it out of my hand.

I laughed in the linen closet. Out loud, alone, in the dark. One short, ugly bark of it. Then, it turned over into something else halfway and I stood there breathing with my hand over my mouth for a while and got it back.

I got it back. I always get it back.

Then, I fixed my face in the little mirror by the ice machine and I went down my mother's stairs—the back ones, the narrow ones, the unlit ones—and I came out through the service door behind the concierge stand. I stood behind my desk in my empty lobby.

I need a break.

There it was. Plain as a bill.