Page 29 of The Drifter

I was up on one elbow with my heart slamming before I was even properly awake, reaching for the phone, running the count in my head—the group checking out, the linens, the delivery, the ice machine, who was on, who was late, who needed me⁠—

And then, I remembered.

I had done it.

I lay back down slowly onto the pillow with the phone in my hand and my pulse going, and I remembered doing it. The remembering was so strange that for a second, it felt like remembering something out of a dream.

I had stood in that empty lobby, after the linen closet, after the folio. And before I could talk myself out of it, I had gotten out my phone and moved a shift.

It took eleven minutes. That's the joke. It took eleven minutes and two texts. Then, it was done, and covered, and handled, and the building was going to open in the morning exactly the way it opens every morning, with or without me standing in it.

Then, I wrote to Izzy.

I typed it three times. The first draft had an explanation in it. The second draft had an apology in it. The third draft had both, and it was four lines long. I read it back and put my hand over my mouth in a dark lobby because I sounded like a woman asking permission to be sick.

I deleted the whole thing.

Taking the morning. Personal. Devon and Missy are covering. I'll be in after lunch.

I sent it and put the phone face-down like it was hot.

She wrote back inside a minute.

Of course!!! You never take time, take the whole day if you want.

Three exclamation points. She meant every one of them. She meant it so easily, so instantly, without one second of hesitation, that I stood there in the dark with the light of that phone on my face and felt something go through me that I couldn’t name and didn’t want to look at.

It had always been that easy.

That was the thing. It had always been that easy, and I had gone years without ever once finding out.

She didn't ask why.

I noticed that. I noticed it and left it alone, because I was tired, and because it was late, and because a woman who has never asked for a thing in her life doesn’t get to be aggrieved the first time nobody wonders why she's finally asking.

Take the whole day if you want.

I didn't take the whole day. I didn’t want to get carried away.

But I took the morning. And I came home over the bridge with my hair down and didn’t set an alarm. I slept the way a stone sleeps at the bottom of a creek. The light woke me up at an hour I hadn’t seen from that side of the day in longer than I could account for.

I lay there.

That was the whole activity. I lay in my bed, in my room, in my condo, and I looked at the ceiling. There was nothing I was supposed to be doing.

It was awful.

Not at first. At first, it was a kind of luxury so foreign that my skin didn't know what to do with it. But then, a minute went by, and then another one. My hands started going, plucking at the sheet, and my mind started throwing up things I could be handling. The delivery. The ice machine. Rashad. Verlie.

You are not on shift, I told myself.

Then, what am I?

That's the part that got me. I lay in the sun on my own bed and couldn’t answer that question. Take the desk away and I didn’t know who was left in the bed.

The harbor was out there doing its business past the window. A shrimper going out. The light on the water like somebody had thrown a handful of coins at it. I could hear the building, mine, the paid-for one, making the small sounds a building makes.

And I thought about him.