Chapter 3 Everything I Owned Fit in a Dryer

The old woman didn't look up from her sheets. "A girl," she said, like she was tasting the word. "What kind of girl?" "Twenty-three. Dark hair. Wet." The thin man tried a smile on for size. "Wearing a uniform from the Moretti Grand." "Wet." She snapped a pillowcase flat. "Sweetheart, it's pouring. Everybody's wet. I've got three machines that eat quarters, a husband who's been dead since two thousand nine, and a nephew who owes me eight hundred dollars. If you find a girl, send her over. I could use help with these sheets." The wide man was already walking the aisle between the washers. He checked the bathroom. He kicked the side of the vending machine, for reasons I will never understand. Then he stopped in front of the supply cabinet, and I stopped being a person and became one long held breath. His shadow slid across the crack in the door. "Touch that," the old woman said mildly, "and I call Father Michael. Then I call my nephew. Then, if I'm not satisfied, I call my other nephew, who is a cop." The shadow didn't move. "That's a lot of nephews," the thin man said. "It's a big family." She set the pillowcase on the pile. "Take an umbrella from the bucket on your way out. Bring it back." The silence lasted eleven seconds. I counted. Then the wide man grunted, the bell rang, the door sighed shut, and the room filled up again with the sound of a game show audience laughing on mute. I stayed in the cabinet anyway. My legs had stopped taking instructions. "You can let go of that breath," the old woman said. "They went left. Men like that always go left." I came out one joint at a time, like a newborn deer. She was already pouring something steaming from a thermos into its cap. She pushed it across the counter, and I wrapped both hands around it so tightly that I almost burned them. "I'm Rosa," she said. "Rosa Delgado. I own this place, God help me. You don't have to tell me your name." "Sienna." "There. Now it's a friendship." She rummaged under the counter and dropped a gray sweatshirt in front of me. UNIVERSITY OF SOMETHING, with a hole in one elbow. "Lost and found. It's been there since twenty sixteen. Nobody's coming back for it." I pulled it over my head. It smelled like dryer sheets and somebody else's life, and it was the kindest thing anyone had handed me in a year. "I have thirty-one dollars," I said, and tried to fish a damp bill out of my shoe. Rosa stared at me as if I'd offered to pay in teeth. "Put that back. Keep your money in your shoe. It's where I'd keep it." I laughed. It came out cracked, and somewhere in the middle it turned into something else, and I had to press the heel of my hand against my mouth until it stopped. Rosa became extremely interested in a fitted sheet. I slept two hours on the folding table with my cheek on a stack of warm towels. I don't remember falling asleep. I remember the last thing I thought, and it wasn't about Dante or the gala or the car. It was my father. Marco Cole was a bookkeeper, and a good one. He wore pressed shirts and kept his pencils in a coffee tin, and every night after dinner he sat at our kitchen table with a ledger the size of a cinder block. When I was five, he taught me to read a column of numbers like it was a face. Look for the one that's lying, tesoro. Numbers don't lie. People do. The morning he died, he kissed my forehead at the door and said he'd be home for dinner. I was seventeen. I heard it on the radio at four o'clock, a man shot in the Fenwick Street parking garage, believed to have stolen from his employer. By midnight my mother had packed one bag and pressed a brass compass into my palm and told me to keep it where nobody could take it, and by morning she was gone. I never saw her again. After that I spent six years learning how to disappear in plain sight. When I woke, the windows had gone gray. "Rosa." My voice came out like a rusty hinge. "I need to get back into the Moretti Grand." "That's the dumbest thing I've heard since my husband proposed." She didn't look up from her crossword. "Why?" Because under a loose floorboard in room 214 of the staff dorm, wrapped in a pillowcase, was the only thing of my father's I had left. A small black notebook, soft as cloth, filled with initials and dates and columns of numbers I'd stared at for six years without understanding. It was the reason I'd taken the job. It was the reason I hadn't just left the city and started over. If Dante's men found it, they'd burn it, and my father would stay a thief forever. I told her a version of that. Rosa listened, moved the unlit cigarette from one side of her mouth to the other, and picked up the phone. "Tomás," she said. "Wake up. You owe me eight hundred dollars." Her nephew drove for the linen company that serviced the Grand, and he showed up at five in a white truck with a cart full of folded sheets. He didn't ask a single question, which I took to mean he'd been raised by Rosa. I climbed into the cart. He piled towels on top of me. I rode into the loading dock of the Moretti Grand curled up like a pastry in a box, and I have never been so grateful for fabric softener. The service corridor was only half awake. I heard Mrs. Halloran's voice somewhere ahead, sharp as a dropped pan, and Tomás wheeled me straight past her. "Sheets," she said, and sniffed. "Finally." I almost died of a laugh. I knew the service elevator, which camera swung left, which guard took his coffee on the hour. I knew room 214, third door down, and when I pushed it open my stomach turned over. Empty. The mattress was stripped. The closet was bare. My two uniforms, my one good bra, my chipped mug, all gone. I dropped to my knees and dug my nails under the floorboard by the radiator. It came up easily. Too easily. Nothing but dust. "Looking for this?" I turned around. Teo Bruno stood in the doorway with a paper cup of coffee in one hand and, in the other, a small black notebook.