Rule One Said I Was the Only Person Awake After Midnight, but My Mother Never Sleeps novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Desk Keys

Meg lays the desk keys on the breakfast table and tells the manager to sit the night desk himself, wins in front of the whole room, and at one in the morning a guest comes down the stairs and asks her to test him.

My mother smiled at Travis, because she smiled at everyone.

"Is this the young man who's taking us to the water?"

"Nobody's taking you anywhere, Mom."

I looked at Travis.

"She stays in 214, next door to me."

"Erin already moved her suitcase," he said. "It's done."

By the door to the back stairs stood my mother's blue suitcase, the one with her name on masking tape.

Erin gave me a sorry little shrug.

I had the desk keys in my cardigan pocket.

They were on a brass ring, with the card hanging off it on a little chain.

I took them out and set them on the table between the toast and the jam.

"Then you sit the desk tonight," I said.

Travis laughed.

"I'm the manager."

"Then manage it. Midnight to six. Don't get up. Don't open the curtains. If somebody knocks with a guest's face on, don't let it in."

The laugh went out of him.

He looked at his grandfather, and for the first time he looked young.

"Coes don't sit the desk," he said.

"Then find somebody who will by midnight," I said. "In December. Eleven miles from town."

The room had gone quiet enough to hear the cook's radio in the kitchen.

The woman in 210 set down her knitting.

"If she goes, I go," she said. "I won't sleep one night in this house with that boy behind the desk."

"Same," Neil said from his corner.

The old couple from 115 looked at each other and nodded.

The man from 108 lowered his newspaper and smiled at my mother.

"Now, now," he said. "The east wing's lovely. Quiet. Right over the water."

"She'd love that," Travis said.

"She'd walk out the lake door the first night," I said. "She's been trying to get to water since she was diagnosed."

Mr. Coe hadn't moved.

He took out his gold watch, looked at it and put it back.

"Mrs. Duquette stays in 214," he said. "Travis, carry her suitcase back up yourself."

Travis stared at him.

"And apologize to her."

Travis picked up the suitcase.

He walked it across the breakfast room in front of the residents, the cook, the housekeeper and his grandfather.

He stopped beside my mother's chair.

"I apologize, Mrs. Duquette."

My mother patted his arm.

"Thank you, young man," she said. "Are you the bellboy?"

The cook laughed out loud in the kitchen doorway, and then the woman in 210 did, and then the whole room.

Travis carried the suitcase up the main stairs with his ears red.

I put the keys back in my pocket.

My hands were shaking, so I kept them there.

Mr. Coe stood and buttoned his cardigan.

"That was well done, Miss Duquette," he said quietly. "Don't make a habit of it."

The woman in 210 caught my sleeve on her way out.

"If that boy comes near her room, you call me," she said. "I don't sleep. I'm eighty-one."

After that, the residents stopped bringing their complaints to Travis.

They saved them for me.

I slept from nine to four in 213 with the door open between my room and my mother's.

Erin sat with her in the afternoons, doing word searches with her by the lobby fire.

My mother liked her.

She told me Erin had "very clean fingernails, not like the last girl."

There hadn't been a last girl.

At 11:50 that night Erin went down to the staff rooms, and the man from 108 went up to bed early with his newspaper.

"Goodnight, young lady," he said from the landing.

"Goodnight."

He didn't go out on the porch.

At midnight the bolts slid shut.

I checked the board for the room phones and the curtains and my mother, asleep upstairs with the door ajar.

I had the house phone in my lap and the card in front of me.

The hotel ticked and creaked as the cold got into the wood.

At 1:10 a door opened somewhere above me.

Footsteps came along the first-floor hall, slow and heavy, and then down the main stairs.

It was Neil Garrahan in jeans and a flannel shirt, with his red hat in his hands.

Rule one said I was the only person awake in the hotel.

I put my hand on the phone.

He stopped on the bottom step, well away from the desk, and held up both hands.

"I know what your card says," he said. "I'm a person. Ask me something."

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