Chapter 6: The Lobby

My father's voice carried up the escalator before I reached the bottom.

"I want my daughter!

"Hattie Moser, she works here, I know she does!"

Orrin Moser stood in the middle of the marble lobby in his barn boots.

He wore the stained canvas jacket he wore to feed cattle, and he had brought the smell of the farm in with him.

My brother stood beside him, twenty-one, thin, looking at the floor.

Forty people in suits stood around the edges, holding their coffee, watching.

A security guard stood at my father's elbow with one hand raised and a patient face.

"Sir, you need to lower your voice."

"I need my money," my father said.

Then he saw me, and his whole face changed.

He opened his arms.

"There she is," he said.

"There's my girl."

I stopped ten feet from him.

I had spent my whole life walking toward that voice because the other choice was worse.

"Dad," I said.

"What are you doing here?"

"I called you thirty times," he said, still smiling for the crowd.

"The bank wants twenty-four hundred by Friday, and you know it.

"You send me what you make, Hattie.

"That's how it works."

"I sent you eleven hundred dollars two weeks ago," I said.

"That was my whole paycheck.

"I ate rice for nine days."

A woman near the revolving door looked away.

"You're living in the big city," my father said, louder.

"You've got a rich boyfriend with a penthouse, I heard.

"Your mother would be ashamed, but I'm not.

"I'm practical.

"So you ask him for the twenty-four hundred, and the twelve thousand for the north field, and we'll call it even."

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