They Gave My Sister the Hotels, So I Stayed to Take Them Back novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Soup at Four

In the night staff kitchen Elise sees four missing pension payments on the workers' statements and the staff close ranks around her, until Damon and Vanessa walk in at four in the morning.

The night staff kitchen was a low room on B-level with a steel table, a dented stockpot and a radio tuned to zydeco.

At three in the morning it was the busiest room in the hotel.

"Sit," Dorinda said. "Eat. Then talk."

She put a bowl of chicken and sausage gumbo in front of me.

I hadn't eaten since the memorial.

A line cook in a stained apron slid a hunk of French bread next to it.

"You're the one who took the mic," he said.

"I'm the one."

"My wife said you were crazy. I said you were a Bell."

"Is there a difference?"

"Not really," he said, and the dishwasher laughed so hard he had to set down a tray.

Dorinda had given me the spare room in her apartment at the back of the second floor.

My father had let her live there for twenty years.

The bed had a quilt her mother made and a framed photo of me at six, wearing her reading glasses.

"You look like a raccoon in this," I'd told her.

"You looked like a raccoon," she'd said. "I looked distinguished."

Now she sat down across from me and took off those same glasses.

"Lise," she said. "Before you say anything about loans. We've got a thing of our own."

She pulled a stack of envelopes from her smock pocket.

Pension statements.

Eleven of them, with names written on the back in different hands.

"The union sends these out every quarter," she said. "I started collecting them in January when a man in laundry said his looked wrong."

I opened the first one.

Then the second.

Every one showed the same thing.

The workers' own share came out of their paychecks every two weeks, like always.

The hotel's share had stopped.

December. January. February. March.

Four payments, gone.

"How much is that," the line cook asked, "for all of us?"

I did it in my head because I always do.

"About nine hundred thousand dollars," I said.

Nobody said anything.

The radio played an accordion solo into the silence.

"They told us it was a processing delay," said a room attendant by the coffee urn.

"Mr. Halberd came down and said it personally. He brought donuts."

"He brought donuts," the dishwasher repeated.

"They weren't even good donuts."

"Who handles payroll now?" I asked.

"Since October, Mr. Halberd's people," Dorinda said. "Your mother brought him in as a consultant when your daddy got sick."

October.

The month Dad started forgetting his pills.

I spread the eleven statements across the steel table in a row.

"These are evidence," I said. "Don't let anyone take them."

The door from the service corridor swung open.

A young man in a supervisor's blazer came in carrying a stack of leather folders.

The night supervisor.

He'd been hired after I left; I didn't know him.

He looked at the table, then at me, then at the statements.

"Those are company documents," he said.

"They're pension statements," Dorinda said. "Mailed to people's houses."

"They contain company information." He set his folders down. "Mr. Halberd asked me to collect anything that leaves the office."

"They didn't leave the office," the line cook said. "They came in the mail."

The supervisor reached past me for the stack.

The room attendant put her hand flat on it.

Then the dishwasher put his hand on top of hers.

Then the line cook. Then a bellman I hadn't even seen come in.

Four hands on eleven envelopes, and nobody moving.

The supervisor flushed red to his collar.

"I'll have to report this," he said.

"Report what?" Dorinda said. "That we were eating soup?"

He picked his folders back up and walked out.

The door hissed shut behind him.

The bellman took his hand off the pile and flexed it.

"Well," he said. "I've never done that before."

"How'd it feel?" I asked.

"Terrible," he said. "Great."

Everybody laughed, too loudly.

Dorinda refilled my bowl without asking.

"You're going to need help," she said. "And not only from cooks."

I took the card out of my pocket and set it on the table.

Dorinda put her glasses back on and read it.

"Mercer," she said. "Corpus Christi?"

"You know him?"

"I knew a Mercer who ran the Bayfront down there. Best shrimp in Texas."

"He came to our union picnic with a little boy who carried everybody's plates."

She tapped the card.

"That boy turned out tall?"

"Very."

"Hm." She studied me over the rim of her coffee cup. "Do you trust him?"

I opened my mouth and nothing came out.

"Is he handsome?" she asked instead.

"Dorinda."

"That's a yes."

"That's a I'm-not-answering-that."

The line cook grinned into the stockpot.

I put the statements in order by date and photographed each one with my phone.

My hands were steady for the first time in two days.

This was the part I was good at.

Somebody had stopped paying the hotel's share four months ago, and someone had told two hundred people it was a delay.

That was a person, not a mistake.

At four o'clock the service door banged open so hard it hit the wall.

Damon came through it in a golf shirt and loafers, his hair still wet.

Vanessa was behind him in a trench coat over silk pajamas, holding her phone.

The night supervisor hovered in the doorway behind them both.

Damon looked at the staff, at the gumbo, at me.

"Get her out of my kitchen," he said.

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