LITMIR.BIZ

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y,” Troy had said, laughing, “is really a sarcastic sneer.”

      Claudia said my last name with the same drawn-out uhhh sound and with a question mark on the end of it: “Burre?”

      “Yes, ma’am.”

      “Claudia.”

      “Yes. Claudia.”

      “You were on the beach last Thursday? For the whole arrival demonstration?”

      She knew I was. I had to be at every arrival, according to my contract. And I turned in my time card with all the information from the week: when I was cleaning the rooms, when I was on the beach for the arrivals, when I was assisting with laundry. “Yes, Claudia.”

      “How many pennies did you receive?”

      “That one day?” Sometimes we had more than one arrival per day this time of year.

      “The afternoon boat arrival on Thursday. The jar was missing six pennies when the boat staff prepared for Friday’s arrival.”

      “I return the ones that are given to me by the tourists. I don’t count them.”

      “Guests.”

      “Guests. I don’t hand the pennies out.”

      “You don’t hand them—what do you mean?”

      She knew what I meant. There were no interviews like this with the boat staff members, who collected the money from the jar and handed them out on the boat. (Or with the guests, who could keep the pennies or throw them in the water for good luck; I was pretty sure I’d seen some thrown.) Waiting outside this beige door was a line of women only like me, “natives,” in our maid uniforms.

      Claudia closed her files, sighed loudly, and clasped her hands on top of the stack. She kept tucking a straw-colored strand of hair behind her ear, and it kept making its way forward again. Her hair and her skin and the beige shell she was wearing all blended together, her pale blue eyes popping out at me; the contrast was similar, it struck me, as the water to the sand just outside her office. I looked for tides in her eyes. They were ringed by pink. The wide center part in her hair looked like a dried-up riverbed. She looked tired. With the guests she always brightened up, even her faded grayish hair sparkling blonder from the reflection off the pool water.

      Her desk faced away from the window, leaving me the ocean view. I knew the setup wasn’t for me; this other side of the desk beautified for upper management or guests or both? Through the window, I could see most of the pool deck, the loungers all faced toward the pool. All turned away from the ocean view, which always surprised me, the way the brochures sold our blue seas. From where I sat, I could see the pool and the ocean in sequence, like two versions of one thing: the heated, simulated version and the rough, cold version that was too vast to see all at once.

      There was barely movement out there. Just acres of white skin, strung up in spandex, in various stages of sunburn and repose. Except for the one woman from B3. That woman with her sharp bracelets and elbows seemed softer somehow, reclining in her bathing suit, her thighs the shape of upside-down lungs. Pastel bag slumped under her chair. Her husband was on his side, seemingly fast asleep. Even from this distance the back of his neck looked like rare steak. I didn’t see the little boy or the girl who apparently was his nanny.

      Through Claudia’s closed window I could just faintly hear the tinny music still bobbing along. The only movement was a woman snorkeling in the pool, taking in the mural of a coral reef painted on the bottom. The resort used to offer boats to take tourists out to the reefs, but almost none of them wanted to dip into that cold water, real thing or not.

      The snorkeler walked slowly out of the shallow end and onto cement in all her gear: steel-colored hair wrapped around her ears and mask, each flipper dropping a short wall of water off its side. She was waving her hand around the same way she had yesterday, when she’d scraped it open on the bottom of the pool and emerged announcing to everyone and no one: “It is so real down there! I reached out to touch it!” She sent the AYS in a tizzy to find a bandage. I’d had a Band-Aid tucked into my apron for that night, but I knew I’d be caught out if a manager saw me touching a guest.

      But here I was anyway.

      “Have a seat,” Claudia said wearily, her eyes softening and meeting mine. She fixed me with the I-get-it-because-I’m-reallyyour-friend look management pulled out of their pockets.

      “Look. The international office makes me investigate if we are missing more than ten percent of any supply. Any supply. Five? Fine. I would look the other way. There have been many times—many times—that we were down one, two, three, four, five pennies, and we made do without reporting a thing. I don’t want to go through this any more than you do.”

      I could tell from the slump of her shoulders that she thought she meant what she was saying. Caught up against her will by the powers that be—and by whoever it was who started this whole thing by stealing or misplacing six pennies.

      You could have put six pennies in the jar instead of reporting it, I thought. You could have assumed the pennies were dropped in the sand and either told the main office that or gotten down on all fours and searched all day for them. You could have told the main office to get the sticks out of their asses. You could have stolen the pennies. But we both know you didn’t, because we both know that if someone really stole six pennies, that person really needed them.

      One of the AYS came in the office without knocking and didn’t even give me a glance. Started fighting with a filing cabinet, and Claudia handed him a tiny key over her shoulder. He unlocked the drawer and took out what looked like a brick of blank name tags. Handed her back the key, left without a word and with the door partly opened. I could feel the ears from the women still lined up in the hallway lean closer to the crack in the door.

      I said: “I carefully hold in my palm each penny that is handed to me. I put it safely in my pocket with my hand while I make the walk from the boat arrival location to the counter in the kitchen where the jar is placed. I cup my palm just so as I put the pennies back in the jar so that none can fall onto the floor. I give my bag to the guards every night when I leave so they can search it for anything they think I have stolen, and they hand it back and send me on my way.” I almost laughed at the thought of a guard finding a penny at the bottom of one of our bags and assuming it was trespassing there. Spare change wasn’t typical on this island.

      Claudia shuffled through her files, the desperate fidgeting of her fingers trying to get to the bottom of all of this and set things right. As though she wanted to dismiss me to go back to my work if I could just prove, beyond every shadow of a shadow of a doubt, that there was no possibility I took those coins. If one of us maids could just get her off the hook with the international office.

      From where I sat I could see only the black cardboard backs of her picture frames held in place by tiny metal arrows. The faces—of husband, kids, maybe aging parents with crow’s-feet smiles—only looked at her. Waiting for her, reminding her to resolve this nuisance and get home to her real life.

      She had, after all, dragged the whole family down here for this job. To this dusty place where they didn’t have the things they had at home and where they had a hell of a time getting used to the way our people lived. If it weren’t for the pool they got to use all the time, and the financial opportunity in this international company that she was scrounging her way through with her tough, clean fingernails, that family would not even be putting up with all of this. I had heard it all, when the staff or their families came into Thiflae Bar. Had one or two too many, told us all how it was, this hard thing of keeping the place going, being here, whole family’s life on pause, so a resort could be pushed along. My nose wrinkled itself, as if the sour breath of the night’s last beer were in the room with us, right here with Claudia and me and her desk piled high with problems.

      She stood up from behind her desk, secured the door, and I found myself taking the seat she’d offered several minutes before. She stood above me, walking from one side of my chair to the other. Through the window I could see the sun starting to bleed out into the sky,

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