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Fingerprints of Previous Owners. Rebecca Entel
Читать онлайн.Название Fingerprints of Previous Owners
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781944700430
Автор произведения Rebecca Entel
Жанр Зарубежная классика
Издательство Ingram
“Hmm.” Her voice was calmer, surer. Her fidgeting had receded to allow the tide of power back into her voice and movements. “You put the coins in these pockets?” Her thumbnail scratched at some hooks of thread that hadn’t been pulled back through all the way. Hadn’t been reinforced.
“Yes.”
I could hear the music outside break off abruptly for the announcement that the dining room was open for dinner. The speaker’s vowels were flat, the words spreading out like water. That’s when I spotted the nanny and the little boy, coming back up from the shore. Sandy feet and ankles. The only two who hadn’t stayed up on the pool deck. From where they were standing, I knew she could see the break in the fence, where the dumpsters and trucks were, and I wondered if she noticed the division between the workers back there—no maids, since we were all in here, but the other workers, like Lem, in jumpsuits—and the AYS on the deck in their crisp white shorts and pastel shirts. Not just clothing different colors either. As they approached that nanny’s boss, the little boy’s mother, I saw the woman dig through her bag as if she’d misplaced something and then stand up and walk toward the doors to the lobby. (Was it that book that’d drawn Lionel’s eyes toward Mother, made him nudge the cover away from her?) Some of the AYS who circled endlessly between the bar and the pool deck fetching cocktails turned and watched her go through one of the doors.
Claudia’s breath was close to my ear. My eyes left the window.
“And it’s not possible,” she began, “that with all these tears all over this uniform—all over it—that some coins could have slipped through?”
I felt her fingers on all the nubs of thread and fabric, scars of all the trips I’d made inland and back out. The claws of the haulback trying to keep me out, then trying to keep me in.
“Catches in the material like this,” Claudia murmured. “Looks like...” Her eyes met mine, one eyebrow in a knowing arc. Some of the resort people around here, a few of them, knew the land. The plants. I felt goose pimples rise up all over my arms.
She stepped away from me, and I looked back up at her. Behind her on the bulletin board were the season’s disciplinary write-ups, with a thumbtack staked through the stack. Lateness. Stealing (suspected). Stealing (confirmed). Guest Complaints/Service Negligence. Uniform Divergence. Trespassing.
If she wrote me up for negligence (dropping the pennies) or divergence (tearing my uniform), I’d be better off than for trespassing, for which I’d have to meet with the security team and would almost certainly be fired anyway. And either way, fired or kept on, would be watched. An invisible but thick wall between me and the inland. If I forced her to keep going down the line of women, one of them would have to be written up for suspected stealing, since Claudia wouldn’t know how else to resolve this. And whoever it was would never be able to work at the resort again or at any of the resorts in the capital. Why we all lined up so nice and polite even when management got our names—or anything else—wrong. A list, a database, whatever it was that had its way of knowing spread across the ocean. Bad words swam fast.
As they had with Miss Patrice’s husband. The resort didn’t like that he’d kept talking to people about the whole mess with the trees and the cabins and the storms. Especially when there was no need to be put in harm’s way, when he knew better and had said so. Probably couldn’t help himself, all that mix of sad and mad and crumpled men got. They also didn’t like that he’d kept insisting to be paid the consulting fees they’d promised, even if they’d ignored his advice. He had to go back to the capital for work, but that didn’t last long. He kept talking about what happened, and the resort badmouthed him in a way that, after a while, he couldn’t even get work on the capital. All the hotels that used to hire him for projects stopped. Some wouldn’t even see him when he came to ask for work, even people he’d worked with for years as their go-to man. And then That Storm came and tore his own roof off with his family inside.
Thought of myself wandering the capital alone, no work to be had, while Mother rotted alone in our house. If we even still had a house.
“Well, Murna? Possible?”
I reached into my bag and spidered my hand for change. One dime. I put it on her desk. She shook her head slowly, still standing above me.
“The missing coins are already reported. I can’t replace them.” Her fingers went back into my lap, pointing to each spike. I didn’t squirm; I would not squirm. “Well? Is it possible?”
“Are you asking me if it is possible a uniform divergence could have caused the pennies to be accidentally lost?”
“Yes.”
Above my shoulder, Claudia’s blazer was drooping, too big. Like a kid playing at teacher. She looked tired, her cheeks creased like bundles of straw. I went through all the options again and again in my mind. She needed to settle this money thing before she could go home or else she’d spend the night on the phone with management, accused of not doing her job, of letting us natives take the dust from her pockets, as my dad used to say. If not me, she’d convince Miss Philene or Christine or Miss Vernie or someone else. Well, probably couldn’t convince Christine. But Miss Philene was now last in line, no one else to move on to after her. I tried to picture who else was waiting in line before I came in. Ticked off all the names of who would go home employed, not written up, with their water for the week. Claudia waited until I had conjured the others who were waiting. Aprons pristine compared with mine.
“Aye,” I said.
The rest of the line in the hall dispersed when they saw the yellow paper in my hand. Two weeks of overtime garbage duty without pay.
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