When Mara got back, the woman she'd trained that morning was standing outside room 212 holding a fitted sheet in both hands.
“I think it's the wrong bed,” she said.
Mara took one end and looked at the little label. It had been washed until only the outline of the letters remained. The elastic was good. That was often what made a person think the rest of the sheet had to be.
“Wrong sheet. Try the blue shelf. We put the label out so you can see it.”
“It was on the blue shelf.”
Mara stopped. The woman looked at her, waiting.
“Then someone put it away wrong. I'll get it.”
“I can go.”
“I'm passing.”
The woman's name was Sonia. She had told Mara twice already, once when they were introduced and again when Mara called her the other woman's name. Mara said it to herself now as she walked toward the closet. Sonia. No use teaching a person a system and forgetting who had to use it.
Elena was in the closet. She had two piles on the floor, one balanced on a clean bag, the other directly on the tile.
“Wrong shelf?” Mara asked.
Elena nodded. “They're all mixed.”
Mara sat on the overturned bucket and began pulling the corners out. Elena checked the labels. They put the good sheets into one pile, the doubtful ones into another. After a while Mara went to get a second bag so neither pile would have to sit on the floor.
“How's the foot?” Elena asked when she came back.
Mara looked down. “Which one?”
“Priya said you moved the couch.”
“We all moved the couch.”
“She said you got stuck underneath it.”
“I sat down.”
Elena smiled and handed her another sheet. They worked on without finding anything else to discuss. Mara liked knowing what Elena would pass her next. She could reach without looking. Once their hands went for the same corner, and Elena let go first, leaving Mara with the whole thing in her lap.
“Greedy,” she said.
Mara grinned. It was not a word she could have enjoyed from anyone else that morning.
They took the right sheet to Sonia together. She had stripped the second bed and was waiting because she hadn't wanted to put another wrong sheet on it. Mara showed her the little colored stitch she could look for if the label had gone. Elena took the other side of the mattress. Sonia watched, then reached beneath the far corner before either woman asked her to.
“That's it,” Mara said.
They let her finish. On the way out Mara saw her smooth the top with both hands, beginning at the middle rather than pushing the creases ahead of her. She wanted to go back and show her the easier way. Elena was already pushing the cart toward the next room. Mara followed it.
At lunch Jo was sitting in the back room with a paper plate on her knees. She had brought her own lunch and still found something worth taking from the tray somebody had left after a meeting. Bev was on the phone, standing by the window to hear. Priya sat with her shoes loosened beneath the table, answering a message from Arun. When Mara asked how the first night had gone, she held up a photograph.
The bike stood behind the door. Arun had put his helmet on the handlebar, a shoe balanced on top for a reason nobody was going to explain. There was bedding on the bed and a pile of wires beneath the desk.
“He says it doesn't count as a photograph of him,” Priya said. “So I can show it.”
Mara looked at it longer than she needed. Jo leaned across for a turn. When Bev finished her call, Priya passed the phone to her too.
Simon came in holding the kitchen's list of things they could make without closing the rest of the hotel. Doreen followed with two plates stacked together and a packet of crackers inside her cardigan pocket. She had come to ask about Saturday, she said, while somebody could still change it.
“Next Saturday,” Simon said. “Back room's ours from six. Kitchen can do the hot food at six thirty. Does that work?”
Doreen nodded. “Jules has to be out before eight. She's got someone till then.”
“We can start at six.”
“Food, though. Not six o'clock for standing about and looking at it.”
“I'll make sure.”
Jo was looking at the list. “They'll eat that. Mine will.” She pointed. “Not the sauce on everything. Kit wants to see what's being done to her.”
“On the side,” Simon said, writing it down.
Bev wanted the roast vegetables. Priya asked if the rice could be plain. Elena chose one thing and crossed nothing out. They passed the sheet back to Simon with fewer changes than Mara had expected. For a moment it resembled every other break they'd taken together, somebody holding a piece of paper as if it could tell them how to be ready for the rest of the day.
“I'd like someone to keep an eye on it,” Simon said. “I can get the room set up, but the family guests and the timing—”
Jo shook her head before he finished. “I've got mine. I can't organize the other ones as well.”
“I don't mean—”
“I'll do it,” Mara said.
Simon found his pen beneath the list. Mara leaned over to show him the time.
“I'll be there early,” she said. “I can make sure the food comes out. I'm bringing people too.”
Simon thanked her. Doreen pushed the crackers deeper into her pocket and asked whether there was a number she could tell Jules, not a final number, just whether to bring her sister or leave her at home.
“Bring her,” Mara said. “We'll count her.”
“You haven't met her.”
“Does she eat?”
Doreen smiled. “Start with that.”
Simon left them the list so Mara could take down what people wanted to bring. He would cover the meal; nobody needed to turn it into a competition of trays. Bev said she had never once won a competition of trays and wasn't going to begin when she could retire undefeated. Jo laughed and took another piece from the meeting leftovers.
Elena was watching Mara across the table.
“Will you come?” Mara asked.
“I don't know yet.”
Mara nodded. She wrote the date on the back of the sheet, Saturday October 2, and pushed it to the center so everyone could see. Priya copied it into her phone with elaborate care. Bev made a small sound; Priya looked up, then began laughing despite herself.
“I deserved that,” she said.
“It was barely anything,” Bev told her.
Mara took the plate from Jo when she stood and carried it to the sink. In the doorway Doreen was talking to Jules, the woman whose cart had caught Mara's on Thursday. Jules had a phone pressed against her ear and a pen in her other hand. She looked at Mara, then returned to the call.
“Six,” she said. “I can be there at six. No, with you. She said bring you.”
Mara went past them to rinse the plates. She had been about to ask Iris if she wanted to come out on Tuesday, and now the two invitations joined in her mind: an afternoon her daughter had already offered, an evening she could ask her to choose. She dried her hands and sent a message before she could get occupied by something else.
Bowling still on tomorrow? I'm free when you said.
The answer came while she was walking back to the elevator. Yes. Don't buy shoes. We can rent them.
She laughed out loud in the corridor, making a guest look up from his phone. She showed him the screen before remembering he didn't know her. He smiled politely, and she put it away.
The afternoon went slowly. Her hands still ached from Saturday, and there were more rooms than she'd remembered agreeing to. Sonia came to find her twice: once for the extra pillowcases and once because a guest had left something she didn't know whether to move. It was an open laptop, connected to a charger stretched across the floor. Mara showed her how to work around it without touching anything, then held the door while she got her cart through.
Near the end of the shift they heard a child crying in the hall. The little boy had been told to wait outside a room while his father found the right key. The key had turned out to be for another floor, and the father had gone to reception, leaving him beside the suitcase. He was too old to like crying and too young to stop.
Mara crouched beside him. “Your dad's coming.”
He nodded, crying harder. There was nothing to correct. She stayed where she was. A few minutes later the man came back with a new card and a face full of apology. The boy went to him at once, and Mara stood slowly, her knee protesting.
“Thank you,” the man said.
She told him it was all right and went to get the last clean towels. Sonia had finished the room. She'd left the cart standing in exactly the right place, close enough to reach, not blocking the door. Mara looked at it, then at the corridor behind her.
She went back for the key she'd left in the closet lock and put it where Sonia could find it.
In the staff room she took her things from the hook. There was a pale mark on the wall where her coat had rubbed against it for years. Jo was already gone. Priya had left a message about the couch, which somebody would help her fix tomorrow. Bev stood outside the door, waiting to go down together.
“You got everything?” she asked.
Mara looked in her bag. Phone, keys, half a packet of mints, the folded list for Saturday. She reached into the little side pocket and found the coin she kept for the locker that no longer needed one.
“Nearly.”
She left the coin on the shelf above the hooks. Bev watched her do it, said nothing and held the door while she went through.