Chapter 11
SASHA
Iwent in, anyway.
There wasn't a reason. I had the day. Izzy had put it in writing, with the exclamation points and everything.
I had a sofa and a harbor and a coffee cup and a phone with a government website open on it.
I sat in that condo for about an hour after the passport thing.
Then, I got up and got showered and dressed and drove over the bridge like a dog let off a chain that doesn't know one single thing to do with a field.
Just stopping by, I told myself, going up the steps. Check the schedule. See that Missy's holding.
Missy was holding. Missy is always holding. Missy could hold that desk through a hurricane and a tax audit. I knew it when I hired her, which is exactly why I hired her.
I stopped at the doors and caught myself in the glass.
My hair was down.
I stood there and looked at that woman a second. She had on jeans and a sleeveless top the color of a good tomato. There wasn't a pin in her head. She looked about nineteen years old and like she'd been sleeping.
Turn around, I thought.
I didn't turn around. I pushed the door and went into my lobby with my hair down. It was the strangest feeling I'd had in that building since I was a child hiding in the linens. My scalp prickled the whole way across the marble.
Otis saw me first.
He came up off the stool with an expression I had never once seen on his face, which was open, undisguised delight, and he said, "Well, now," in a way that made me want to go straight back out the doors.
"Don't."
"I ain't said a word."
"You said well, now."
"That's two words, and neither of 'em was about your hair."
I had something loaded. I never got it out. He wasn't alone at the bell stand, and the man he was talking to had turned around.
Clint Dane.
He'd come to a stop the way he does, which is completely. He was looking at me from across my own lobby with his hands at his sides.
He didn't say anything for a moment.
And I had nowhere to put my hands.
"Miss Benning," he said.
"Mr. Dane."
Something crossed his mouth. "We had a deal about that."
"I don't recall shaking on it."
"That's fair."
There it was again. That thing that wasn't a smile. It went through me exactly the way it had gone through me across the marble. I stood there and let it happen.
I had made a promise. I had made it standing mere feet from where I stood right then.
He is a guest in this hotel, I told myself. I am not on shift. This is a public room.
"You're not working," he said.
"I'm not working."
"Then, why are you here?"
Otis made a small noise. I didn’t look at him. I didn’t have to look at him to know what was on his face. I haven’t wanted to strangle that old man so badly in all the years.
"I forgot something," I said.
"What'd you forget?"
I opened my mouth.
"She forgot nothin'," Otis said.
"Otis."
"I'm answering the man's question."
"You are stirring a pot."
"Miss Benning," Otis said, with the gravity of a bishop, "I have been stirrin' pots since before your mama pinned your bib on, and I intend to die stirrin' one." He turned to Clint like they were old friends, which, they, apparently, had become. "Now. Where was I?”
"Boots," Clint said.
"Boots." Otis nodded. "So there's a place out to the mall—"
"Absolutely not," I said.
They both looked at me.
I had not decided to speak. It came out of me the way a hand comes off a hot pan. The two of them stood there and blinked. I heard my own voice ringing in the rafters of a building I had never once raised it in.
"Otis. Do not send this man to the mall."
"What's wrong with the mall?"
"What's wrong with the mall." I put my hand flat on my chest. "Come on, now."
Otis was delighted. He was radiant. He was having, I understood, the best morning of his year.
"Well," he said. "He asked me."
"He asked you because you were standing there."
"That's how askin' works, generally."
Clint hadn't said anything for a little while.
He was leaned up against the bell stand with his arms crossed, watching the two of us go at it. There was something on his face I couldn’t read and had nowhere to put. Not amusement. Quieter than that.
He was watching me the way a man watches something he came a long way to see.
Stop it, I thought.
"You need boots," I said to him.
"I've been told I need a sprucing."
"By who?"
"My brother." He said the word plainly. "Came by this morning.
Gave me a card and told me to go get a haircut and some clothes that fit.
Then he made jokes about it, because that's what he does.
Now, I've got a card in my pocket and no idea what to do with it.
I've been standing here a good while asking this man where a fella buys a shirt in this town. "
"And Otis said the mall."
"Otis said the mall."
"Otis," I said, "has worn the same jacket since the Clinton administration."
"It's a good jacket," Otis said.
"It's a great jacket. That is not the point I’m making."
And then, Clint laughed.
It wasn't a big laugh. It came out low and rusty, like a shed door that doesn't get opened. It stopped almost as soon as it started. The man looked faintly startled by it. Like he'd heard a sound come out of himself he hadn’t authorized.
I felt it land under my ribs and stay there.
I had made a promise. In this room. On that floor. I'll pour their coffee. I'll burn their paperwork. But I will not love one. I'd been so certain of it.
And here I was, arguing about footwear.
"Where would you send him?" Clint asked.
"Excuse me?"
"You've got opinions." He tipped his chin. "You took Otis apart in front of God and everybody, so, I figure you've got a better answer. Where would you send a man for boots?"
"King Street."
"All right."
"Not the bottom of King. The bottom's for tourists.
The good leather's up past Calhoun. There's a man up there who'll actually look at your foot before he sells you anything, which nobody does anymore.
" I heard myself and couldn’t stop. "And you don't want a shop that stocks a bunch of brands.
You want the one that stocks two and is snotty about it.
And you don't buy the first thing you like, because the first thing you like is the thing at eye level, and the thing at eye level is the thing they need to move. "
I stopped.
Clint was looking at me.
"That's a lot of information," he said.
"I'm a concierge."
"You're on your day off."
"It doesn't come off."
He nodded slowly, like I'd told him something true. I suppose I had.
"Well," he said. "I'd better write some of that down."
"You don't have a phone."
"I've got a phone." He looked pained. "Tommy left it on the dresser. It's still got the plastic on it."
"So, you don't have a phone."
"I don’t have a phone," he agreed, "in any way that matters."
And I stood in my lobby, with my hair down, on my free day, and heard the words come out of my own mouth before any part of me signed off on them.
"I'll go with you."
The whole room stopped.
Otis's eyebrows went up so far they left his forehead. Missy, at the desk, developed a sudden and profound interest in the printer. An elevator dinged somewhere behind me and I didn’t turn around, because I couldn’t turn around, because I was standing in the middle of the floor of the building that raised me with my heart going like a rabbit.
Clint didn't move.
"You'll go with me," he said.
"You need a guide." I was already building it. That's what I do. I put the walls up. I make the thing stand. "That's a concierge service. It's a standard concierge service, and it's a comped suite, so it's already covered."
"You're off."
"Yes."
"So, it's not a concierge service."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
The truth of that lay down on the marble between us.
He looked at me a long moment. Not up and down. Not the once-over I’ve been given by every kind of man there is, in that lobby, at that counter, while I was printing their receipts.
He looked at my face.
"Why?” he asked. Not sharp. Not a challenge. Just the question.
And there was no lie in me that would fit through it.
"Because I have the whole day," I said, "and I don't know what to do with it."
Nobody said anything.
"I got up this morning with nothing on my schedule.
Nothing. For the first time I can remember.
" My voice did something on the last part and I let it.
"And I sat on my sofa and looked out at that water and felt like a woman standing in the middle of a field.
Wide open. Nothing coming at me from any direction.
And it scared me so bad, I got in my car and drove to work. "
Otis had gone very quiet, and I didn’t look at him. I never was going to.
"So," I said, and got my chin up. "You need boots. I need something to do with my hands. I'd take it as a kindness."
Clint pushed off that bell stand.
He came across the floor toward me, unhurried, in that walk that eats ground without ever seeming to be in a hurry to get anywhere.
He came to a stop.
Three feet.
I watched him do it. I watched him measure it. I saw the man calculate that distance and hold at exactly the line I had drawn without ever saying a word about it. He stopped there with his hands loose at his sides and looked down at me.
And I understood, standing there, that if I took one step forward, he wouldn’t move.
He would never close it. That distance was mine. He had handed it back to me and he was going to keep handing it back to me for as long as I stood in front of him. The only person who could ever cross those three feet was me.
Something happened in my body.
"Sasha," he said.
"Yes?"
"I'd be grateful for the company."
I said, "Okay."
It came out small. It came out in the voice I was born with, the one I don't use in that building. I heard it happen, and it was too late.
"Let me put my bag behind the desk," I said, and turned. My legs worked, which was a mercy.
Missy handed my tote across the counter with her whole face doing something she was going to pay for later.
"Not a word," I said.
"I didn't say anything."
"Your eyebrows said something."
I loved her. I have never wanted to fire anybody so badly in my life.
I turned around.
He was waiting by the doors, holding one door with his shoulder.
Not with a flourish. He'd just put himself against the door and made a space, and he stood in it, waiting on me.
Otis, from the bell stand, said, "Y'all, have a nice time, now."
"Otis, I will end you."
"Yes, ma'am."
I walked across my lobby and out the front doors of The Palmetto Rose, in the middle of a working day, with my hair down and my hands empty, and a Dane holding the door.
The heat came up off the sidewalk and took me in both arms.
One day, I thought. It's boots. It's one day. It doesn't mean a thing.
He fell in beside me on the brick with three feet of Charleston between us. He did not take one inch of it.