Previously – Chapter 2: What He Wrote on His Wrist
The gondolier had a fine voice and a terrible dispatcher, and Lila could only concentrate on one of them.
“Fourteen boats,” she said.
“Mm.”
“Two dispatchers. And the dwell at the dock is running ninety seconds when it should be forty, because the second guy keeps leaving his post to hand people out of the boat, which isn’t his job at all, it belongs to the gondolier, and the gondolier is standing right there with his hand out.”
Jake had one arm along the back of the seat and his head tipped toward the painted ceiling, where it was permanently six in the evening over a city eight thousand miles away. “Ninety-four,” he said.
“You timed it.”
“I timed three. You were doing the math out loud and I didn’t want to interrupt, you looked happy.”
The canal smelled of chlorine and, faintly, of the pretzel place thirty feet above them. Their gondolier was working through something in Italian that Lila was fairly sure had been written in Naples in 1898 and rewritten in Burbank in 1999. He had a real instrument and he was giving them all of it, on a Thursday, for two people who had not asked.
“He’s carrying this entire operation,” Jake said.
“He’s carrying it, and they’ve got him on a fourteen-minute loop with a ninety-second dead spot at each end. He sings for ten minutes and stands in line for three, thirty times a shift.” Lila trailed her fingers in water she suspected was more chemically interesting than it looked. “By August he’ll have nodes.”
“You want to tell somebody.”
“I want to fix the dock.”
“I know. Your hands went.”
She looked down. She had, at some point, begun folding the paper napkin from the water bottle into precise thirds.
“I do that.”
“I’ve noticed you do that.”
He took the napkin out of her hands, folded it once more, badly, and put it back in them. Then he left his hand where it had ended up, on her knee, and the gondolier went into the big part of the song, and Lila lost the dock problem for one whole verse, which had not happened in six years.
* * *
They had not intended to become people who did this. In the elevator that morning she had said she wanted to be a tourist. The kind who takes the photo and buys the thing and does not look at the service well. Jake had agreed with real enthusiasm. They made it six minutes into the Venetian before Lila said, without any warning to herself, “Why is the host stand there,” and Jake said, “Oh, thank God,” like a man releasing a belt after Thanksgiving.
It faced the atrium, because the atrium was the pretty view, which put the host at forty degrees to the door guests actually used. Every arriving party had to enter her peripheral vision and wait to be found.
“Nine seconds is where the review starts,” Lila said. “Rotate the stand thirty degrees and it’s fixed. One guy with a dolly, Tuesday morning.” She was aware of how she sounded and did not want to stop. “And it isn’t her fault. Look at her, she’s excellent. Somebody put one host on a floor with two entrances and then went to a meeting.”
Jake was watching her with the attention you give a good bartender making three drinks at once.
“This is where we differ,” he said.
“We don’t differ. We’ve known each other two days.”
“You just fixed that with furniture. I’d fix it with a person. Put a second body on the door Friday and I don’t care where the stand is.”
“A second body is fifty-two thousand a year, benefits, and turnover. The dolly is twenty minutes.“
“The dolly doesn’t say good evening.”
“The dolly doesn’t call in sick,” said Lila, and considered the point won.
* * *
By two o’clock they had a method neither of them had proposed out loud. Rule one: you never blamed the person on the floor; you blamed the schedule, or the build, or a general manager who had never worked a double. Rule two: you called it before it happened, and if you were wrong you said so.
Jake called the pool bar at 2:14.
“Twenty minutes.”
They were at a high table under an umbrella that did not fully commit to shade. The bar had two bartenders, a barback, and a service well running the whole cabana side. It looked, to a civilian, calm.
“Tell me.”
“Ice.” He didn’t point. He had a way of indicating things with almost nothing: a tip of the chin, half a second of attention. “Bin’s showing metal at the back left. He hasn’t been down since we sat, that’s seven minutes, and the walk to the machine is three each way because they built the pool bar before the service corridor. There’s a twelve-top of bachelorettes on their first round, which in ten minutes is a twelve-top of bachelorettes wanting frozen drinks. And his mint’s gone.” He turned his glass a quarter turn. “Watch him. He’s deciding which of the next three things he’s going to do badly.”
At 2:31 the barback went down for ice, the bar went to one and a half bartenders, and the tickets began to hang. There was a moment, almost physical, when the bartender’s shoulders changed. He stopped making drinks in the order they came and started making them in the order that emptied the rail, which is what you do when you have stopped saving the night and started saving the hour.
“Seventeen minutes,” Lila said. “You said twenty.”
“I round up. It’s polite.”
“That was good.”
“Ten years behind a bar does that to you. Anyone who’s done the time can do it. Nobody gives you a prize.”
“I’d give you a prize.”
“You’d give me a clipboard,” he said.
He got up. She assumed the restroom; instead he stood at the end of the bar and said six words to the barback, who nodded, then something to the bartender, who laughed once with his mouth closed. Then he came back and did not mention it.
“What did you say?”
“That the cabana runner’s been dropping his own tickets and he should go around him. Saves him nine minutes a shift.”
“Nine seconds is where the review starts.”
“Nine minutes is where a man decides to go work at a Marriott,” Jake said, and drank his beer.
* * *
The mask shop was the best thing that happened all day, on account of a woman named Renata who was, Lila decided within a minute, one of the five or six finest salespeople she had ever watched work.
Renata did not greet them at the door. She let them get eight feet in. That was correct; a greeting at the door makes people turn around. She did not ask whether they were looking for anything. She said, to Jake, “You’re going to try the plague doctor. Everyone does. Get it over with and I’ll show you something.”
Jake put on the plague doctor.
“You look,” Lila said, “like a heron who owes money.”
“I feel powerful.”
“You look like a man being deposed.”
Renata waited exactly long enough, then took a mask off the wall and did not describe it. She put it in Lila’s hands. That was the whole move: no adjectives, no story about Venice, only the weight of the thing arriving in her palms, which is the oldest close in the trade and works every time. Black volto, matte, a raised line of gold along one cheekbone that wasn’t decoration so much as a scar the maker had decided to keep.
“That one’s not for a party,” Renata said. “That one’s for a wall.”
Jake bought it. Lila said the price out loud, once, the way you say a number you want a person to reconsider, and he looked at her with genuine confusion and said, “It’s already yours, you’re holding it,” and paid.
Outside, with the box under her arm, Lila said, “I don’t love being bought things.”
“I noticed. Why?”
“Because then there’s a ledger.” She had not known she was going to say that. “Sorry. That’s not about you.”
“You apologize a lot for things that aren’t yours.”
“I know. Sorry.” She heard it. “Oh, come on.”
He laughed all the way to the escalator, and on the escalator he stood on the step below hers so their faces were level, and did nothing whatever with that, and looked pleased with himself the whole way down.
* * *
They came back across the Bellagio floor a little after five, and Lila noticed two things in the same five seconds.
The first was that Jake did not look at the room. He walked a casino exactly as she walked the Warrick’s back-of-house. No scanning, no head turn at a machine paying out to his left. He took a diagonal she would not have known was there.
The second was the woman coming toward them with a tray of empties on her palm, who stopped, and lit up.
“Jake Dalton.“
“Junie Park.”
“You’re back!” She said it with enormous pleasure and no weight at all. “I thought you said you were done coming here.”
Jake’s face did not change. That was the thing. No flicker to catch, no half-second of recalculation. He kept smiling and put his hand very lightly on Lila’s back and said, “Junie, this is Lila Brenner. Lila runs the concierge desk at the Warrick in Chicago, so please don’t tell her anything about how this place is staffed, she’ll write a report.”
“Oh, I have notes,” said Junie.
“She has notes,” said Jake. “Junie has notes that would end careers.”
And that was it. It closed like a good door. Junie asked where in Chicago, and told a story about a bachelor party from Naperville, and shifted her tray to the other hand and said she was in the weeds and lovely to meet you. And then she got out the words “Do you want the” and stopped there, and said, “Never mind, you’re busy,” and went.
Lila watched her go.
Do you want the and then nothing at all. You do not begin that sentence with a stranger. You begin it with a man whose drink you have made two hundred times, and you stop because he is standing with a woman and you have understood, a syllable too late, that you were about to say something with a history in it. Lila knew that because she had stopped herself the same way a thousand times in six years. It was not a suspicion. It was a fact about the trade.
She could feel the read assembling. Knew his name without a beat, which means recent. Knew the order, which means repeat. Said “done coming here,” which is a thing a person says out loud once, to somebody who was listening.
She stopped it, took the thing that was building and set it down, the way you set down a glass you have decided not to drink from yet. She had made a career out of reading people and a personality out of it, and she was, on this particular Thursday, tired of it.
“You okay?” Jake said.
“There’s a service cart blocking that fire door,” said Lila.
She went and moved it. It took nine seconds. When she came back he had the mask box under his arm and a paper cup of water for her that she had not asked for and had wanted for an hour, and he did not ask about the cart.
* * *
The Tahoe thing happened at seven the next morning, in bed, with the curtains open, and it took under a minute.
“How long is the drive,” she said.
“Eight hours. Seven if I’m honest.”
“To what, exactly.”
“A cabin belonging to a guy who owes me a favor, which is the most Los Angeles sentence I’ve ever said out loud. But it’s a real cabin, and there’s a lake and a wood stove and no television.”
“For how long.”
“Three days.”
She had a 6:40 out of Harry Reid that night and a shift at two the next day.
Here is what Lila knew about that shift. A hundred and forty arrivals, including a wedding block of thirty-one. The Hallorans in 1102, in for their fortieth, whose profile said Mr. Halloran chose the restaurants. That was wrong. Mrs. Halloran chose them and let him think otherwise, and Lila had never written it anywhere because it felt indecent. Mr. Adeyemi in 908, who needed a car to a dialysis center at six on Saturday, and whose first driver had been chatty, and he had not liked that and had been too polite to say. There was a note in his file that read quiet driver, Bogdan if avail, and the note did not explain itself, because notes like that never should.
Dev would be covering. Dev was twenty-four and good and not ready.
She had never called in sick. Not once in six years, not the winter she’d had flu badly enough that Sophie came to her apartment with soup and threatened her.
“I’d have to call in,” she said.
“Then don’t. It’s a cabin. It’ll be there.”
That, obscurely, was what did it.
She waited until 9:40 Chicago time. That was not an accident. Sophie walked the ballroom at 9:30 on Fridays with the banquet captain and did not carry her desk phone.
It rang four times. Lila stood in the bathroom with the door shut for no reason. There was nobody in the suite but Jake, and he was making coffee. She felt her pulse in her jaw. On the fourth ring she thought, with total clarity, if she answers I will tell her the truth. Then the voicemail picked up, and the relief that went through her was so complete and so disgusting she had to put a hand on the counter.
“Hey. Hi, it’s me.” Her voice came out wrong immediately, half a tone high. “So I am, I’ve got something, I think it’s food poisoning? There was a shrimp thing at the closing lunch on Wednesday and I think, not that it’s, I’m not saying it was the hotel, obviously, it could have been anything, it could have been anywhere, I ate at like four different places.”
She heard herself doing it. Six years of listening to guests explain why they needed a late checkout, and she knew exactly what it sounds like when a person puts four details into a sentence that needs one.
“Anyway, I’m not going to make the two o’clock tomorrow, and probably not Sunday, and I’ve texted Dev, he’s got the arrivals, tell him the Hallorans are, you know what, I’ll text him. I’ll text him. Sorry. Okay. Sorry. Bye.”
She hung up.
You cannot unsend a voicemail. She stood with the phone in her hand and understood that the sentence there was a shrimp thing was now permanent, in a building she loved, in a machine on a desk twelve feet from a woman who had held her hair back in 2019. And that Sophie had been in Las Vegas on Wednesday and had eaten the same lunch.
Her hands were shaking. She looked at them with a kind of professional interest.
“You all right?” Jake called.
“Fine,” she said, and stood there another full minute before she could make her face do anything.
* * *
They came out of Las Vegas at eight and picked up 395 at Lone Pine before noon, the Sierra standing up on the left the whole way, brown at the bottom and white at the top. Jake drove with one hand and let the silences alone.
Past Conway Summit the last station on the dial went out in the middle of a word. He let it hiss for a mile before he turned it off, and after that there was the engine and the road and nothing in any direction but sage.
Lila told him about her father.
She had not planned to. She had planned to tell the funny ones, and she started with the funny ones, because the funny ones were load-bearing.
“Vending machines,” she said. “Ninety-eight. He bought a route. Do you know what a route is?”
“I know what a route is.”
“He bought a route in a county where he didn’t live, from a man he met at a wedding. And the machines were real. That’s what everybody gets wrong about him. The machines were real. He drove out every Saturday for five months and filled them himself out of a Costco run, and then found out he’d bought the machines and not the placements, and the placements belonged to the buildings.” She put her feet up on the dash and took them down again. “So we had sixteen vending machines in the garage. He never emptied the coin box. He said that would be admitting something.”
Jake laughed, and it was a real laugh, and it was not at Denny.
“What else?”
“A car wash that turned out to be a territory license. Bottled water: two thousand two, ground floor, huge, huge opportunity, he had a binder. He’s in pickleball now. And I want you to hear this in his voice. It is eight weeks from self-sustaining.”
Jake took his eyes off the road for longer than the road allowed. “Eight weeks.”
“Always eight weeks. Never six, never three months. My whole childhood, everything was eight weeks away.”
“That’s a beautiful number.”
“It’s the perfect number. Six sounds like a lie. Twelve months sounds like a maybe. Eight weeks sounds like a man who’s done arithmetic. You can’t check it, you can’t argue with it, and by the time it’s over you’ve forgotten when the clock started.”
“Did you ever start the clock? Actually, on a calendar.”
She looked over at the side of his face.
“I was eleven,” she said. “I put it on the fridge.”
He didn’t say anything to that. Everybody she had ever told this to had answered inside two seconds, and the answer was always the same shape, that must have been so hard, or a story about their own father, and that was worse. Jake let a mile go by, and then another, and the waiting had no pressure in it, and she went further in than she had gone with Ryan in six years.
The second time was the house. Denny put the rent into something in 2009 involving a man named Pastor Ted who was not a pastor, and after that they were out of the place on Kolmar in fourteen months and into an apartment in Skokie with a galley kitchen.
“And the thing I actually remember, and it’s so stupid: I came home from school and the dining table was gone. The good one. My grandmother’s. There were four dents in the carpet where the legs had been.”
“Where’d it go?”
“I never asked. That was the first grown-up decision I ever made. Deciding not to ask.”
“What did your mother say?”
And there it was. Not how did you feel. Not I’m sorry. He had asked the second question, the one underneath, and Lila had told this story maybe six times in her life and nobody had ever gone looking for it.
“She laughed,” Lila said.
He didn’t look over.
“No. She wasn’t being brave. That’s what everyone assumes. She wasn’t gritting anything out. She thought it was funny. She said, ‘Well, that’s your father,’ and laughed, and made us grilled cheese, and we ate it standing at the counter, and she was.” Lila stopped there, one word short. She had reached the part she never got to, because she had never told it slowly enough to reach it. “She was happy. She forgave him twice and it cost her nothing. She just put it down.”
“And you couldn’t.”
“I was eleven and I had a fridge calendar.”
A cattle truck came the other way and rocked them on its wash, and Jake lifted two fingers off the wheel at it, and the driver lifted two back.
“People think it’s ambition,” she said. “It isn’t ambition. Somebody in that apartment had to know where the money was.”
“You still love him.”
“Enormously.” She said it with no hedge at all. That surprised her. “He calls on my birthday. He’s the funniest man I’ve ever met. I have never lent him a dollar and I never will, and both of those are true at once, and I’ve stopped trying to make them make sense to people.”
“They make sense,” Jake said.
* * *
She asked about his father then, partly because the arithmetic of a conversation demanded it and partly because she wanted to know. He was good at it. He was so easy about it that the whole thing arrived like a gift rather than a disclosure.
Big Mike Dalton had owned Dalton’s on Pico, then a second place in Culver City, then a room in Gardena nobody remembers, then a supper club with a fountain in it, briefly and disastrously. He wore a watch he could not afford and he tipped like a man being watched by God, and his voice filled a room the way a smell fills a room: you didn’t hear it arrive, you just noticed the room was different. Jake did the voice at seventy miles an hour, to the windshield.
“He was better at opening than owning,” he said. “That’s the whole obituary. He could open a bar in a neighborhood where three bars had died and the line would be around the block for a year. Then month fourteen he’d be bored, month sixteen he’d have a guy. There was always a guy. And month twenty he’d be telling you about the next room.”
“What happened to them? The bars.”
“Pico went under in the recession, along with everybody’s. Culver closed before that.” He said it evenly, and checked a mirror he had no reason to check. “He had a run of bad luck with businesses, my dad. He was a gambler about businesses.” And then, warmly, with a small shrug that folded the subject shut like a napkin: “I was in that office at nine doing homework on the invoice spike. Which is why I’m not romantic about any of it.”
“Do you miss him?”
“Every day. Best company on earth.” He took his sunglasses down off the visor and put them on. “He wasn’t chasing money, is the part nobody gets. Everybody assumes he was chasing money.”
“What was he chasing?”
Jake smiled and said, “There’s a Basque place in Gardnerville that’s been feeding people family style since about 1896. They sit you with strangers and bring you a soup you didn’t order and it’s the best thing in Nevada. Are you hungry? You should be hungry.”
Lila said yes.
She had asked four questions and she had three answers. She could feel the shape of the one that hadn’t come, and she left it where it was, because he had just spent two hundred miles asking about her grandmother’s dining table, and going back at him now would have felt like handing him a bill.
* * *
They stopped in Truckee for groceries.
He pushed the cart badly, one-handed, and she caught herself squaring the boxes as he dropped them in, and he watched her do it and said nothing. They disagreed about how many limes a person needs. It turns out to be a religious question for a man who owns bars. He took twelve. And when she said nobody has ever needed twelve limes he said he’d watched a bar run out on a Cinco de Mayo once and still dreamed about it. In the cereal aisle she asked what he ate for breakfast and he said he didn’t, really, and she put a box of the terrible chocolate cereal in the cart and he left it there. In the bread aisle he hooked a finger through the back belt loop of her jeans to steer her out of the way of a man with a flatbed cart, and left it there for the rest of the aisle.
At the register the kid ringing them up was seventeen and slow and apologizing, and Jake said, in an ordinary voice, “You’re fine, take your time, we’re not going anywhere,” and the kid’s whole spine changed. Lila watched it happen and thought, he does that for everyone, he is not doing it for me, and then had to stand very still for a moment in a Safeway in Truckee.
The lake was fifty-eight degrees. A sign said so, at the little public beach two hundred yards from the cabin, in the flat manner of signs in mountain towns stating facts they assume you will respect.
Lila went in the way she did everything, which is to say at a consistent pace without stopping, because stopping is how you don’t. The cold came up in a ring and closed over her sternum and took her breath. Not romantically, properly, so that her first two attempts to inhale did nothing at all. Within a minute her hands would not close.
Jake got in to mid-thigh and made a sound with no dignity in it anywhere.
“Come on,” she called, out past the drop-off, treading, hair flat to her skull.
“I want to be clear that this is not fear.”
“What is it.”
“Respect. It’s a respect thing.”
He came in. He was appalling about it. He waded to the ribs and stood there swearing quietly and comprehensively at the lake, addressing it directly, as a party to the dispute, and Lila laughed until she took in water and had to be helped out of a lake by a man who had been in it twelve seconds.
Afterward they sat on the rocks with one towel between them, and he got hold of the end of it and dried her hair with it, badly, the way you dry a dog, and she let him, and her teeth were going the whole time, and neither of them said anything. She looked at his hands spread on the granite taking heat off the stone and thought that she had never in her life been anywhere with nothing scheduled in it.
* * *
She built the fire. Badly the first time and well the second, and he sat on the floor with his back against the couch and let her, and did not offer, and did not explain airflow to her, which she had been braced for. When it caught she sat back on her heels and said, “There,” and he said, “You have a face when something works. Did you know you have a face?”
Later, when the room had gone the temperature of a room with a fire in it, and the box of terrible chocolate cereal stood open on the counter for reasons neither of them had defended, he put his hand along her jaw, and it was not the way it had been in Vegas.
Vegas had been fast: good and greedy and half-laughing, at two in the morning, with the noise of the Strip coming through glass. This was slow, and slow turned out to be the harder one. No music, no clock, nothing to be witty about. She had time to look at him, and he had, catastrophically, time to be looked at.
He tried twice to make her laugh. She didn’t, not because it wasn’t funny, but because she wanted to see what he would do next, and what he did next was stop. A man who could hold three hundred people in a room could not hold still under one person’s steady attention without something coming loose in his face.
“Hey,” she said.
“I’m here.”
“I know.”
She kept her eyes open, not touching him differently, not saying anything, only refusing to look away while he was being looked at. At some point his hand found the back of her neck and stayed there, holding, the way you hold a rail.
Afterward he lay with his forehead against her shoulder and did not perform anything at all. The fire ticked. She put her palm flat between his shoulder blades and felt his heart doing something high and quick, well past when it should have settled.
She did not ask. She thought: there was a version of him on Tuesday and there is a version of him now, and the second one is smaller and I like it better, and I don’t know which of them lives here.
* * *
On the third night she showed him the business plan.
She did it badly, which was the only way it was ever going to get done. She had the laptop open on the kitchen table doing something legitimate, checking whether Dev had replied, which he had, with a thumbs up. Somehow worse. Jake was reading the back of a jar of marshmallow fluff with unfeigned scholarly interest, and she said, to the screen, “I’ve written a thing.”
“What kind of thing?”
“A business plan.”
He put the jar down.
“For an events company. Forty pages. Eleven versions. Nobody’s read it.”
“Nobody.”
“Not Sophie. Not Ryan, in six years.” She turned the laptop around so she would not have to hand it to him. “You don’t have to read the appendices.”
“Do you have a printer in this cabin?”
“No.”
“Then I’m going to need my glasses, and I’m going to need you to go somewhere else,” Jake said, “because I can’t do this with you watching my face.”
He read it for an hour and fifty minutes.
She knew because she checked, twice, from the other room, where she attempted a paperback about a submarine that somebody had abandoned in 2011. She could hear him not turning pages, which is its own specific sound: no scroll wheel, long quiet, the small click of a cursor going back up. At half an hour he came out and asked where the pens were, and wrote on the back of a gas receipt from Bishop.
At an hour ten he called through, “Is Karina Vo any good?”
“She’s the best florist in the city, she’s difficult, she works with six people and I’m one of them.”
“Okay,” he said, and went back to it.
When he was done he came in and sat on the arm of the chair and handed her the receipt. There was nothing on it but a number, and the number was 31.
“Page thirty-one,” he said.
“That’s the appendix. That’s case studies.”
“The pharmaceutical gala. A sprinkler head went off in the ballroom at two in the afternoon and you had four hundred people at seven.”
“Six hundred and twenty.”
“Six hundred and twenty.” He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. Tired, not performing it, the face of a man who had read the whole thing properly and late at night. “You moved it onto a raw floor of an unfinished building on Wacker, got a liquor license transferred in three hours, and had a lighting guy you’d never met hang a rig on a deadline he’d already told you was impossible. And the client’s email afterward is in a footnote.”
“It’s a good email.”
“It’s the whole company and it’s in a footnote in an appendix.” He handed the laptop back. “One note. Ready?”
“Ready.”
“You’ve priced yourself as a vendor.”
Lila opened her mouth and did not say anything.
“Fifteen percent of vendor spend plus a tiered coordination fee.” He said it like a diagnosis read off a chart, without unkindness. “That’s a line item living inside somebody else’s budget. Every year a procurement person you’ve never met sits down with a spreadsheet and goes looking for the softest number on it, and the softest number on it is you. And a percentage of someone else’s spend means your ceiling is set by what other people decide to spend. You wrote forty pages about controlling everything and the one thing you gave away is the ceiling.”
“That’s how the industry prices it.”
“That’s how vendors price it.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the first time all week she had seen him serious for longer than a sentence. “Nobody paid you fifteen percent of a florals invoice to find a raw floor on Wacker in ninety minutes. What you sell is that the event happens, and that isn’t a percentage. So you hold the master contract. Client pays you one figure for the outcome. You subcontract the build. Karina, lighting, AV, rentals. You carry the risk, and you take the margin on all of it instead of a commission on somebody else’s revenue. You’re not charging for your hours. You’re charging for the fact that nothing goes wrong. Producers charge for that. Planners charge for hours, and they get shopped every January.”
Lila got the first word out and nothing after it. Her hands had gone somewhere and she did not know where. “That’s a different company.”
“It’s the same company. It’s the one you already run twice a month in somebody else’s hotel, for a salary.” He shrugged. “And it scales, which yours doesn’t, because fifteen percent of vendor spend needs you personally in a room, and there’s only one of you, and I’ve met you, and you’d work until you died.”
Lila looked at the screen. Three years of numbers she knew by heart had shifted six inches to the left, and she could see, with a physical vertigo, every place the model got better.
“Say something,” Jake said.
“I’m doing the P&L.”
“Now?”
“Year three. In my head.” She stopped. “It’s not a small difference.”
“No.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because I own three bars, and for two of them I’m a producer, and for one I let somebody else hold the contract, and I can tell you exactly which one I lie awake about.” He got up for water and said, over his shoulder, “Also you should start with weddings, the margins are obscene.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because a wedding is one client with two decision-makers who hate each other and a budget that is emotionally load-bearing,” Lila said. “Corporate has a procurement department and a rate sheet and nobody cries at midnight about chair covers. I will never do a wedding. Write it down. Put it on the receipt.”
“Noted,” he said, laughing, and let it go in one move, and did not circle back to it three sentences later the way people do.
She said, because she had to, “Are you being nice to me?”
He turned around with the glass in his hand, honestly baffled. “About the business?”
“Yes.”
“No.” Flatly, almost offended. “I’ll be nice to you about a haircut. I don’t do it about money. That’s a real business, Lila. That’s the best document anybody’s put in front of me in five years, and I’ve been shown some documents.” He drank. “I promise you. It’s real.”
Nobody, in six years, had gotten past the cover, and this one had found page thirty-one.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
“You can’t tell Sophie.”
“I don’t have Sophie’s number.”
“You met her Wednesday. She gave you her card. She gives everyone her card, it’s a compulsion.” Lila closed the laptop. “Okay.”
They stayed up. He was most of the way into a story about his manager at the Bantam, a woman named Marisol who had spent a July night asleep on a milk crate in the walk-in with a dying compressor and four hundred dollars of oysters, and the sentence stopped in the middle, at and so Marisol says to me, and did not start again. Lila lay there listening to him not finish it. She had not known he could do that. Then she got the blanket up over his shoulder and took his glasses off and folded them and set them where he would find them, and he did not wake, and she lay in the dark being pleased about it.
* * *
They drove out on Monday just after ten, down 395 with the Sierra going brown and enormous on the right, and stopped in Lee Vining for gas and coffee that was, they agreed, the worst in the state, and better than it had any business being, because the woman who poured it called them both hon and meant it. Lila drank hers in the gravel with her shoes off, and Jake came out of the store with a box of the terrible chocolate cereal because he had gone in and checked, and she laughed about it for a mile.
Somewhere north of Bishop the road went straight for twenty miles and there was nothing to do but drive it.
Lila had the laptop open on her knees. She’d said she was going to look at the third-year numbers, and she had, for an hour, and the numbers were good. She had made a new tab and written master contract at the top of it and underlined it twice. An editorial decision.
She scrolled to the desktop.
She clicked once on the folder called `misc`.
She typed `misc_v2`, and pressed return, and closed the lid.
“You want to stop in Bishop?” Jake said. “There’s a bakery. It’s a whole thing, people drive out for it.”
“Sure,” said Lila.
One thought on “Against All Odds – Chapter 3: Page Thirty-One”