J.KARUU · 1. The Missing Doors
The hotel had counted the pillowcases twice and arrived at two different shortages. Ruth set her delivery slip on the receiving-room shelf, weighted it with the van keys, and asked the young man to open the hamper again.
“They’ve already gone through it,” he said.
“Then we’ll know where to look.”
He wore a dark waistcoat over a shirt whose cuffs were wet. Behind him, through the open service door, the river showed between a dumpster and a stack of plastic bread trays. Thursday traffic was gathering on the bridge. Ruth had made this delivery because the regular driver had a dental appointment, and she wanted to be back before the afternoon collections crowded the bay.
The young man pulled loose the hamper’s drawstring. A corner of a sheet had caught beneath the knot. He tugged it until Ruth put her hand over his.
“Give it some slack first.”
Her fingers objected as she worked the cord backward. She felt the pain along the base of her thumb, familiar enough to be irritating rather than alarming. The knot opened.
They laid the returned linen on the sorting table. Sheets first, then bath towels, hand towels, pillowcases. Ruth kept the categories apart with the flat of her hand. The receiving room smelled of coffee grounds and damp cotton. Somewhere beyond the wall, a trolley struck a door repeatedly before somebody held it open.
“Twenty-four,” the young man said.
“Twenty-three.”
He looked at her.
“You’ve counted the one under your elbow.”
He lifted his arm. “Right.”
The missing pillowcases were inside two sheets that had been stripped from beds in bundles. There were nine, enough to settle the shortage and leave one over. Ruth checked the penciled notation on the previous collection slip.
“You owed us one from Tuesday.”
“So we’re even?”
“We’re counted.”
She smiled to take the correction out of it. His name badge said BEN. He was perhaps twenty-two, with a patch of shaving rash beneath his jaw. She remembered how exposed a person could feel in the first weeks of a job, before learning which errors would be forgiven.
She amended the return figure, initialed it, and turned the clipboard toward him.
“Sign beside mine. Keep your copy.”
Ben searched his waistcoat for a pen. While he went to the desk, Ruth noticed the brochure propped against the receiving-room telephone.
It showed the river in a blue she had never seen in it. Along the bank, people walked beneath young trees, carrying nothing. The old buildings had been washed pale and fitted with balconies. At the left edge stood Bell Linen, recognizable by its stepped brick parapet and the narrow upper window beside Ruth’s kitchen.
Below that window were three tall rectangles of glass.
She moved closer. The loading doors had been removed. In their place, behind the drawn windows, someone had furnished a room with a chair and a lamp.
“Looks good, doesn’t it?” Ben said. He came back clicking a pen. “They left a whole box at reception. We’re supposed to put them out for guests.”
Ruth read the words beneath the picture. REACHSIDE. A NEW WAY TO LIVE BY THE WATER.
“That’s the old laundry, isn’t it?” he asked. “Or part of it. Hard to tell with everything cleaned up.”
“Yes.”
“My girlfriend wants one of those apartments. I told her wanting is probably all we can afford.” He bent over the slip. “They say there’ll be a café on the corner.”
Ruth could see the café’s striped awning. It occupied the place where Daniel kept the spare trolley wheels and a bucket of rock salt. She had signed the purchase contract herself. The developer’s representative had explained the conversion, the conditions, the closing date eleven months away. She had asked about retaining a portion of the ground floor and received a courteous, definite refusal. None of this was news.
Still, she had expected the picture to make some acknowledgment of what was there.
Ben handed back the clipboard.
“All sorted?”
Ruth checked his signature and the corrected figure before she answered.
“All sorted. May I take one?”
“Help yourself. There are hundreds.”
She put the brochure beneath her copy of the delivery slip. Outside, she secured the empty hampers in the van before getting into the driver’s seat.
At the traffic light she looked once at the picture on the passenger seat. The artist had kept the upper window. Her window. Apparently it could be useful without her.
***
At Bell Linen, a collection van stood crooked across the loading bay while Daniel guided a hamper over the threshold. Its front wheel had developed a wobble. He lifted the handle slightly, taking the weight off it, and the hamper came through straight.
Ruth waited until he had cleared the ramp before backing in.
Inside, the air changed against her face: warm moisture, detergent, the faint hot-metal smell from the finishing line. She carried the hotel’s returned linen past the scales. Beyond the partition, Inez was showing a newer worker how to square the corners of a tablecloth before feeding it into the ironer. Neither woman looked up.
Ruth followed her usual route farther into the building. Past the washers with their scarred circular doors. Past the dryer whose side panel had been replaced in a different shade of cream. Along the yellow line Daniel renewed every spring, though trolley wheels and wet shoes soon rubbed it dull.
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