Chapter 3: The Price of a Job
The manager's office at Maison Greer was located in the basement, down a narrow concrete corridor that smelled of old grease and floor wax. It was a small, windowless room dominated by six closed-circuit television monitors showing different angles of the dining floor, three metal filing cabinets, and a heavy mahogany desk that belonged to Arthur Pendelton.
Arthur was fifty-two, a man whose hair had gone white at thirty and whose stomach had been ruined by thirty years of restaurant ulcers. He was currently standing in the doorway of the eastern wing, having come up the stairs two at a time when Julian hit the emergency page on the internal intercom.
"Emma," Arthur said, his voice a low, gravelly rattle as he pulled her into the shadow of the service pantry. His eyes were wild, his tie slightly askew. "What the hell are you doing? I’ve got Victoria Greer-Vance threatening to pull our liquor license through her father’s board connections. Do you know who her father is?"
"I know who he is, Arthur," Emma said, her back against the wire shelving that held forty cases of imported sparkling water. "He's the guy who pays you to run a restaurant, not a country club with a gate keeper. Rose hasn't broken a single rule."
"Rule?" Arthur laughed, a short, ugly sound that ended in a cough. "This isn't a courtroom, Emma. It's a business. We sell an illusion. We sell the idea that when you come here, you are away from the mud and the old people and the poverty of the world. Victoria pays for that illusion. That old woman... how much is her check? Forty dollars? Fifty? Victoria's table will clear twelve hundred before tip. You do the math. You’ve been here six years, you know how the world works."
"I know how it works," Emma said, looking out through the small porthole window of the pantry door.
Across the floor, Rose was still sitting alone. She had picked up her handbag and placed it on her lap, her arms wrapped around it as if she were waiting for a bus in the rain. She looked tiny beneath the thirty-foot ceiling, like a small gray pebble left behind on a beach by a receding tide. Victoria was watching her from Table 12, her face triumphant, her phone held to her ear as she spoke to someone with an animated, sharp movement of her chin.
"You go back out there," Arthur ordered, his hand coming down on Emma’s shoulder, his thumb digging into her collarbone. "You tell the old lady that we have a pipe leak near her section and we have to close the corner down. You move her to the bar or you give her a coat and you get her out. If you don't do it, Julian will, and you can pack your locker before the shift is over. I like you, Emma. You work hard. But you're replaceable. The Greer family isn't."
Emma looked down at Arthur's hand on her shoulder. She thought about the twelve dollars in her account. She thought about the pink notice from ComEd. She thought about her rent, which was due in six days, and the way her apartment smelled like cold linoleum when the radiator went out on Tuesday mornings. She knew he was right. The world didn't care about a seventy-nine-year-old switchboard operator's birthday. It cared about three carats of emerald-cut diamond.
"No," Emma said.
Arthur blinked, his hand dropping from her shoulder. "What?"
"I said no," Emma repeated. She reached up, unpinned the silver Emma nametag from her vest, and dropped it into Arthur's open hand. "If Julian wants to kick an old woman out into a blizzard on her birthday because she doesn't look like a magazine cover, he can do it himself. But he’ll have to do it in front of the whole room, because I'm going to sit with her until she's finished her tea."
She turned her back on him before he could answer, pushing through the swinging double doors of the pantry and walking back onto the floor.
The room had grown warmer, or perhaps it was just the blood in her ears. She walked straight to Table 14. She didn't look at Victoria, who had hung up her phone and was now smiling at her husband. She didn't look at Julian, who was standing by the host stand with two security guards in gray blazers.
She pulled out the empty chair opposite Rose and sat down.
The old woman looked up, her blue eyes watery and bright behind her thin, gold-rimmed spectacles. "Oh, dear," Rose whispered, her fingers tightening around the brass clasp of her purse. "You shouldn't be sitting here. That lady... she’s very angry. I heard what she said about the mothballs. I... I tried to wash this coat before I came out, but the closet in my building is very old. I didn't think anyone would notice."
"It's a beautiful coat, Rose," Emma said, her voice dropping into the quiet, steady tone she used when she was telling herself that everything was going to be fine. "And you smell like rain and winter. It’s my favorite smell in the city."
Rose looked down at the table, a single tear slipping from her eyelashes and disappearing into the white linen of the napkin. "I don't want to cause trouble, child. I can just go. My son... he’ll be waiting down at the station in an hour anyway. I’ve had my steak. It was very good. It was the best steak I’ve had since my husband passed."
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"You haven't had your dessert yet, Rose," Emma said, reaching across the table to take the old woman’s small, cold hand. "And nobody leaves Maison Greer on their birthday without the chocolate torte. It's an official rule. It's written right on the back of the building."
From across the room, the sound of Victoria’s heels clicked against the herringbone floor. She was coming over herself now, Arthur Pendelton trailing behind her like a dog that had broken its leash, his face the color of old lard.
