Page 9 of The Drifter

I could have run that place today, I thought. I did run that place today.

I let the wind take it.

My building sat right up on the water with a view that made people say things when they visited, which was rare, because almost nobody visited. Two bedrooms. A balcony that got the sunrise. The kind of place a woman in this city was not supposed to be able to afford on hotel money.

I owned it. All of it. Not a note on it, not a nickel.

I had the deed in a fireproof box in the closet behind my winter coats, and there were nights I got it out and looked at it. Not often. But there were nights. It had my name on it—my whole name, first and last, in a font somebody had chosen to look like the eighteenth century, on thick paper. The first time I saw it, I had to sit down on the floor of a title office in North Charleston and put my head between my knees while a very kind woman got me a paper cup of water and pretended not to be looking at me.

Because my mother rented her whole life.

Thirty-one years of turning other people's beds, and she rented a house with a landlord who painted over mold instead of killing it. She paid him on the first of the month for three decades. When she died, there was nothing to leave anybody, because there was nothing.

So, I bought a place with a door that locked and a wall that was mine. I put my name on everything, and I have never once apologized for it.

I let myself in. The air conditioning was on because I'd left it on. The whole place was cold and clean and quiet.

So quiet.

I did the things I do. I put my keys in the dish. I stepped out of my heels by the door and left them there because there was nobody to trip over them. I hung the blouse—the pale pink one, the roses, the uniform—and it went on the hook with the four others exactly like it. I stood there a second looking at all five of them lined up in a row like something in an evidence photo.

I put on a T-shirt that had been washed to nothing. I ate standing up at the counter out of a container, because cooking for one is a thing I've never gotten the trick of. I've tried. You make a meal and then you eat a meal and then you look at what's left of the meal and you understand that it is now going to be your problem for four days.

Then, I stood at the window with the lights off and looked at the harbor.

That's the part nobody would believe. That the woman with the good view stands in the dark and looks at it alone.

I'm not lonely. Lonely is a thing that happens to people who don't have anybody. I had Izzy, and I had a cousin in Summerville I called on Sundays, and I had Otis, who would have taken a bullet for me and grumbled about the paperwork. I had a whole building full of people who lit up when I came through the door.

I had a life crammed so full of other people that there wasn't a square inch of it left over for one of my own.

That's not lonely. That's just the way it was.

Every woman I checked in came with somebody, or came for somebody, or came running from somebody. All three of those are a kind of having. I handed them their keys. I upgraded them. I told them where to get a good breakfast, and I went home over that bridge with my hair down and my shoes off and slept in my own big bed.

Thirty-two years old.

I had a second bedroom that was not an office and was not a gym and was not a guest room, because nobody stayed over. It had a dresser in it I'd bought at an estate sale in Beaufort because the drawers slid nice. It had a window that got the morning. And it had exactly nothing else in it. I kept the door closed. Every so often, I'd come down the hall in the dark and find that I'd opened it without deciding to and I was standing in the doorway looking at that window and that light and that dresser, and I would close the door and go to bed.

I would have been a good mother.

That's the thing that gets you at that hour. Not the wanting—the competence. I have spent fifteen years anticipating what people need before they know they need it. I know how to make a room safe. I know how to make a scared person laugh. I know which door creaks and which stair groans. I have never in my life failed to be the one who was steady.

And I was going to run out of time to use any of it, because I gave so many hours a week to a building that already had my mother.

So date somebody, Izzy would say, if I ever told her. And she would mean it kindly, and she'd be trying. She'd pull out her phone and start scrolling for a man like she was looking for a plumber.

When? That's the whole answer. When.

I closed shifts and I opened them. I covered the desk when the girl with the baby called out and I covered it again when she quit. I took the calls at home. I took the calls in the shower. There was a stretch last year when I did not have one full day off in five weeks. The thing that should frighten a person about that is not the fifth week.

It's that I liked it.

I liked being the one who could. I liked walking into a room that had gone sideways and watching the shoulders come down. There’s a rush in being necessary. It’s the cleanest drug there is, and it will eat your entire life and thank you on the way out.

I finally sat down on the sofa and got the letter out of my bag.

The firm in Mount Pleasant. The heavy paper. Dear Ms. Benning. They'd found me—which was its own small sickness, that somebody in an office had gone looking for the ones with money in the family, and had come up with the hotel girl in the condo on the water.