Five Stars

"You keep your own count," Mabel told her on Thursday, and after lunch, when the floor was quiet, she took Carmen into the locker room and opened her locker — the one with the dented door and the photograph of two grandsons taped inside it — and took out a spiral notebook with a water-warped cover, the kind schoolchildren use.

Years of it. Column after column, in half a dozen hands, the women's true hours. Date, in, out, minutes taken. Marisol's writing was round and young. Ana's was slanted, hurried. Mabel's was careful block capitals, each letter standing at attention. Page after page of small thefts, recorded in pencil by the robbed.

"Why?" Carmen asked, though she knew. She had to hear it in the women's words, because a thing is not evidence until the people it happened to have said it aloud.

"Because the office loses things," Mabel said. "We don't." She turned a page. "Two years ago Ana went to Doug with her count. Three hundred and ten minutes. Five hours of her life, Carmen, in one month. He told her the time clock is the time clock. He told her if she believed she was being shorted she could file with the company portal, and the portal would review. The portal reviewed for eleven weeks. The portal said the clock was accurate. The portal—" she said the word the way you'd say the name of a weather system "—has never cleaned a room in its life."

"Did anyone ever go higher?" Carmen asked.

Mabel looked at her a long moment, and something moved behind her eyes, an old decision being taken down off a shelf and dusted. "There have been letters," she said. "Anonymous. To the owners, to the company, to whoever owns the company. Nobody signs a letter with a mortgage, Carmen. Three letters, over two years. Nothing. The third one—" She stopped.

"The third one what?"

"The third one got an answer." Mabel closed the notebook. "Not to us. To Doug. A memo, from regional. He read it out at lineup like a football score. The company appreciates employee feedback. The company has investigated. The company finds the concerns unsubstantiated." She put the notebook back in the locker, tenderly, the way you shelve a Bible. "So we keep our own count. When the day comes, the count will be there."

When the day comes. Carmen turned the phrase over all afternoon, through three checkouts and a turndown, and it sat in her chest like a warm stone. These women were not waiting for rescue. They were keeping records for a day they could not name, the way people in drought country keep seed.

Eddie Brooks she learned about because of a chair.

There was a chair in the service corridor on the third floor, a plain wooden chair with one leg shorter than the others, and nobody sat in it, and nobody moved it, and when Carmen — new enough, once, to not know — had dragged it two feet to reach a cobweb, Ana had replaced it afterward without a word, precisely, the way you return an altar candle to its mark.

"That was Eddie's chair," Mabel said, when Carmen finally asked.

Eddie Brooks had been the houseman on the third and fourth floors for eleven years. Seventy years old, or near it — nobody had ever asked Eddie his age, because Eddie was not a man who accumulated questions; he accumulated tasks. He carried the heavy water, he ran the trash, he fixed the vacuum belts with his thumbnail and a patience the engineers with their radios never matched. And at two in the afternoon, when the heavy work paused, Eddie sat for ten minutes in that chair with his thermos, because his heart — this the women knew the way you know things about family — his heart was not a good heart anymore, and the ten minutes were the difference between Eddie working and Eddie falling.

Last spring a guest had complained. Not about Eddie. About the look of the corridor — a man sitting, in uniform, in view of a doorway. Doug had called it optics. Petra had used the word loitering, in writing, twice. Eddie was given a warning, and then, when he sat again the following Tuesday — ten minutes, thermos, heart — he was terminated for cause, on the spot, by Petra herself, who was thirty-three and had worked at the Wexford for nineteen months.

"He cleaned his locker out into a grocery bag," Mabel said. "Eleven years into a grocery bag. He asked could he finish his thermos. She said the thermos was his to take, like she was giving him something." She adjusted a pillow with unnecessary precision. "We walked him to the service door, all of us. Nobody said anything at lineup the next morning. Doug said Eddie had chosen to retire. Retire. A man with a grocery bag."