Page 2 of Drawing Home
“Let me show you the outlets,” Emma said. She bent down and pointed out one hidden by the legs of the wooden desk.
“Well, that solves one problem,” the woman said, hands on her hips.
Emma walked to the armoire and opened it. “We have more hangers if you need them. I think you’ll find this very spacious.”
Mrs. Stoward peered suspiciously at the armoire. “Is this cedar?”
“Just use the damn cabinet, Susan,” mumbled the man.
“And what about the television?” she said to Emma.
That got the man’s attention. He directed his irritated gaze at Emma. “Yes, we need to get a television in here,” he said. “There’s a game at seven.”
Before Emma could explain that they didn’t have televisions at the hotel, she heard a scream from the ground floor.
“Excuse me,” she said, and she rushed from the room to the top of the stairs. One of the housekeepers was running up.
“Someone just passed out at the bar!” the housekeeper yelled, almost breathless. Passed out? It was early afternoon. Had someone already overindulged? It had been known to happen.
“Did you call an ambulance?” Emma said, running down the stairs to reach the front desk. She pushed through the wooden door between the stairwell and the lobby, a door she knew was often blocked by a café cart or a table, but she would lose precious seconds if she used the patio door and went around to the front entrance.
Nothing was blocking the door to the lobby today. She grabbed the black landline phone on the front desk and dialed 911.
“It’s Emma at The American Hotel. We need an ambulance for an unconscious customer.” The dispatcher asked her for some specifics, but from her spot, she couldn’t get a good look at the fallen customer, and the phone wasn’t cordless. The old-fashioned quirks of the place sometimes posed a challenge. She should have used her cell phone, but service could be spotty.
Waiters and busboys gathered around the person on the floor; the bartender, Chris, was on his knees trying to help. Did Chris have EMT experience? She wouldn’t be surprised. Most people working in town were, if not jacks-of-all-trades, skilled at a variety of jobs. The person taking your dinner order one night could very well be operating your water taxi the next.
She scanned the bar, looking for anyone she recognized, trying to get a sense of whether the guest on the floor was a tourist or a local. The bar had a few regulars who came for happy hour every day, year-round. They were the ones at the bar in the middle of a blizzard. The American Hotel was a club to these customers.
Emma realized one bar stool was empty, the one at the corner closest to the lobby.
Oh no.She hoped the person on the ground wasn’t who she thought it was.
Penny crossed Main Street, heading for the bookstore. As far as she was concerned, the town had two major things going for it: the bookstore and the self-serve frozen-yogurt shop, BuddhaBerry. Somehow, between these two places, she would find a way to pass the three-day weekend.
Penny didn’t do well with lots of free time. It made her anxious.
“Instead of worrying,” her mom had said, “think of something you have to be happy about. Just one thing, even if it’s small.”
One thing she had to be happy about was that eighth grade was nearly finished. It had been a brutal year. She’d almost failed math. Her best friend, Robin, barely had time for her anymore now that she’d become part of the group of “basics”—the girls with the flat-ironed hair and the new iPhones and the right clothes. Then, in December, the town’s only movie theater had burned down. Everyone freaked out—it had been a historic building, and that stretch of Main Street smelled charred for weeks afterward. The burned pit was nasty. Still, Penny was amazed how upset people got about it.
“It’s symbolic,” her mother told her. “It’s a sudden loss. And too much about this town is changing as it is. We have to hold on to some things.”
Without the theater, there was one less thing to do on the lonely weekends. And now, one less thing to do this summer.
But she still had this place, Harbor Books.
The bookstore smelled like fruit and spices from the Dobrá Tea bar in the back. The owner, a twenty-something woman named Alexis Pine, had told Penny about the tea thing months before it opened. Alexis was obsessed with it—oolong tea, pu’er tea, green tea. Alexis had long hair that had once been blond but was now the pinkish-red hue of hair that had been dyed with Kool-Aid. She had funky, boho clothes and was basically everything Penny wished she could be. Alexis also had two cats in the shop, a vintage-book collection in a glass case in the back, and an impressive working knowledge of graphic novels.
“Hey, Penny,” Alexis called from the counter. “Your book came in.”
Penny was moving on from her manga and superhero phase and getting into realism with the graphic novelThis One Summerby Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki.
Penny slid her mother’s twenty across the counter with her fingertips, trying to touch as little of the bill as possible.
“Whatcha doing this weekend?” Alexis asked, handing Penny her change.
Penny quickly shoved the change in her pocket, pulled her forbidden tube of Purell out of her handbag, and squeezed a fat blob of it on the backs of her hands and on her palms. It burned her skin, which was already dry and cracked from overwashing.
