"And what will you do?" she asked Marcus.
He looked down at his tea. "Find another door to hold."
"Is that what you want to do forever?"
"No, ma'am. I want to run a hotel someday. Not a fancy dream about having my name on an office. The actual work. Staff schedules, budgets, maintenance, complaints, the people who call because they don't know what to do when something goes wrong at two in the morning. I've been going to night school for hospitality management."
"How much longer?"
He shifted in his seat, embarrassed by the question in a way he had not been embarrassed by Whitley's cruelty. "One semester. Nine thousand dollars left between tuition and the final practicum. I've saved most of it. Or I had, until about an hour ago. Without the income, I'll probably defer for a term."
"That doesn't seem fair."
"No," Marcus said. "But it's what happened. I can be angry about it and still have to figure out rent on the first."
He looked toward the kitchen, where Alma was laughing at something a cook had said, and then back to Odessa. "My grandmother cleaned offices for thirty years. She'd come home with aching hands and tell me about the things people said when they thought the cleaning staff weren't listening. One day she told me she'd rather I make a living holding doors than spend a lifetime closing them in other people's faces. I didn't understand it then. I think I do now."
Odessa asked what his grandmother's name had been, and he told her about Ruth. They talked about the small house Ruth rented, the books Marcus carried to school, and the afternoons she spent teaching him how to iron a shirt properly because she believed neatness was a kind of self-respect rather than evidence of wealth. He told Odessa about the day he won a school scholarship and Ruth bought a tiny cake they could barely afford, placing it on the table beneath a photograph of his late grandfather. He did not speak of her as a saint. She had been stubborn, impatient with excuses, and capable of making him feel twelve years old long after he was grown.
"She would've liked you," Odessa said.
Marcus laughed softly. "She would've asked why you were walking around in that weather without somebody making sure you got home."
"Perhaps she would've been right."
At the end of the meal, Marcus reached for the check. Odessa objected, offering to pay with the very cash the manager had thrown onto the floor, but Marcus insisted that he had invited her. She pointed out, gently, that he had just lost his job. He answered that kindness was not an account to be balanced at the end of the month. Odessa let him pay, though she made a mental note to remember what that modest dinner cost him.