He smiled at that, though he knew she was speaking from experience. Alma had started on the same cleaning crew years earlier and earned her supervisory role after repeatedly being asked to do the work of a supervisor without the title or pay. She had taught Marcus how to keep careful records of completed rooms, how to report hazards without accepting blame for them, and when to insist that an emergency outside his assignment be treated as an emergency rather than a favor. Those lessons were part of the reason he had lasted almost two years.
Before moving to Meridian Tower, Marcus had spent eleven years in equipment repair. He had started as a teenager washing parts and sorting hardware for his father's friend, Mr. Delaney, who owned a two-bay appliance shop behind a gas station. At eighteen he discovered he liked the work enough to stay after his classmates moved on to other trades. He took evening classes in basic electrical systems, earned the qualifications required for the jobs he was assigned, and learned under experienced technicians who corrected his mistakes without treating him as stupid.
Mr. Delaney used to say that the expensive part of a repair was rarely the replacement component. It was the time a customer lost while the equipment was unavailable, the food spoiled in an uncooled refrigerator, or the small business that could not serve its customers until a machine started again. Marcus remembered repairing a bakery's display cooler on a summer morning while the owner stood beside him wondering whether she would have to throw away everything inside. When the cooler resumed holding temperature, she had cried into a dish towel, and the sight had stayed with him longer than any paycheck.
He had also made mistakes. Once, early in his career, he replaced a motor that was functioning perfectly because he had become too confident in his first diagnosis. The real problem was a loose connection elsewhere in the system, and his supervisor made him go back and explain the unnecessary expense to the customer. Marcus had been embarrassed for days, but he never forgot the lesson: being quick was useful only if the answer was right.
When Emma was born, he and her mother were already struggling to agree on what their family would look like. They were young enough to assume that affection would solve arrangements that needed planning, and tired enough to turn ordinary disagreements into arguments. Her mother left when Emma was two, first promising she would return after sorting out her life, then gradually becoming a name attached to irregular messages and empty weekends. Marcus did not tell Emma that her mother had stopped loving her, because he had no right to claim knowledge of another person's heart.
What he could tell her was what he would do. He would pack her lunch, help her learn to tie her shoes, be there when she had a fever, and sit through every school play even when his eyes felt gritty from working overnight. In the beginning, he tried to manage all of that while remaining at the repair company. It almost worked until the schedule changed and emergency calls began arriving with less notice and greater demands.