Chapter 7
That was what the hotels were for. That was what all of it had been for.
Lily appeared in the doorway of the bedroom at eight-fifteen in her pajamas with her rabbit under one arm, hair sideways, looking at me with the expression she used when she was still not fully certain what room she had woken up in. Then she saw the roses on the dresser and she crossed to them without speaking and stood in front of them for a moment the way she always did, seriously, giving them the attention the ritual required.
"Are we going to get a vase?" she asked.
"There's one in the bathroom," I said. "You want to pick it out?"
She went to look. I heard her opening cabinets with the careful sound of a person taking a decision seriously. Marcus was still at the window with his coffee, and he looked at me and then at the bedroom doorway and his expression did something that was not quite a smile and not quite grief but was some combination of the two that people arrive at when they see a father and a six-year-old performing a small and private ceremony in a hotel room overlooking a lake.
Lily came back with the vase, a simple clear one, and she set it on the dresser beside the roses. "This one," she said.
"Good choice," I said.
She looked at the roses for another moment. "Daddy," she said. "Do you think she can see them?"
I looked at the roses. I thought about Sarah in the catalog years ago, pointing at furniture on a Sunday morning, and the hospice room, and the three years of November anniversaries that had passed since, each one a different shape than the one before.
"I think she can," I said.
Lily nodded with the seriousness of someone who has received a satisfactory answer to an important question, and she went to the window to look at the lake, and I sat in the chair Marcus had vacated and watched my daughter look at Chicago in the morning, and I thought that there were seven hotels and thirty-one properties across four states and a chairman's card in a cardholder in a backpack, and none of it was the reason I had gotten out of bed every day for the last three years.
The reason was in the window.
She was six years old.
She had her mother's way of looking at things that were large, with complete attention, like the thing deserved to know it was being seen.
May you like
I was going to give her everything I had built. Not eventually. Every single morning. That was the plan and it had always been the plan, and standing in the lobby of my own hotel the previous night in a worn jacket with a damaged bouquet had reminded me, cleanly and without ambiguity, that the things worth protecting were never the ones in the financial reports.
They were the ones that fit in your arms while they slept.
