Friday morning, I got up at six, pinned my hair, walked back down that road, took a cart, and started down the hallway, and I want to say first that I did not sneak in.
Odalys at the front desk called me at five fifty and asked me to come. She has been there six years and was the only person in that building over twenty-four that morning.
The contract crew was four people out of Flagstaff and two showed up.
Forty-four rooms to turn by three on car club weekend, and the district manager was in Phoenix.
I did nineteen. Odalys did eleven between checkouts and the two girls from Flagstaff did the rest, and they were both crying by noon, not because of me, because nobody had trained them on anything.
We got it done at twenty after three.
Now the part that mattered, and it did not come from me.
In the linen room there was a banker’s box that had been there since before I started. Guest comment cards. The chain went to the website, the district gal told Odalys in February to throw the box out, and Odalys carried it to the dumpster and then took it back out and put it in her trunk.
Eleven hundred and some cards. Thirty-two years.
She sat up two nights and pulled every one with my name on it. Three hundred and forty-one.
The one she put on top is from August of 1997 and it is written small, in pencil, both sides.
Room 114. Two nights. You left the little light on and you put the chain on the door for me without my asking and you never one time asked me a question. I was not able to say anything to you in person. I am somewhere safe now. I am going to keep this address in case I can ever do something for you.
Odalys sent that box to the regional office in Scottsdale. Around the district manager, which is a thing I would not have known how to do.
A woman from the chain drove out on a Tuesday and sat in the lobby with me two hours.
The contract got cancelled in April. Housekeeping is in-house again at that property and four others on that stretch, and I am head of housekeeping, which is a title with a badge, a dollar sixty more an hour, and four people under me.
I hired both girls from Flagstaff. They are good now. I trained them the way you train somebody, slowly, standing next to them.
The district manager is not with the company. I do not know how that happened and I have not asked.
The box is a binder behind the front desk now. Odalys did that, tabs and everything, and guests read it while they check in, and about once a week somebody comes and finds me in a hallway.
Room 114 still gets a night-light. That was never policy and it is policy now.
She called me somebody’s abuela over the noise of the dryers so she would not have to hear herself say it. Three hundred and forty-one people had already written down what I was, on little cards, in a box, in the dark, for thirty-two years.