She drank the coffee standing up. Her uniform hung on the back of the bedroom door, pressed the night before with a care she pretended was only professional. Through the window the el tracks drew a dark line across a sky the color of tin. A neighbor's shower ran. Mrs. Kim downstairs would already be awake, and Claire did not play. She had made that bargain years ago without signing anything: before noon the apartment was a place a person slept and ate, not a place a person filled with evidence.
On the table, beside the mug, lay a grocery receipt and a letter from the building about a boiler inspection. No music. She liked it that way until she didn't. Some mornings the not-playing felt like wisdom. Some mornings it felt like a scar she kept checking to see if it still had a job.
She rinsed the mug. She twisted her hair into the low bun in the bathroom mirror and pinned it until it agreed. Hazel eyes looked back, and she told them, without drama, the list: six tables if Andre was in, eight if he wasn't; the duck; the allergy at fourteen; do not let the new busser stack the hot plates against the cold ones. She did not put the piano on the list. The piano was not scheduled.
The train was crowded with Saturday errands. She stood and watched her reflection slide over brick and backyards. At the restaurant door, before the elegance began, there was a narrower door for staff and a stair that smelled like lemon cleaner and the ghost of stock. She changed nothing about her face on the way up. Changing your face in a stairwell was how you arrived already tired.
Martin Hale was at the pass with a pencil behind his ear, sixty, precise, a man who believed a room could be kept from harm if the names were said correctly.
"Patrick's out," he said. "Fever. Don't let guests migrate to the bench. If anyone asks, the piano is resting, which is a sentence I would like you to deliver without irony."
"I can do without irony," Claire said.
"You can do whatever you want on your own time," Martin said, not unkindly. He knew she had a piano at home the way he knew Andre sang in a church on Sundays: as a fact that did not need to be used. "On my floor, resting means resting."