The Hotel Nantucket (41)
“You’re a complete squid, Long Shot,” Bibi said that first day. “Long Shot” was the nickname Ms. English had given him and he’s secretly pleased because, on Nantucket, any name is better than Chad. “But I’d rather be paired with you than with those other bitches.”
She meant Octavia and Neves. They speak Portuguese and wear thick gold crosses around their necks. Ms. English refers to Octavia and Neves as the A-team and Chad and Bibi as the B-team, which is probably not a random designation. This might be what fuels Bibi’s dislike of the other girls (Chad doesn’t care; he knows he belongs on the B-team), although Bibi’s vitriol is so intense that Chad wonders if the sisters are mean to Bibi on the ferry. (He can’t imagine this.) By her own admission, Bibi hates people. It’s the one thing, she says, that brings her joy.
Chad announces that he’ll clean the bathroom and deal with the floral bouquets if Bibi wants to vacuum and get started on the bed. She grunts in the affirmative, though Chad was hoping for a thank-you, since he’s taking the more onerous tasks. The flowers are a surprisingly tedious job—he has to wipe up the blue hydrangea dust, trim the stamens of the lilies because pollen stains everything a bloody rust color, and change the smelly brown water in the vase. But the flowers are a picnic compared to cleaning the bathroom. In the two weeks that Chad has been working at the hotel, he’s dealt with bloody pads and tampons in the trash (he appreciates anew that he and his sister never had to share a bathroom), and he cleaned up the puke of some bachelor-party dude who didn’t make it anywhere close to the toilet bowl. Only slightly less repulsive are the globs of toothpaste and stray hairs he has to scrub from the sink.
By dealing with the flowers and the bathroom, he achieves the dual purpose of punishing himself and sucking up to Bibi. Her approval matters, even though she’s not pretty and not sophisticated and not particularly well educated; despite her claim that she is “meant for the finer things,” everything about her demeanor suggests otherwise. She’s a twenty-one-year-old single mother (she hasn’t mentioned the father of the baby and Chad isn’t brave enough to ask), and Chad is both in awe of and afraid of her.
When Chad finishes scrubbing the shower and the tub—he does the tub conscientiously even though it’s clear it hasn’t been used—he pokes his head into the bedroom. The bed has been stripped and remade, the pillows artfully arranged; Bibi always does a really good job with the beds. Chad doesn’t see Bibi, but instead of calling her name, he tiptoes around. He finds her in the walk-in closet, sifting through a suitcase. She holds up a belt first, then an amethyst silk negligée. He notices she still has the tennis bracelet on her wrist.
“Bibi?” he says.
She jumps. “Jeez, Long Shot, you scared me. What the hell?”
“What are you doing?” he asks. “You know we’re not supposed to go through personal stuff. And you need to take that bracelet off.”
“Who are you, the cleaning police?”
“I just don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“Why would I get in trouble? I’m just looking around. I’m not going to take anything. You probably think I’m a thief because I’m not rich like you, Mr. Eel Point Road. Mr. Range Rover.”
Chad blinks. He’s not sure how Bibi discovered what he drives or where he lives. He’s been careful to present himself as a normal-ish summer kid. He parks way up on Cliff Road and told her only that he lived on a “dirt road, out of town.”
“I don’t think you’re a thief, Bibi,” he says. He’s tempted in that moment to offer her part of this week’s paycheck because he knows she has to buy things like diapers and formula, but he’s afraid she’ll find it patronizing. “Do you want me to do the vacuuming?”
The next morning, Ms. English sends Octavia and Neves to clean suite 114—Chad is grateful they’re doing it, because being around Doug the pit bull makes him uncomfortable—but instead of giving Chad and Bibi a roster of rooms and sending them out too, Ms. English closes her office door and turns to them.
“The guests in room one oh five reported something missing,” she says. “A black-and-gold Fendi scarf.”
Chad closes his eyes. Room 105 was the last room they cleaned yesterday; it was a checkout. In room 105, Bibi had been suspiciously on task and Chad thought this was because the guests had left a forty-dollar tip, which Chad told Bibi she could take. Bibi had asked if he wanted to go down to the service kitchen to replenish the items that went in the minibar—the wine, the Cisco beers, the bluefish paté and crackers—which was the best job of all. The service kitchen was adjacent to the Blue Bar kitchen, where Beatriz was usually pulling a tray out of the oven—gougères or homemade pigs in a blanket or the pretzel bread—and she always offered some of whatever it was to the cleaning staff. Yesterday afternoon, Chad hit the jackpot because Beatriz was prepping lobster-roll sliders on homemade milk buns. Chad had eaten lobster growing up the way other kids ate peanut butter and jelly but he had never eaten anything like this slider before. The outside of the milk bun was crisply toasted while the inside was fragrant and pillowy; the lobster meat had been mixed with lemon zest, herbs, crunchy pieces of celery, and just enough tangy mayo. The lobster slider was so…elevated that Chad went back to room 105 feeling inspired. He wanted to do his job as well as Beatriz did hers. He wanted to clean the hell out of room 105!