Grand house, a small library indeed/draft 1

Grand house, a small library indeed

fiction
edward w pritchard

Working seven to three shift at a hotel is mind numbing. As the night auditor, working overnights  I worked alone and the only customers most of the time were odd balls. At night a normal customer wanted to check in quickly and get on with their life. The odd balls if they wanted to hang around and talk to the hotel employees were at least very interesting.

This morning I was covering for a pretty girl on my night off.  In the morning people visited the hotel desk like a tourist would visit the Vatican, with ceremony and a person visiting a hotel at nine am spent a long time talking, asking questions and opinions of the desk clerk. " Was the Holiday Inn in Tampa, Florida left hand assessable?"

I took three calls from the General managers wife on the switch board while he was at breakfast with the hotel owner in the fancy hotel restaurant. On the third call I had enough and reminded my bosses boss that employee were not supposed to get personal phone calls at work. Night auditors, at least good ones are hard to find and the General Manager had a good laugh with me. His wife was keeping close tabs on him. It was a very Freudian thing for him to say, he was about the handsomest man in the hotel business around our town, General hotel managers always are. He said they were remodeling their house and I would see what was going on later, when I got married someday.

Two weeks later the General Manager stopped by the Hotel where I worked at five AM on a royal visit. Unless there was trouble no one ever checked up on night auditors who were all curmudgeons and were best left alone. The General manager wanted me to do him a favor. He wanted me to help his wife find and buy books for the new library they were building. I had a reputation of being a book worm and of always reading. Once my boss here, now fired, had wanted me to not read so much at night, after my work was done at three am in the down time. It's hard to say no to your bosses boss and this guy was very charming, so I agreed to review their library.

About a week later after working all night on a Wednesday morning I stopped at the General managers House. It was there in Fairlawn Heights where all the rich people lived. I had never been to this house but I had been to the area once picking up my date at one of these mansions in high school.

The General Manager's wife was very pretty and showed me the whole remodeling project. The workers were making a tremendous mess in the fancy house. Three children under six were not yet in school and were about. The children were ordinary looking despite the beauty of their parents. The General managers wife was doing two or three things at once and answering the phone also.

The book shelves were roughed in but not stained or finished and could hold about two thousand books. She had placed their book collections on the shelves ceremoniously early. About thirty books. She took a notebook labeled " project notes" and ask me for a list of books to buy. The General Manager is the bosses boss so I played it straight. I started with the Bible, Shakespeare , then Emerson, Flaubert, I went on for a long time and she wrote them all down. She knew how to spell them all I remember.

It's about forty years later now. What I wouldn't give now to have a woman I like working on a project with me joining about in the background.

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