She walked through the empty lobby and slid back the doors of the dining room. This was the largest room in the Hopewell—its own little wing, with a high ceiling and a dozen tall, thin windows facing both the street and the building next door. Fifty years ago, this room was packed every morning with guests enjoying a hearty breakfast off prim bone-china plates, served up with silver cutlery and coffee pots emblazoned with the HH monogram. The china had long been chipped and retired. A drug-addled waiter stole the silver in the seventies. The floor was subsiding, the chairs no longer completely matched, and the chandelier was missing pieces.
Still, it was a happy room. It had been designed to amplify the best qualities of each part of the day. In the afternoon, it caught the breeze. In the evening, its diamond-cut top windowpanes caught the sunset and refracted it into a dozen colors. On sunny mornings like this one, it was drenched with light. In the sunniest corner, four tables had been pushed together to create one long family-sized table. There were balloons taped to the backs of the chairs, and blue and yellow streamers fanned down from the ceiling creating a colorful canopy. Scarlett recognized both the streamers and the balloons from Lola’s high school graduation party four days earlier. Someone had gone to some effort.
Spencer was already seated, fork in hand.
“I did this,” he said, pointing at one of the linen napkins. They had been folded into decorative cone shapes, and each had a single yellow tulip tucked inside.
“No, you didn’t,” Marlene said sourly, coming in behind Scarlett. “Lola did.”
This, Scarlett already knew; she could recognize Lola’s handiwork. Spencer had been joking, but jokes were not Marlene’s strong point.
“Come,” Spencer said, patting the seat next to him. “Sitteth next to me, so that I may chooseth the second-best waffle after you.”
Martin family birthday breakfasts followed a strict tradition. First, there were Belgian waffles, made by Belinda, the beloved Hopewell Hotel cook. These were served up with an array of toppings: chocolate syrup, fresh lemon whipped cream, stewed strawberries, and powdered vanilla sugar. The air should have been thick with wafflely perfume. Instead, there was an acrid, confusing smell, undercut by a light touch of smoke.
Scarlett looked to Spencer, and he met her gaze with a raised eyebrow. He smelled it, too.
“That’s not right,” he said.
The kitchen door swung open, and Lola emerged. She was immaculately dressed in her “beauty scrubs,” lean black pants, a slim black T-shirt, and low heels. Her white-blonde, stick-straight hair was wound into a knot.
Lola always looked good. This was just one of the laws of Scarlett’s universe. Like Spencer, she was thinner and taller than average. She had tiny, sharp eyes and thin lips, both of which managed to convey fullness. She was universally regarded as beautiful, in an easily-bruised and delicate kind of way. Painters would want to capture her beauty on canvas. Doctors would want to give her a blood transfusion. Such was Lola’s appeal.
“Happy birthday!” she said with a smile. “This is really hot. Don’t touch it for a minute.”
She set down a small jug of chocolate syrup wrapped in a towel. The syrup, usually a gooey pot of chocolaty perfection, looked a bit more like something you might get if you melted down a tire with a pound of butter. Before Scarlett could ask why they were having buttery stewed tire for breakfast, her dad came bursting out with a large plate of waffles.
Scarlett’s dad was frequently the most dressed-down of them all. He had an affection for a thrift shop in the village where NYU students tended to shop, so his wardrobe consisted of a lot of vintage T-shirts and hoodies, well-worn jeans, and incredibly strange shoes. (Today, he was wearing his threadbare “My name is Mr. Pineapple” shirt.) People sometimes thought he was their older, blonder brother or cousin. Guests rarely ever thought he was in any way in charge of the hotel, much less its official owner.
“Belinda isn’t here today,” he said, settling down a plate of deflated, undercooked waffles, topped by a few deeply charred ones. “We did our best.”
Truthfully, this was a disappointment. Birthday breakfasts were sacred events, but Scarlett wasn’t about to scream in protest. Marlene, however, was more than prepared to do so.
“We can’t eat those,” she said.
“They’re not that bad,” her dad lied, picking through them. “This one looks okay.”
He found one in the middle that looked like it had hit the waffle iron at exactly the right time, purely out of luck. He stabbed it with a fork and lifted it toward Marlene’s plate. As usual, Marlene was the center of everything, even on Scarlett’s birthday.
Lola was fidgeting with the syrup, even though she was one of the least fidgety people Scarlett knew. Spencer gave Scarlett a long sideways glance. Something was very much not right here.