I wasn’t sure that hotel guest services was necessarily my life’s calling, but on the whole this wasn’t such a terrible job. Amira left me pretty much to my own devices; she knew she could trust me with both her money and her Travelocity reputation, and hers was the variety of Type A personality that drove her to tend to most of the minutiae herself. As much as she loved to mutter, “If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself,” under her breath when she knew I was within earshot of her office, she had a habit of bulldozing over every task I tried to take on and twisting it into the shape of her own quirky compulsions, and we were both just as happy for me to stay out of her way.
The chain of which she’d bought an outpost was a mainstay of cross-country hospitality, hers
