Free Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia

appointment book, and dead on the carpet the next. Hastings has stood behind that same desk and watched his hotel get older and shabbier, the guests following suit. Where once the businessmen wore three-piece suits and hats—always hats—now they showed up in rumpled shorts and polos dotted with coffee drips. Families that had looked crisp and excited about their vacation in the Catskills were now tired and distracted, making a quick stopover on their way to other, more thrilling destinations when they bothered to come at all. He can mark the decades through the kids’ appearance alone. The Statewide students began as a sea of impossibly shiny, straight hair, puka shells clicking and bell bottoms flapping. Their hair got higher and puffier, their concert ties skinnier, and their shoulders broader, and now they look as though they barely bothered to bathe before swaddling themselves in plaid and flannel.
    But this girl—this girl standing at the check-in desk. She doesn’t belong to any of those memories and yet she’s familiar. He’s seen her before. Where? How? If she’s here for Statewide, she’s late, though he doubts she has any connection to the festival. She’s young but not a teenager. Her blondish-brownish hair is pulled back in a sloppy bun and she’s unzipping a dark blue field coat that makes her look like an enormous blueberry. She’s large. A big girl, not just tall but round. She has the look of acquired fat, of sadness weighing on her in the form of flesh. A whisper of tenderness mixes with his déjà vu.
    Sheila at the front desk is greeting her, welcoming her to the Bellweather, and asking politely for her name. Sheila Czeckley, his check-in girl extraordinaire, is the only other person at his hotel who has the slightest comprehension of what real customer service looks like.
    Hastings points his good ear in their direction, but the girl’s voice is too low, too quiet for him to make out. He hears a gentle jingling instead.
    The girl has a dog. Hastings grins, confused. A small dog, half fox by the look of it, with big pointed ears that flop when he shakes his head. He, the dog, is wearing a red vest with a white cross on it. His tail wags at the sound of his mistress’s voice.
    Curiosity killed the concierge,
he thinks, and leaves his post.
    The check-in and concierge desks are on the same side of the lobby, separated by the entrance hall to the west wing and its assorted ballrooms and business suites. A ghostly harmonic murmur wafts by as he crosses the open carpet: the sound of the Statewide chorus warming up. It lifts his steps. Hastings waits all year for this weekend, for his hotel to be full of life and song again.
    “Welcome, welcome!” He hails Sheila and the large girl. “Have you come for the festival?” The feeling of having seen her, of knowing her—when Hastings looks into the girl’s face, the sense that he knows her is so powerful he rocks on his heels. The carpet bounces him back. “Hello,” he says, much softer. “Hello and welcome to the Bellweather.”
    Her eyes are large, gray, and her face—it’s odd that she has any effect on him at all, because her face is as forgettable as blank paper. She looks like any young woman running to fat. Her cheeks are full, her chin pointed.
    “Are you here for the festival?” he repeats. She blinks. “Statewide. The Statewide school music festival. I hope you’ll be with us through Sunday. That’s when they’ll hold the concerts, right through there.” He points across the lobby to the auditorium’s closed doors. “The orchestra’s rehearsing in there now if you’d like to hear them.”
    Her dog shakes his head again, jangling his tags.
    “What’s his name?” asks Hastings.
    The girl bites her lower lip. “August,” she says. “He’s a working dog. I’m training him to be a working dog. For the blind.”
    “That’s wonderful.”
    She doesn’t respond.
    Sheila smiles and hands over the key to 407. It’s one of