"Mo? You okay? You never call during a shift." Trisha had gone home an hour ago; her voice was half-asleep, half-worried.
"Trish, I'm standing in a hallway that smells like steak and bleach, holding a business card from a man who runs one of the biggest consulting firms in Chicago. He just told me I'm the best linguist in the city."
Silence. "Are you messing with me?"
"He wants me to step in if something goes wrong at the table tonight. He wants me to speak to the delegation directly."
"Then do it!"
"Trish, I'm wearing a uniform with a ketchup stain on the sleeve. I make $11.50 an hour. I don't belong in that conversation."
"Mo." Trisha's voice changed: sharper now, awake. "You've been belonging in that conversation since you were nine years old, sitting in that lobby. The only difference is tonight somebody finally noticed."
Monique closed her eyes, let the cold air fill her lungs. "What if I mess up?"
"What if you don't?"
She hung up, stood there for a moment. Then she looked at her phone's lock screen: a photo of Nadia sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, holding a picture book with Japanese characters on the cover. Her daughter's face was scrunched up in concentration, little finger tracing the lines of a word she was just learning to read.
Monique stared at that photo for a long time.
She thought about Dorothy riding two buses to clean offices so her daughter could sit in a lobby and listen. She thought about the spiral notebooks, the library books, the woman from Osaka at the diner who taught her how to count to ten, then to a hundred, then to a thousand—who'd never once asked why a Black girl from Englewood wanted to learn Japanese, who just taught her because she asked.
She thought about the interviewer in the gray blazer: "We need people with actual credentials."
She thought about Whitfield: "That's all you're good for."
She thought about Nadia reading Japanese on a Tuesday night in a one-bedroom apartment on the South Side: five years old, already further than anyone ever expected her mother to go.
Monique put her phone in her pocket, straightened her uniform, and wiped the ketchup stain with her thumb. It didn't come off, but she tried.