Room Service Nobody Ordered

I travel for work and I have stayed in a lot of hotels, so I do not spook easily. This one was a grand old place downtown, all marble and brass, the kind that has been open for over a hundred years and is proud of it.

At four in the morning there was a knock. Two soft raps, then silence. I looked through the peephole and saw a room-service cart parked outside my door, white cloth, a domed silver cover, a single rose in a bud vase. Nobody was standing with it.

I had not ordered anything. I opened the door and pulled the cart in, thinking someone had the wrong room. Under the dome was a plate of food I did not recognize, old-fashioned, arranged the way you see in photographs from decades ago. It was still warm.

I called the front desk. The clerk was baffled. There was no order on my room, no charge, and — he lowered his voice — the kitchen had closed at eleven and there was no room-service staff in the building at that hour at all. He came up himself to look. When he saw the cart he went pale and said, carefully, that they had "issues" with the fourth floor, and that I should not have accepted anything.

He wheeled the cart away without another word and moved me to a different room, no charge, at four in the morning. In the new room I could not sleep. I kept thinking about how warm that plate had been, and about who, in an empty kitchen, had taken the time to add the rose.