Mokhtar felt for him. James, a retired white man in his sixties, was a decent man, and the encounters were awkward for him, too. If he assumed Mokhtar wanted better things than working the desk and the door, that would be diminishing his current job, which for all he knew was, for Mokhtar, a personal pinnacle. On the other hand, if he assumed this was Mokhtar’s personal pinnacle, that brought with it a more troubling set of assumptions.
