The Rooms I Booked at the Super 8

Nine Rooms

I got my laptop down off the shelf and I looked up the Super 8 out by the interstate, the clean one with the blue sign you can see all lit up from the overpass, the one where my cousin Jenna stayed during the county fair and swore the breakfast was better than it had any right to be.

Nine rooms. That number covered the four couples and Grandma Marge in her own quiet room and left the cousins’ kids doubled and tripled up the way kids like it anyway, all piled in together like a litter. I looked at the nightly rate. Seventy two dollars a night. When I called the front desk, a kind man named Phil heard “block of nine” and “four nights” and gave me a little off the top and threw in two connecting rooms for the little ones at no charge.

I put all of it on Cory’s card. The card with his name embossed on the front, the very card he had used, I was willing to bet, to feel like a big man promising his family a Christmas. It came to a shade over two thousand six hundred dollars with the tax, and I did not flinch when the total came up on the screen.

I did not flinch because every dollar of it bought me back my spine and my ankles and my quiet house, and there is no price for that a woman seven months pregnant will not gladly pay. Two thousand six hundred dollars against five days on my feet in December. I would have paid it twice.

I did not tell Cory. He had made a plan for both of us without saying a word to me. I made one right back the same exact way. That felt even, and even was all I was after. I was not trying to win. I was trying to get my feet up without having to ask.

I printed the confirmation and folded it into my cardigan pocket, next to a peppermint, and I slept better that night than I had since the Tuesday he sent the text. The baby slept too. We both knew it was handled now, really handled, not Cory’s kind of handled.

I did fret over Marge a little, lying there. An old woman that age, moved to a motel, might take it as a slight, might feel put out of the family home. I told myself I would walk her up to her room personally and make sure Phil set her near the breakfast and the elevator. It turned out I did not need to worry about Marge at all. Marge, as it happened, understood the gift faster than anybody.