The Rooms I Booked at the Super 8
The Twenty Second of December
They came at dusk on the 22nd, in a caravan, the way his family has always traveled, headlights swinging in off the county road one after another after another, snow coming down soft and slow the way it does when it is not in any hurry to be done.
I had the porch lit up. Christmas lights on the eaves, the warm white kind, the good ones Cory had put up back in November on the one ladder day that was not iced over. Snow sat along the porch rail like somebody had spooned sugar down it. I stood at the open front door in my big gray cardigan, the one that still buttoned over the belly if I did not try for the bottom two, and I had the key cards fanned in my hand like a dealt deck, nine of them, white plastic with the blue Super 8 logo printed across the front.
Cory stood beside me on the mat, happy, not knowing, waving big at his mother’s car as it nosed up to the curb.
They came up the shoveled walk with their suitcases and their foil pans and their grocery sacks, Aunt Deb with two pies balanced one on the other, a cousin lugging a cooler by both handles, the kids already hollering up the steps asking where the pool was, and Marge last of all, slow, on her son Ray’s arm, bundled to the eyes with just her glasses showing.
Linda reached the top step first, arms already open wide. “There she is. Oh, honey, look at you, you are all baby, front to back.”
I hugged her as best a woman can hug around a seven month belly. Then I turned to my husband, and I took his cold hand in mine, and I pressed the whole fan of nine key cards down into his palm, and I closed his fingers over them one by one.
“Merry Christmas, Cory,” I said, loud enough for the porch to hear. “Your family’s got nine rooms waiting at the Super 8 by the interstate. It’s all paid for, four nights. There’s a heated pool and a hot breakfast that runs till ten. You can drive everybody over and get them settled in, and then Christmas dinner’s right here at our place at six.”
The Porch Went Quiet
For a second nobody said one word. The snow ticked down onto the dead leaves still stuck in the gutter. Cory looked at the cards in his own hand like they were a poker hand he had just been dealt in a game nobody told him he had sat down to.
“A motel,” Linda said. Not angry. Just turning it over, trying to find the right end of it.
“A real nice one,” I said easy. “The clean one off the overpass with the blue sign. I called ahead and talked to Phil at the desk. You’ve got two connecting rooms for the little ones, Deb, so you can keep all the cousins together in a row.”
Aunt Deb, God love her forever, was the one who broke it. “Wait. Is there a pool?”
“Heated. Open till ten every night.”
“Grandkids,” Deb hollered over her shoulder down the steps, “you hear that? There’s a pool.” And the kids went off like a whole string of firecrackers down the walk, whooping, and just like that half my porch was on my side without ever knowing there had been sides to pick.