The Room I Would Not Rent

I told a young man holding a baby that my motel was full, and I said it with eight keys hanging on the board behind my head.

I want that sentence at the front of this story, because for twenty-one years I have been telling it to myself a softer way. I say I was frightened, which is true.

I say it was nineteen below zero, which is also true. What I leave off, when I tell it in the dark at three in the morning, is the plain part.

I lied to him. I looked at a cold man and a cold baby and I said a thing that was not so, so he would not argue with me.

My name is Delcie Varnum.

I am sixty-six years old, and I run the Gaylord Springs Motor Court, twelve little units in a horseshoe around a gravel yard and one old cottonwood, in the part of western Kansas where the highway used to go.

Merle and I took it over in 1988, when his father’s knees quit, and we made a good life out of it, not a rich one.

The office sits at the bottom of the horseshoe.

It has a little sliding window with a brass bell above it, the kind you press with your palm, and you can hear that bell from our kitchen in back.

I have answered it something like forty thousand times, and I thought I knew every way a person could stand at that window.

I did not know the way he stood.

It was the second week of January, twenty-one years ago, and I was forty-five.

A wind had come down out of the north with nothing in front of it for six hundred miles, and by dark the bank sign in town was flashing nineteen below.

The roads had not closed. They were just empty, with the snow moving across the blacktop in long white ropes.

Merle was in the back bedroom with the flu, a hundred and two and a bucket by the bed, under orders not to set foot in the office.

I had the night desk myself.

We had four rooms rented: a county surveyor, two wind-turbine technicians sharing one, a Nebraska trucker who stopped every January, and a quiet couple on their way to a wedding.

The other eight keys hung on the board behind the counter, brass tags in a row, the numbers stamped in.

At ten forty, the bell rang.

I looked up from my crossword. Through the glass I saw a gray Ford Escort in the yard with a trash bag taped over the back window and its exhaust blowing sideways.

A man got out and came toward my window with his shoulders up around his ears.

I should tell you what he looked like, because the whole sin is in what he looked like.

He was maybe twenty-three. He wore a black knit cap pulled to his eyebrows and a beard a month old that nobody had minded.

His canvas coat was gray at the cuffs with grease, and above the open collar, climbing the side of his neck, was a tattoo. A bird, or a flame.

I did not look long enough to learn.

He smelled of cigarettes and cold, and when he got close to the glass I saw that his knuckles were split and his hands were red as raw meat.

He was holding his coat shut with one arm, high against his chest, the way you hold something you are afraid to drop.