The Room I Would Not Rent

I made hot chocolate for the boy and found the woman a pair of Merle’s wool socks, and in the morning I woke the wind crew fellow in Number 5, who towed the Buick into the shop, grumbling the whole way.

The man would not look at me until the woman nudged him.

His name was Ellory Pitts, and he told me, very quietly, in the doorway, that he had nothing to pay with. I said, “That’s all right, it says right on the sign.”

He read it, and put his hand over his face.

In the morning I made eggs for the three of them, standing at the stove with the radio going. The boy, whose name was Cal, asked whether this was a hotel.

I told him it was a motor court, and rang the bell for him once with the flat of my hand, and he laughed, which I had not heard a child do in my office in years.

When they left at noon, I did not tell myself a story about it, that they were good people or deserving or any of the other things I used to need.

I do not know what they were.

I know the man had a bad look and the woman had a scared one and the boy was nine and cold, and that was enough.

In March, when the ground let go, I drove to the cemetery at Lund Creek with a pot of red geraniums and found Ardith Kloster’s stone beside Alvar’s, and sat in the grass in front of it.

It was the shortest speech I ever made. I said, “Thank you for taking them in. I’m the one who sent them down your road.”

The light is on over my office door as I write this. The wind is out of the north again, and I have the chime beside the bed and a stew on the back burner.

I think about Dwaine, who is somewhere around Lund Creek on a ladder, and Tilda, who is learning to catch babies.

She called last Sunday after her first night on the labor floor to say a boy had come at four in the morning, and that she had held him, and thought of me.

I told her I would keep a room for the first baby she catches on her own, and that it was on the house.

I do not know if I have forgiven myself. I am practicing. Some nights I am slow.

Some nights the old voice comes up my throat, and I catch it, and I put it down. I have turned the bolt the right way four times since that January.

I am sixty-six years old, and that is the whole of the score.

But I know one thing now that I did not know on the thirteenth, when I stood on my side of that glass.

Whatever I was afraid of that night, it was never really the man.

It was being the only one awake, and the old fear that anybody I let in would see what I was.

And the thing I dreaded most, being found out, turned out to be the thing that let me go.

A man came to my window carrying the worst I had done to anyone, and he set down his money and let me write him a receipt.

There are eight empty rooms tonight and a sign in the yard that says Vacancy and nothing else. The bell is at the window. If you are cold, ring it.