The Room I Would Not Rent

“Ma’am,” he said. “I’m sorry to bother you this late. Do you have a room?”

I want to explain what was in my head, not because it excuses anything, but because I would like you to see how ordinary the parts were.

Six weeks before, a young couple had rented Number 4 with a toddler in a snowsuit who sat on the sidewalk and never cried. The third morning the car was gone.

The window was broken out, there were burns on the dresser and the carpet, and there was a smell I can still call up, sharp and sweet and wrong.

Cecil Amsden, the county deputy, walked the room with a mask on and told me kindly that there was a pair working three counties who carried a little one around for cover.

Nobody looks hard at a family, Cecil said. I had that sentence in my head like a splinter.

And here at my window was a man with a month of beard and a neck tattoo and split hands and a bundle in his coat, on a night when nobody had business being out.

Merle was sick. I was alone. I put my hand flat on the counter and I was aware of how far away the phone was.

“How much?” I said, which was not what I meant to say.

“Whatever’s cheapest.”

“Thirty-four dollars. Cash, in advance.”

He took a fold of bills from his pocket and laid it on the counter and smoothed it flat with his thumb. A ten. Two fives. Then ones.

He counted under his breath, and I counted along with him, and at the end he was quiet a second.

“Thirty-one,” he said. “I’m three short. I can get you the rest in the morning, ma’am, I swear it. Or I can leave you my watch.”

He turned back his sleeve, and there was no watch, only a pale stripe on his wrist. “I sold it in Limon. Or I can work. I can shovel your walks.”

The bundle in his coat moved then, and made a small, thin sound, like a kitten.

“It’s my daughter,” he said.

“She’s four months. The heater quit on me outside Goodland and I’ve been driving with the window cracked so the glass won’t fog, and I’ve had her inside my coat, and I need to get her warm. That’s all it is. She doesn’t need a bed. She can have the floor.”

Here is what I said.

I said, “I’m sorry. We’re full.”

He looked at me.

Then he looked past me, the way people do, at the board on the wall and its row of brass tags, and then slowly back through the glass to the yard, where there were four cars in a lot built for twelve.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

That is all he said. That is the part I cannot get out. He did not argue, he did not say one ugly word.

He said, “Yes, ma’am,” the way you say it to a teacher who has caught you at something, and he gathered his thirty-one dollars off my counter one bill at a time, and folded them, and put them in his pocket.

“There’s a place in Colby,” I said. I heard my voice say it, high and bright, like a woman giving directions to a church supper. “The Super 8. It’s only forty-one miles.”

“Forty-one miles,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Thank you for your time,” said the young man.