The Room I Would Not Rent

He turned and walked out into the yard with his shoulders up, and I reached to the wall behind the register and flipped the switch that lights the red word on our sign.

I have thought about that switch more than I have thought about most of my wedding.

The sign by the road is a tall, tired thing, shaped like an arrow, with Vacancy in green neon across the top and below it a small panel with a single red word that Merle’s father added in 1966.

The word was No. I had not turned it on in years, because I did not like how it looked.

I turned it on that night, and I watched through the office door while the man got into his car and sat a long time with his head on the steering wheel.

I would like to tell you I felt something. I did not. I felt tidy. I felt like a woman who had followed a rule. I locked the office door and turned the deadbolt and checked it twice.

The Escort started on the third try. I watched its one working taillight go out of the yard until the snow took it.

I sat at the kitchen table with my heart going and told myself over and over that he would make it. Somebody would take him in. There were barn lights out there.

At midnight I went to switch off the lamp over the office door, the one we always shut off when the desk closed. My hand would not move.

So I left it on. It was the one light burning in the whole court, over the door of a place with a sign out front that said No.

Merle woke at six, weak but clear, and I told him over coffee, standing at the stove with my back to him. I thought he would yell. I wanted him to.

I said it all fast, and I said, “I told him we were full,” in my own voice so he could hear how it sounded.

He did not yell. He asked me one question, which was how old the baby was.

Then he took the truck keys off the nail, gray in the face and still shaking from the fever, and I said, “Merle, you have the flu,” and he said, “Delcie, I know.”

He drove all day.

He took the Colby road both ways and every county road a car could have turned onto, walking up to doors in the wind, asking whether anyone had seen a gray Escort with a bag taped over the back window.

Cecil called the neighboring counties and the highway patrol. No wrecks, no cold-weather calls, nothing.

Merle came home at dusk, white as flour, and sat at the table in his coat and said, “Nothing.”

That was the thing I had to carry. I think I could have lived with knowing they froze, the way you learn to live beside a closed grave.

I could not live with nothing. A car went into a storm, and a young man went with it, and a baby whose name I never asked.

The next morning Merle took a ladder and a screwdriver out to the sign and took the red word down.

He carried the little panel to the barn and set it on a shelf, and he never said why, and I never asked. We never spoke of that night again.

But for the next sixteen years, every dusk, Merle went out and checked the bulb over the office door, and if it was dim he changed it. The light never went off.