The Room I Would Not Rent

He was a man with a lot of rules, and that was the only one he never explained.

When the first hard freeze came each winter, I stopped sleeping.

I would lie there hearing the wind and see a gray Escort with a taillight out, and I would get up and stand at the office window in my robe at two in the morning, looking at the road.

I did not know it, but I was waiting for the bell.

I also decided to make it up, and here is where I have to tell you something that does not make me look good. I started giving rooms away.

A stranded old man, a woman with two kids whose husband had taken the money, a college girl with a dead battery: I put them up for nothing and wrote it in the back of the ledger with little tally marks.

In twenty years I gave away eleven rooms, and I felt each one go into some account I was paying down.

It was Merle’s sister Winola who finally said it, five years ago, at Merle’s funeral, over a pan of funeral potatoes. She had a way of saying hard things as if they were recipes.

“You know every one of those was a nice-looking person, Delcie,” she said.

“I’ve been counting. Old man with the Rotary pin. Pretty girl with the violin case. That young mother in the good coat. You only give it to the ones you’d have given it to anyway.”

I told her that was not true. Then I went in the bathroom and shut the door and sat on the edge of the tub, because it was.

Eleven rooms, and not one had gone to a man with a beard and a split hand and a look on him. I had been calling it penance.

It was only me buying my way back into feeling like a good woman, using the same eyes that had done the damage.

After Merle died I took over his rule, since I could not think what else to do with my hands. Every dusk I check the bulb over the office door.

The wind crews say mine is the only place on the old road you can find from five miles off on a clear night, one small yellow light over a door, and I let them think that is the whole reason.

On the thirteenth of this January, at ten forty at night, it was eleven below, with a wind.

I know the hour because I looked at the clock when the bell rang. I was at the sink with my hands in the dishwater, a stew on the back burner.

I have never since that night heard that bell without a small drop in my stomach, like a stair that is not there.

I dried my hands and came through the kitchen door, and my heart was going before I turned my head.

There were two people at the window.

One was a young woman, tall, in a green parka, a long dark braid over one shoulder and a nursing school lanyard tucked in her collar.

In front of her stood a man of about forty-four, very still, hands at his sides.

He was big through the shoulders, with a gray beard cut close and a canvas coat clean as a new dollar, and a patch over the pocket that said Kloster Electric.