The Room I Would Not Rent

“I know.”

“You could see the lot.”

“I could see the lot,” said Dwaine.

“That’s the part that stayed. Not the no. The no I understood. It was how you said it. High and bright, the way people talk when they’ve decided to be someone else for a minute. I’ve used that voice myself. Everybody has one for the thing they’re ashamed of while they’re doing it.”

“Let me tell you the end of it,” said Dwaine. “You never got it.”

“Merle drove all day,” I said. “Nobody had seen you.”

“No, ma’am, they wouldn’t have. The old highway forked in the whiteout and I took the wrong side of it, north, and never knew. An hour and a half later the car just quit on a county road, twenty below.

“I wrapped my girl in my coat and started walking toward one kitchen light across a field. It took forty minutes. I banged on a farmhouse door, and a woman opened it in her nightgown with a shotgun in her other hand, and I said, ‘Ma’am, please, it’s the baby.'”

“Ardith,” said the young woman, softly. It was the first thing she had said.

“Ardith Kloster,” said Dwaine.

“Seventy-one. Her husband Alvar had been an electrician, she’d been nine years a widow, and the shotgun was his. She took one look at what was in my coat and set it down. She had my girl in front of the oven before I finished asking, and my feet in a dishpan of warm water.”

He looked at his daughter.

“Then she gave us the spare room, and we stayed three weeks. There was no money and no job, and she didn’t seem to care. She put Alvar’s tools in my hands and had her nephew Fenn put me on his crew pulling wire. I was terrible.

“I shocked myself twice. But I learned. By thirty-six I owned the business.

“She died six years ago in October, in that house, with us in the other half. I held her hand.”

“She’s why I’m standing here. That last week she woke up one afternoon and said, plain as anything, ‘Dwaine, did you ever find that motel?’ I’d been looking for fifteen years by then. I said I didn’t know what I’d say. And she said…”

He stopped.

“Go on, Dad,” said the young woman.

“She said, ‘Whoever turned you away was scared, honey. The scared ones are the ones who need forgiving most, because nobody ever gets around to telling them.'” He drew a long breath.

“And then she said, ‘Go tell them. You can do it kindly. You’ve had practice.'”

The wind pulled at the corner of the office. I did not know I was crying until I tasted it.

“So I kept looking six more years,” said Dwaine.

“I never saw a town sign. I didn’t know the motel’s name, only a neon arrow and a red word and one light, and by the time I was looking right, the state had moved the highway four miles south. You’re barely a dot on a map.

“Lund Creek, where I live now, is sixty-one miles from your court, and the new road never goes near it. A man hunting a neon arrow could drive past your whole county and never know it.

“Three years ago my daughter said, ‘Dad, we do it the way you came. By the old roads, at night, in January.'”

“Three Januarys,” said the young woman. She had found her voice, and it was dry and steady.