The Room I Would Not Rent

I said, “Dwaine, I want you to take Number 1. It has the good mattress.”

He shook his head. “I’m paying for them, Mrs. Varnum. Two rooms, two nights, seventy-nine dollars a night apiece. That’s why I came.”

“I won’t take your money.”

“You’ll take my money,” said Dwaine, and for the first time he laughed, so the cups rattled. “I’ve been carrying the first of it twenty-one years. Thirty-four dollars, the price of that night. The rest is for the rooms.”

“He has an envelope,” said Tilda, wiping her face on her sleeve. “It’s been in the glove box since I was in a booster seat.”

And I understood then what the hard thing was. I had spent twenty-one years handing out free rooms as penance, and every one had been for me.

If I refused his thirty-four dollars, I would be doing it again, only with a bow on it, making him my charity so I could be his savior.

He wanted to be a guest. He wanted to be a man who paid. So I took it.

I stood at the little sliding window with the bell, and he laid the old envelope on the counter, thirty-four dollars, and then counted out two hundred and eighty-two more, and I counted it all, and wrote the receipt for three hundred sixteen dollars in my own hand.

It was the hardest thing I did all night, and maybe the kindest. I passed the slip through, and he read it and folded it into his wallet.

“Number 1,” I said. “And Tilda gets Number 2. It has the electric blanket.”

I handed him the key, a brass tag with the number stamped in, and I took one off the board for Tilda, and I had a thought I had never had in my life.

These are just rooms. They are not much to give, and they are all I have ever had.

They stayed two nights. I want to tell you about the second morning.

Dwaine came to the office at seven with a ladder and a toolbox and said the old sign’s wiring looked like a fire hazard.

He found the old switch behind the register, the one that had lit the red word, and held it up. “Do you want this back in service?”

So I told him about Merle, and took him out to the barn and showed him the little panel on the shelf behind the baling twine, two red glass letters under a coat of dust like felt.

He held it a long time.

“I’d like to take the circuit out,” Dwaine said.

“So it can never come on. It’s the one free thing I’ll let you take from me, Mrs. Varnum. Call it a trade favor.”

He took the switch off the wall and handed it to me, a small brass thing with a black toggle. It is in the drawer by the register now, with the keys.

Then we cleared Number 12, the one at the end nearest the office, the one with the good furnace, and Joleen Strack, who has cleaned my rooms since 1991, put fresh sheets on it and a wool blanket that had been Merle’s mother’s.

Dwaine wired a lit button on the outside wall of the office, under the yellow light, with a chime in my kitchen and another by my bed.

He would not take a dime. “Don’t argue with an electrician about his own parts, Mrs. Varnum.”