The Room I Would Not Rent

Tilda found a cedar plank in the barn and a can of white paint and lettered a sign one letter at a time, the way a nurse writes on a chart.

She read it back to me with the paint still wet.

Under twenty degrees, Room 12 is open. Ring the bell. Nothing owed.

“You can’t say it that way,” I said. “People will take advantage.”

“Some will,” said Tilda. “Dad had thirty-one dollars and a bad look. I think the question is how many of the other kind you’re willing to turn away so you don’t get robbed once.”

I looked at the sign a good while. Then I said, “Put one more line. ‘Nobody asks your name.’ That’s the part I’d want, if I were out there.”

She added it, and we hung it by the button with two of Merle’s nails, and the three of us stood in the cold looking at it, and my eyes ran in the wind.

They left that afternoon. In the yard Dwaine took my hand in his big rough one and said they would come every January, on the thirteenth, and pay for their rooms, and I said that would be fine.

Tilda hugged me before she got in the truck.

It was brief and awkward and smelled of cold air and cedar paint, and she said into my shoulder, “Count them every night, Mrs. Varnum. For me.”

Then I stood in the road and watched them go until the truck was a dot, and then a thought, and then nothing, which is not how I watched the last one go.

It was a different kind of nothing.

I would like to say that was the end, but I am not a woman who lives in stories. I live in a motel.

Sixteen days later, on the twenty-ninth of January, it was nine below at ten to two in the morning, and the chime went off by my bed.

I sat straight up, and my first thought was the old one: who would be out at this hour?

I went down the hall in my robe, and I could feel my whole self fitting back into the old shape, narrowing, getting careful.

I turned on the office light and looked through the glass.

There was a woman of about thirty-five in a purple scarf, and a boy of maybe nine pressed against her side.

Behind them in the yard was a Buick with its hood up and steam coming off it.

And a man, big, in a camouflage jacket, with a swollen eye and a cut lip, standing a little behind the woman with his hands hanging. He looked exactly like trouble.

My hand went toward the deadbolt, and I will tell you which way.

It went toward locking it.

I stood there with my fingers on the cold brass and heard the old voice start up in my head, high and bright. We’re full. I’m so sorry.

There’s a place in Colby. I felt it come up my throat like something to be sick with.

And then I thought of Tilda lettering that plank with her tongue between her teeth. I thought, nobody asks your name.

I turned the bolt the other way.

I opened the door, and the cold came in, and I said, “Come in. Come in out of that, all of you.”

I did not ask what had happened. I did not ask about his eye. I put the three of them in Number 12 and carried the blanket down myself.