Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift (30 page)

Sheila Renfro asks me to keep holding her hand as we walk back to the motel. I do as she requests.

“Have you ever had a girlfriend?” she asks.

“No.”

“Never?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

That’s an unanswerable question. I tell her about my one disastrous venture into online dating, when Joy Annette wigged out (I love the slang phrase “wigged out”) on me after I told her we couldn’t have sex on our first date. She ended up writing me a series of increasingly bizarre e-mails, until I unplugged my account. Since then, I’ve been fearful of trying to date someone again.

“Have you ever had sex?” Sheila Renfro asks. I’m taken aback by this.

“No.”

“Really?”

“How could I have sex if I didn’t have a girlfriend?”

Sheila Renfro laughs. “There are people in the world who don’t consider a boyfriend or a girlfriend a necessity for sex, Edward.”

This perplexes me, until I remember Kyle and
Jersey Shore
. Those guidos would have sex at the drop of their pants.

I just made a joke where I take a common phrase—“the drop of a hat”—and turn it into something fresh and new by referencing the droopy trousers of the guidos on
Jersey Shore
.

I’m pretty funny sometimes.

We have a lunch of spaghetti—my favorite—in Sheila Renfro’s cottage.

After her interrogation of me earlier, I feel bold enough to ask my own questions.

“Have you ever had a boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“You have?”

“Why are you surprised?”

“I’m not, I guess. Did he live around here?”

Sheila Renfro goes to the refrigerator to pour some more cold water into her glass.

“Yes. Still does. His name is Bradley Sutherland. He owns one of the bars in town.”

“Did you have sex with him?”

“Yes.”

I don’t make my earlier mistake of suggesting surprise. I just pick a saucer off the table and smash it. It shatters. Sheila Renfro, at the refrigerator and with her back to me, turns around.

“What happened?”

“I accidentally dropped it.” This is a lie.

“Well, don’t hurt yourself.” She comes to the table with the trash can and sweeps the shattered pieces of the saucer into it.

“Why isn’t he your boyfriend anymore?” I ask.

“I told you, my daddy said it would take a special person to see how special I am.”

“I remember that.”

“Bradley Sutherland is not special enough.”

Before Sheila Renfro leaves for the grocery store to stock up on supplies, she shows me how the guest register and the credit card machine work. She says she’ll be gone for about an hour and doesn’t want to close the motel. She asks me to run things, if there’s anything to run.

I am happy to do this. And sure enough, four minutes after she leaves, a man and a woman who look to be in their twenties come through the door.

“Any vacancies?” the man asks.

“Sixteen of them,” I say. “Wait. Fifteen.”

“We just need one.”

I consult the list of questions Sheila Renfro wrote down for me.

“How many nights?” I ask.

“We’re not sure yet.”

“Business or pleasure?”

The man looks at the woman—I almost said wife, but that would be an imprudent (I love the word “imprudent”) assumption on my part—and shrugs his shoulders.

“Business, I guess,” she says.

“One king bed or two queens?”

“Two is fine,” he says, and this intrigues me.

“We’ll put you in room number sixteen, upstairs.”

“Do you have anything on the ground floor?”

I consult the motel layout. I’m in room number four, which has two beds. Room number eight does, too, but that room is under repair. Everything else is one bed.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“OK, one bed is fine.”

I consult the layout again. “We’ll put you in room number six.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll just need you to fill this out”—I push a registration card across the desk to him—“and I’ll need your credit card.”

“I’ll pay in cash.”

I consult Sheila Renfro’s instructions again.

“I need to know how many days you’re staying. And there will be a three-hundred-dollar deposit for damage, which will be refunded after—”

“We’re not going to damage your room, man.”

“I’m just telling you the rules.”

“Oh, yes, the rules. We must obey the rules.”

I agree with what this man is saying, but I don’t think he does. He’s saying it in a mocking manner.

“OK, buddy, let’s call it three days, and I’ll add more if I need them. What’s that plus the deposit come to?”

I start punching numbers into the calculator, using the base room rental fee and the state sales tax and local lodging tax.

“It comes to $491.21, sir.”

The man reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a thick roll of bills. He peels them off one by one and puts them in my hand.

“One hundred…two hundred…three hundred…” He says this and I hear the voice of U2’s lead singer Bono in my head. “Four hundred…five hundred.”

“Let me get your change.”

“Keep it,” he says. He swipes the key off the desk, and he and the woman turn and walk down the hall. I don’t even get a chance to tell him about our continental breakfast.

Still, that was fun. It made me feel responsible again. Also, I made Sheila Renfro $8.79 extra. Cha-ching! That’s how the saying goes, right? Cha-ching? I’m feeling a little whimsical (I love the word “whimsical”) today.

When Sheila Renfro comes home, she’s not as happy about the extra $8.79 as I assumed she would be. Once again, the danger of assumptions is made clear to me.

“Let me see the registration card,” she says. I hand it to her.

“Steve and Sandy Smith,” she says. “I’ll bet.” She carries the card outside and then returns perhaps fifteen seconds later.

“The license number matches. Probably figured we’d check that.”

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“I don’t have a good feeling,” Sheila Renfro says. “I don’t like cash payers.”

Sheila Renfro clearly is more willing to trust gut feelings than I am. I prefer to let the facts of a situation bear out.

“Keep manning the front desk, Edward. I’ll be back.”

Sheila Renfro’s motel is jumping today. Again while she’s gone, another lodger shows up. This time, it’s just a single man, and he says he needs one night.

“Gotta be in Denver in the morning,” he says.

I put him in room number seven, across the hall from our other guests. He pays with a credit card. He writes down his name as “Ed Piewicz,” which matches the card. I tell him about breakfast,
and he says he knows. I can’t imagine that Sheila Renfro will have a problem with him. She should be thrilled. She needs the money.

Sheila Renfro returns and I fill her in on the new guest. She knows him.

“Oh, sure, Ed,” she says. “He drives a run between Salina and Denver. Must have had a delivery in Oakley. He stays here a few times a year.”

“Where did you go?”

“Sheriff.”

“Why?”

“Told him about our mystery guests.”

“You think Steve and Sandy Smith are criminals?”

“No, Edward, I don’t. At least, I hope they’re not. But I’ve had trouble here before and I know what trouble looks like. I can’t be too careful. If they’re trouble, the law will know what to do.”

“What did the sheriff say?”

“He thanked me for the information and told me to run the place like I normally would. So that’s what I’m going to do. Do you want to help me replace the hand soap in the rooms?”

This is a silly question. Of course I do.

Perhaps I should not have been so eager to help Sheila Renfro with her chores around the motel. When we made it upstairs to replace the soap in those rooms, I was so out of breath that I had to sit down on the bed in room number fifteen and wait for my
heartbeat to slow. Dr. Ira Banning warned me about this, that my freshly repaired lung would need some time to work itself back to capacity. The way to do that, he said, is through exercise, which is what I just did.

“You can wait for me downstairs,” Sheila Renfro says.

“I’m OK.”

“After I’m done here, we can take a break. I’ll make some hot tea.”

“That sounds nice.”

“I’m glad you’re here, Edward.”