“I can’t,” she told me flatly.
“Yes, you can,” I answered, as patient as I could be. We’d had this same conversation so many times already, with both of us saying the same things and with the conclusion not changing: Willow had to get a job. As much as she didn’t want to and as understandable as her reasons might have been, nothing altered the fact that we needed the money.
Fortunately, we didn’t have to worry about utility bills anymore. That was because we didn’t have utilities, because we didn’t have a house. I had explained it to Jannie, framing it in the most practical way.
“I wasn’t going to be able to stick to that payment plan for our debt to the water company, and we couldn’t have kept paying for the heat, either. It’s for the best,” I’d told her.
“That’s bullshit,” she had answered. “Your mother royally screwed you.”
That was also correct. It had been really hard to find out that Mom had taken out a few loans using our home as collateral. It was the place that my grandparents had paid off and where my sister and I had grown up, and she had risked that without seeming to care or bothering to tell me about it, when most of my salary had been going to her to help with upkeep and bills. I hadn’t known, but my mother also had a huge car payment that she hadn’t been dealing with. A few days after she’d left us, a wrecker had shown up. It was amazing how quickly and efficiently those guys repossessed a vehicle and it solved the mystery of why she’d left it behind when she’d taken off. So far, nothing had cleared up the other mystery of whom she’d taken off with. I could have solved that myself if I’d thought fast and had run to the kitchen window as she’d marched away with the duffel bag. Too bad I’d stood there in frozen, stunned shock for so long.
“Your father left that house to your mom so that she and his daughters could live in comfort,” Jannie had raged, shaking her fist until her beret had slid off onto the floor. But like everything, her statement was both true and false. My mother had received the house after his death but he hadn’t “left” it to her in a will. There hadn’t been one of those or any other provision set up for what would happen when he wasn’t around,because he hadn’t thought about our future or worried about our stability.
I had to do that now. I was powering through the school year because I was determined to finish so that I could get a teaching position next fall, and I was also powering through with a second job that I’d recently managed to get. Jannie had offered to give me more shifts at the bar, but I had seen her finances—at least, what she had on paper but not the numbers she only kept mentally and sometimes mixed up, and not the parts that she had forgotten. There was no way that she could have afforded to pay me anything else, and she really shouldn’t have had me there at all. But she had been a friend of my dad’s, which was also why she had defended him and excused his behavior. She was happy to pin all the problems on my mother.
And yes, the latest issue of utility shutoffs and foreclosure were definitely Mom’s fault. It made sense that she’d stopped paying for the gas and electricity on a house that she wasn’t going to own anymore due to defaulting on her loans, but it hadn’t been very nice to keep all that a secret from its other two inhabitants. But I didn’t have it in me to excuse or blame either of my parents. This was just where we were and we all had to deal with it.
In order to deal, Willow had to find a job, no matter if she didn’t want to. “I applied for you,” I explained as I was leaving. “Please text them back and set up the interview. That’s all you have to do, except if you get it, you’ll also have to go work there. Here, have this energy bar.” I pressed it into her hand and thoughtthat the offer of food, which we wouldn’t be able to purchase without having money, would help to convince her.
But she tossed it onto one of the boxes of stuff from our former house, and I had to leave. There was no more time to repeat my arguments and try to make her listen, so I walked out and closed the door of the motel room. “Lock this,” I yelled through the metal, because they refused to give us more than one key and I’d been leaving it with my sister. I had been encouraging her to use it when she went out to do things—anything. She could have taken the bus (except that it was hard for her to wait at the stop in the cold), she could have ordered a rideshare (as long as she wasn’t going far, which would have been expensive), and she knew how to drive, (but she’d never gotten an actual license, and she wasn’t very good at it). It wasn’t like I was leaving her trapped in a depressing motel room…well, I was, but she had the opportunity to go, if she wanted to. She had the literal key.
After school and then more school, I went to my new job. It was at a different motel, one that was too expensive for my sister and me but not the nicest, either. I was saving up, not so that we could rent another temporary spot like the one we had now, but to have enough for a security deposit for an actual apartment or at least a room we could share. Motels wouldn’t work long-term, and I knew that I had to think long-term even though the future was vast enough to make both my head and heart start to pound. But if I didn’t look ahead, I could get bogged down in everyday details like, “Your license plate renewal is coming up. Can you pay that fee?” There were a lot of concerns of that type, way too many.
The second shift at the reception desk was pretty quiet, since there weren’t a ton of visitors to our area right now. The days were still short and dark, and there was no football. Well, there was no Woodsmen football, but the Junior Woodsmen were still playing. Since the game that Willow and I had attended, I’d been keeping up with them more. They had traveled to Boise to face the Junior Garnets and had come away with a win. They’d also played in Austin where they’d lost, but it had been close and from the grainy, fuzzy clips I’d been able to watch online, it looked like the officiating was bad. In my opinion, anyway.
The roads were thickly covered with fresh snow but I’d had to drive fast anyway in order to arrive at the motel on time, since the owner wasn’t as forgiving as Jannie about my schedule. But once I was there, it was quiet again. There wasn’t much to do for the job but I had other stuff to accomplish, like lesson-planning and writing some journal entries that were due soon for one of my college classes. I also searched listings of rentals and made some inquiries, but soon enough, I started to dream about my new apartment, the one I might rent someday (but definitely not any of the places I had been looking at tonight). Maybe I would even buy it so that it was mine forever and not just until the end of the lease. I didn’t have a lot of ideas for furniture besides knowing that I absolutely wanted some, but I had definite plans for a big hot water heater. The motel where Willow and I had been for the last two weeks had a very poor system and I was tired of cold showers.
I was just tired, actually. The nice administrative assistant, Anita, had been asking what was wrong. “Everything ok?” she’dwondered again today as she’d helped me un-jam the copier. We were down to one working machine in the school, and there had been a line of people behind me.
“Yes. Mostly,” I had answered, and when she’d asked again if there was anything happening in the classroom that I might want to discuss with her, I’d said no. She’d seemed relieved and then told me that she’d just heard about a janitorial problem in the middle school.
“It turns out, they were replacing the paper products but never really cleaning. There are some rumors about bedbugs, too. I thought you could use that,” she’d said.
“Use it?”
“Aren’t you doing an exposé on hidden problems in our schools?” she had prompted me.
“Oh, right. Thank you,” I’d answered. I hadn’t explicitly told her that I needed all the weird information for an exposé. She had made assumptions and it had seemed easier to go along with them rather than explaining that I’d been quizzing her for the benefit of a former Woodsmen/current Junior Woodsmen quarterback who was trying to get custody of a child whom he hardly knew, and that his strategy for that was collecting insider information about our district. At least he was making an effort, which not everyone did for kids. I’d seen that both in the classes where I’d student-taught and in other areas of my life.
I yawned behind my hand, turning my head away from the wall-mounted camera that was focused on me and the reception desk. I did my best to stay awake here and I was perfecting the art ofsleeping while sitting. I hardly ever fell off my stool onto the floor—only twice, or maybe three times if you counted when I caught myself on the desk and went on my knees. So far, the motel owner hadn’t spoken to me about it but I was aware that I shouldn’t do it again. Maybe I needed to perfect the art a little more.
I was doing that when the automatic doors slid open, and I jerked awake so hard that it scared me and I almost fell off the stool again. Then I frowned and rubbed my eyes, not because I had yet another headache but because I didn’t really believe what I was seeing.
“Everett Ford?”
“Most people call me one or the other,” he said, “but rarely both, unless I’m in trouble.”
“Like you’re under arrest?”
His eyes widened. “No, I’ve never been arrested. You can look it up, I really haven’t.”
“Me neither,” I told him. I got off the stool and held on to the desk, because…had I eaten? I had meant to bring the energy bar in my bag but I’d given it to my sister. That could have been why I felt a little woozy, but waking would help me stand up. No, standing would help me wake up…something like that. “Do you need a room? Why?” I asked him. “Is your house being fumigated?” The exterminators had just left the motel when I’d arrived, so I was ready to explain that he needed to choose a different place to stay if he wanted a respite from roaches.
“Again, no.” He shook his head. “I feel like I’ve walked into a weird dream.”
That made two of us. “I don’t understand why you’re here,” I told him, and he explained a little.
“I was at the bar where you work,” he said, and that made me worry.
