Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift (21 page)

By the time we get back to the motel, it’s an onslaught (I love the word “onslaught”) of snow. The flakes are fat and wet, and they cling to the windshield almost as fast as I can use the wipers to get rid of them. The streets of Cheyenne Wells fill quickly with snow, and the Cadillac DTS fishtails as we pull into the parking lot.

Inside, the motel owner is waiting for us.

“I was watching for you,” she says. “I told you a storm was coming.”

I rub the top of my head with my hand, feeling the snow melt in my hair, and Kyle stomps on the entryway rug to get the snow off his shoes.

“It came on with no warning,” I say.

“No,” she says, “I warned you. I told you ‘storm’s coming.’ I couldn’t have been more clear than I was.”

Again, her eyes are playing games with me. Every time she speaks they sparkle, or seem to. I know this is a trick of the light. And her mouth crinkles like she’s holding something back—it flummoxes me that I can’t tell if it’s a grin or disdain for how stupid I was, getting caught in the storm like that.

“I don’t believe I got your name,” I say to her. Kyle tugs at my jacket and asks for the room key because “this is boring.” I hand it to him, and he skips down the hallway.

“I don’t believe I offered it to you,” she says. “My name is Sheila Renfro.”

She extends her right hand to me, and I take it in my right hand. Her fingers feel rough and chalky. She shakes my hand firmly, up and down three times, and then she lets go.

“I think I stayed in this motel when I was a little boy, with my father.”

“It’s the only motel in town. If you stayed in Cheyenne Wells, you stayed here.”

“It was nineteen seventy-eight. I was nine years old.”

“When in nineteen seventy-eight?”

“June.”

“What day in June?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I was either two years old or three years old. I was born June fifteenth, nineteen seventy-five, so it depends on when you were here.”

“When I was here, the motel was run by a big, fat guy who had white hair.”

“That was my father. He wasn’t fat. He was pleasantly plump. He’s in the ground now.”

“He and his wife had a little girl.”

“That was me.”

“That was you?”

She narrows her blue eyes at me. “Yes, silly. I just told you.”

“So we’ve met before?”

“I guess we have.”

“Do you remember me?”

“No, silly. I was just a little girl. Plus, you only have to remember a couple of people. Do you think I can remember everyone who has ever come to this motel? Sure, I could look at the register and see who’s been here, but that doesn’t mean I would remember them.”

I’m really foundering (I love the word “foundering,” but I hate to do it). I keep saying dumb things, and she keeps pointing out that they’re dumb. And yet, I do not want to stop talking to Sheila Renfro. She fascinates me.

I decide to change the subject.

“Why do your hands feel so weird?”

She rubs her palms on the hips of her blue jeans twice. “They’re not weird. I’m working. I’m doing drywall in room number eight.”

“Papered or fiberglass?”

“Papered.”

“Bathroom or living quarters?”

“Living quarters.”

“I’m pretty handy with drywall. Do you need help?”

“Are you offering or do you expect to be paid?”

“I don’t need to get paid. I’m fucking loaded.”

“Don’t curse around me. I would like your help, yes.”

I excuse myself so I can go tell Kyle what I’m doing, and I tell Sheila Renfro that I will meet her in room number eight in a few minutes. She offers me another handshake. I happily accept, and this time, her hand doesn’t feel weird at all.

As I’m walking down the hallway to the room I share with Kyle, room number four, I feel a little light-headed and funny in my stomach, like birds are flying around in it, which is of course impossible.

TECHNICALLY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2011

I cannot stop thinking about Sheila Renfro. At 9:47 p.m., Kyle and I left her cottage, which is attached to this motel, and came back to our room. We watched the 10:00 p.m. news out of Denver, although I must concede that I wasn’t really paying attention because I kept thinking about Sheila Renfro. At 10:32, I shut off the light and listened as Kyle quickly fell asleep. That was three hours and nine minutes ago—it’s 1:41 a.m. now—and I haven’t closed my eyes even once, except when I blink. Kyle is snoring in the bed next to mine. He’s lucky.

I’ve been lying here and thinking about Sheila Renfro. What an interesting lady. And a very no-nonsense woman, too.

The drywall work went well. As I told Sheila Renfro, I’m very handy with drywall. She needed help replacing a seven-foot-by-nine-foot section of the south wall in room number eight. By the time I got involved, she already had the old wall torn out, so I didn’t get to see the original damage. Sheila Renfro said it was pretty bad, that the room had been “lived in hard” over the years. The final indignation occurred a week ago, when a young man
and his girlfriend were staying in the room and got into a serious fight.

“I had a funny feeling about them when they checked in, but it was late and it was cold, so I ignored that feeling. An hour later, it’s an awful racket in there. Yelling and hitting and the sound of things crashing. I called the cops. It was too late. I had a funny feeling about them when they checked in. I shouldn’t have let them have the room.”

Sheila Renfro was clearly holding onto regret about what happened, so I tried to be helpful as I nailed a section of drywall into place.

“Yes,” I said, “but feelings are hard to quantify. What if they had been a nice couple and you had denied them a room based on a feeling? That wouldn’t have been fair.”

“They weren’t a nice couple. They destroyed my room.”

“I know. I’m just saying what if. You can’t trust a feeling.”

“I trust
my
feelings. I know what’s what.”

Sheila Renfro seemed to be getting annoyed with me, so I stopped talking about it. This is something I learned from Dr. Buckley, that it’s not important to win every argument. The first time she told me that, I thought she was kidding, but she was serious. It took me a long time to see the wisdom in her contention, but as usual, she turned out to be correct. Her general principle is to fight hard for the things worth fighting for, like your family or your inalienable (I love the word “inalienable”) rights. With a difference of opinion, why do damage to your relationship with someone by continuing to argue when there’s no possibility of a resolution? I’m not saying that I always get this right. For example, I got it quite wrong when I was arguing with Kyle about Tim Tebow. But Dr. Buckley’s words are never far from my mind, and in this case, with Sheila Renfro, I stopped the argument before
it did damage. (I still don’t know how anyone can trust feelings above facts, though.)

“How old is your son?” Sheila Renfro asked me.

I thought it was funny—interesting funny, not ha-ha funny—that she thought Kyle was my son, although I suppose I’m old enough to be his father.

“He’s my nephew,” I said, which was a fabrication and one I didn’t feel good about. On the other hand, I could see where being too truthful about this might lead to more questions and suspicion, and I didn’t need that. “We’re on an adventure.”

“In Cheyenne Wells?”

“Well, like I told you, I’ve been here before.”

“Shouldn’t he be in school?”

“He’s home-schooled.” Fabricating is getting easier for me.

“Do you have any children?” I ask her.

“Have you seen any around here?”

“No.”

“Well, there you go. No children for me, at least not yet. I’m still young enough, though.”

“Yes.” It seems right to agree with her, although at thirty-six years old, her biological clock is ticking. That, too, is a figure of speech. There is no clock inside us. That’s absurd.

“You’re too old, though,” she says to me. “Not biologically, but practically.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You have to be at least fifty-five years old, right?”

I am aghast. “I’m forty-two.”

Sheila Renfro smiles at me. A real smile. “Gotcha,” she says.

Sheila Renfro is pretty funny sometimes.

After we got the drywall in place, we had only the painting left. I told Sheila Renfro that I would help her do that tomorrow—technically today, now—and that Kyle and I would drag the old drywall and other detritus out to the garbage. That turned out to be harder than I figured. The snow continued to come down in big, heavy, wet flakes, and drifts had begun to form on the outside wall of the motel. It took us five trips into blowing wind and sideways snow and walking through the drifts, but we got the garbage out. Kyle was a good helper.

When we got back inside and shook the snow off our shoes and jackets, Sheila Renfro asked us to join her for dinner.

Sheila Renfro and I are a lot alike.

She has lived her whole life in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, where she was born. I have lived my whole life in Billings, Montana, where I was born. She likes routines and things she can rely on. I like the same. She’s very smart—in one evening with her, I learned that she knows almost as much about professional football as I do, including offensive formations and defensive alignments. I even tested her by asking what a dime package is.

She said, “Don’t be silly. It’s when there are six defensive backs.”

She was right.

She is even a Dallas Cowboys fan, just like I am. I asked her why she liked Dallas better than Denver, since Denver is much closer to Cheyenne Wells than Dallas is, and she said, “The Cowboys are America’s Team.”

That kind of logic is impressive.

She received good grades in high school, and I did, too. She said she never felt like she fit in with her classmates, and I know exactly what that is like. I never fit in with my classmates at Billings West High School, either. Despite our good grades, neither of us felt prepared for college, so we didn’t go. I asked her if she has regrets about not going to college—we agreed that regrets are not fun.

She said, “Heck no. I got to stay here and work for my daddy.”

That’s where Sheila Renfro’s story turns sad. When she was twenty-two years old, on August 7, 1997, her parents were killed in a car crash just seven miles out of town as they were coming home from Denver. That left Sheila Renfro all alone.

“They’re in the ground now,” she told me. She took me around her living room and she showed me pictures of her parents. I vaguely remembered both of them from my time in Cheyenne Wells, but that was a long time ago and memories are faulty. In the pictures that were taken toward the end of their lives, when they were much older than when I met them, they look content. Contentedness is a hard thing to quantify—impossible, in fact—but the looks on their faces in the pictures tell a lot. The smiles are genuine and loving. I don’t think you can fake something like that.

“Do you miss them?” I asked Sheila Renfro. I knew this was a silly question. Of course she misses them. It was all I could think of to say.

“Yes,” she said, “but I can’t do anything about it. They’re in the ground now.”

Sheila Renfro told me that she promised herself when her parents died that she would stay in Cheyenne Wells and make sure the motel they built together kept running. She said it has been hard sometimes, that her fortunes ebb and flow with oil
activity and agriculture in southeastern Colorado. I knew what she meant. My father’s mood often correlated (I love the word “correlated”) with the price of oil, even long after he left the oil business and went into politics. Most people complain when the price of oil is high, because they know it will cost them more to fill their gas tanks. My father never saw that as a problem. Sheila Renfro doesn’t, either.

“It’s a great motel,” I told her. “You’ve run it well.”

“I’m glad I had the help today,” she said. “I could use it on a full-time basis.”

I told her that maybe things would pick up and she could hire someone. She sort of smiled at that. Then she said it was time to eat.

We had taco soup, which I’d never had before, and Jell-O brand strawberry gelatin. It was a good meal. Kyle liked it, too.