The Art of Losing Yourself (11 page)

I blinked at her. “Why?”

“Because that’s what Aunt Ingrid would want. And it’s what I want too.”

A worm of hope wiggled its way into my heart. I hated that worm. When you grow up with an alcoholic parent, you learn pretty quickly that hope leads to disappointment. Promises end up in a pile of broken pieces. And change never lasts. Carmen wanted to appease her guilt, and so this was her solution. I didn’t have any confidence it would last longer than a couple weeks. I wiped my hands off on a paper towel, took a long swig of my drink, and set the empty can on the counter with a pronounced click. “No, thanks.”

My answer, for whatever reason, made her expression flicker with confusion. She blinked at me. I blinked at her. A silent, blinking face-off. And then her lips thinned and she got this look I recognized. It was the same one I wore whenever anybody told me I couldn’t do something. “What if I pay you for your time?”

My eyes narrowed. “You’d pay me?”

“You saw the place. I need the help.”

“How much?”

“Eight dollars an hour.”

“That’s barely minimum wage.”

“Fine. Ten.”

I picked up another chicken wing. “What time do I start?”

Carmen smiled, like she’d won the victory. But the victory was mine. She was going to pay me ten bucks an hour to take back my plan A.

C
ARMEN

I stood in the pockmarked lot with a bucket of cleaning supplies in each hand and my sister by my side, trying not to think too hard about the video that threatened to go viral or my last-minute decision not to attend Katy’s baby shower. Natalie said I was being ridiculous. Nobody cared about the video. I told her I wasn’t canceling because of the video; I was canceling because of Gracie and The Treasure Chest.

We were both lying.

Overhead, stratocumulus clouds broke apart blue sky. They hung in large, low rows—their darkened underbellies all bark and no bite. People often saw them and thought rain was on the way, but stratocumulus clouds rarely brought rain, and if they did, it was usually nothing substantial. The ones above us had released a teasing precipitation that came and went in the span of our drive here, leaving the air heavier and more humid than it was before.

The sun made its way into a patch of blue. Gracie brought her hand up to her forehead like a visor. I looked from my sister to the motel, trying to figure out what it meant to her. I’d been convinced it meant something, but if that was the case, why didn’t she care to get it running again? Why did I have to bribe her? At ten dollars an hour, no less.

“I used to love coming here when I was a little girl,” I said, hoping the comment might elicit some sort of response since Gracie came as a little girl too. Granted, one big appeal for me had been coming without my parents. Which meant I didn’t have to deal with a mother who drank too much or a father who pretended she didn’t. For a month every summer, I was free from the heavy yoke of being me—perfect little Carmen, who was so pretty and so polite and so good in school that surely nothing could be wrong at home. Gracie, on the other hand, always came with Mom. I peeked at her from the corner of my eye. “This place holds a lot of great memories.”

She huffed. “Tell that to TripAdvisor.”

I turned around to look at her all the way, a can of furniture polish clanking inside one of my buckets. “TripAdvisor?”

“I looked up some of the reviews on my phone while you were rounding up your arsenal of environment killers. There were a lot of complaints.”

“About what?”

“Unidentifiable marks on bedspreads. Carpets that smelled like cat pee. Horrible customer service. One person said the water from the faucet was the color of tea, and I quote, ‘I’d rather get stung by a large family of jellyfish than stay there again.’ End quote.”

“That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

“I’m not the one who wrote it.”

My sense of guilt grew, overtaking any positive feelings I’d mustered earlier in the morning. Guilt over not being there for Gracie and guilt over not checking in at the motel more often after we moved Aunt Ingrid into Pine Ridge. Like the weeds growing up from the cracks in the parking lot—unwanted, unappealing pests best pulled out by the roots. I wanted to make things right with The Treasure Chest. I wanted to make things right with Gracie. But she sure didn’t make it easy. “I bet the older reviews were good.”

“Who cares about old reviews if the current ones suck?”

“If something was once good, then it has the potential to be good again.” The words were more for me than her.

Gracie, however, looked skeptical.

Taking a deep breath, I started toward the office, hoping Gracie would follow. She did, but not very enthusiastically. I unlocked the door and stepped inside. The same stale, unmoving heat that had greeted me and Deputy Ernst on Thursday greeted Gracie and me now. First thing Monday morning, I would call the utility company and turn everything back on. August in Florida meant we needed air conditioning. And if we were going to do any real deep cleaning, we’d need running water too. Even if it was tea-colored.

I handed her a garbage bag and a pair of gardening gloves. “Let’s start in this room and see how far we get.”

I put on a pair of gloves and started picking up the bigger chunks of glass, scattered bits of smashed rotary phone, and smaller parts of ruined chairs. I threw the glass into a cardboard box and the rest into a bag. The bigger parts
of the chairs, I gathered into a pile outside. Most likely, we’d need to rent a Dumpster. If Gracie was right about the reviews, and the carpet in the rooms really did smell like cat pee, then it would have to go. I swept the remaining dust and debris from the floor into the dustpan, dumped the pile into Gracie’s bag, tied them both up, then put them beside the broken chairs outside beneath the portico.

Sweat had soaked through my T-shirt, and Gracie’s black bangs had plastered themselves to her forehead. We’d left the door open in an attempt to get some air flow, but it still felt like we were working inside a sauna. We took a break outside in the shade. Gracie and I gulped from the bottles of water we’d purchased at a gas station along the way.

“How did you sleep in there for three nights?” I asked, wiping beads of sweat from my forehead with my shirt sleeve.

“Uncomfortably.”

A breeze swept in from the ocean and although it was muggy air, at least it was moving. I picked up a crowbar from one of the buckets. If we were going to keep working, I needed to pry some boards off the windows. I jammed the end of the crowbar beneath one of the plywood boards over an unbroken window to the left of the door.

Gracie leaned against a support beam and watched.

“Ben talked to the principal at Bay Breeze. He said they called to have your transcripts sent. You’re all set to start on Monday.” I gave the crowbar a few yanks and pried the board loose. “Maybe after we’re done here we can grab a bite to eat and get some school supplies.”

Gracie said nothing.

I set the board beside the garbage bags and got to work on another. “We could grab a slice of pizza at Bruno’s. They have an excellent selection.”

Still no response, so we returned inside. Gracie engaged in a halfhearted battle with the dust while I continued on the windows. I left the broken ones alone, but attacked the others with a bottle of Windex and a couple of rags in an attempt to get rid of both the stubborn grime from the glass and my growing frustration with my sister, until my muscles burned in protest.

Gracie batted at cobwebs in the corners of the room with a broom. They gathered on the bristles like a thick net and stuck to her fingers when she tried removing them. “So why don’t you and Ben have any kids?”

The question stopped me mid-Windex spray.

It was a Gracie-fied version of
the
question. The one people usually asked with a little more tact and an expectant smile.
“When are you and Ben going to have kids?”
As if having a child was simply a matter of choice. I finished spraying and gave her the answer I gave everybody else. “We hope to someday.”

If the video didn’t mess everything up.

I glanced at my phone sitting on top of the now-cleaned front desk. Whenever it rang, my stomach cramped and my heart raced so quickly I got lightheaded. The video and its possible repercussions had placed an invisible thundercloud over my head. Thinking about it now made the muscles in my shoulders tighten and the air in the front office stuffier. “I’m, uh, going to start on the hospitality room.”

Gracie went to work on another corner, stirring up a frenzy of dust motes.

I escaped into the adjoining room with cleaning supplies in hand. Up until the early sixties, the room was just another unit. But then Aunt Ingrid did some renovations, one of which involved transforming this particular unit into a gathering place for motel guests, something most motels lacked at the time. Thus, the hospitality room was born—not only a place to serve complimentary coffee and muffins, but a place to highlight the motel’s rich and interesting history. It eventually became The Chest’s most lucrative attraction.

Though empty now, the room had once brimmed with knickknacks. Gerald had handcrafted a large trophy case, only instead of putting trophies inside, Ingrid had lined the shelves with relevant memorabilia, most of them Monopoly related. She had covered two of the walls with framed photographs—black and whites of the motel when it was La Tresor Motel, an eight by ten of Frank Sideris shaking hands with Charles Darrow, and poignant pictures from the end of the Great Depression and World War II. Wall three became the wall of fame, highlighting all the celebrities who had stayed at or visited The Chest since its inception. And then my personal favorite, the fourth wall. A wall Ingrid invited guests to sign, doodle notes, scribble jokes, or scrawl their favorite quotes. She called it the wall of wisdom.

As a girl, I memorized nearly every single word, so that now, as an adult, I could quickly find my favorites.

Dead center:
Phillip Peppergree was here
. I liked the sound of his name so much I named my first and only cat after him.

Further to the left and up a bit:
John 3:16. Life
. For the longest time, I thought that was the person’s name—Life. And what a funny name it was. Until I looked up the verse in Aunt Ingrid’s Bible and realized it wasn’t a name at all, but a statement.

A hand’s width below:
Soul Mates, Helena and George, 1962
. I used to wonder if they were still alive, if they were still in love, if they had children or grandchildren.

Down to the right, so low as to almost be on the ground, was my childhood favorite:
Life is worth living as long as there’s a laugh in it
. That used to be my absolute favorite quote from
Anne of Green Gables
. Whoever wrote it didn’t leave a name, but one thing was obvious. We were kindred spirits. Now, as an adult, my mind recalled a much different line from Anne’s story.

My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes
.

I shook the words away, then pressed my hand over some obscure initials scrawled inside a tiny heart, right near the center next to Mr. Peppergree—
CB + WG
. A memory pulsed beneath my palm.

“We’ve only been on one date,” I’d told Ben. And as amazing as that date had been, this was the wall of wisdom. Whatever a person wrote couldn’t be taken back.

Ben had given me a disapproving look. “Aren’t you a pessimist.”

“I’m just saying, once you put us on the wall of wisdom, it’s there forever.”

Shaking his head, he drew a skinny, slightly lopsided heart—nothing feminine or bubbly about it. Everybody who would see it ever after would know it was a man’s heart.

“I’m serious,” I said. “You could be jinxing everything.”

Ben brought the marker down to his side. “Okay then, how about a compromise?”

“What do you mean?”

Inside the heart, he scrawled the initials CB, and below that, WG, adding a plus sign in between.

I squinted at the letters. “Who’s CB and WG?”

“Us.”

“Those aren’t our initials.”

“Sure they are. Cabana Boy plus Weather Girl.” He took my hand and
pulled me toward him, making heat quiver in the depths of my stomach. He smelled irresistible—a masculine combination of soap and the subtlest hint of cologne. “That way, if you decide to get rid of me, nobody would be any wiser.”

“I would,” I said, a little too breathlessly. I couldn’t fathom getting rid of him. Not in a million years.

He placed his hand on the small of my back. Ben’s touch was electrifying. It did funny, funny things to my heart. And so far, no lips had been involved. Our first date had ended with a lingering hug. The kind that was so wonderful it made me ache, giving new meaning to the song “Hurts So Good.”

“You know how I know we’ll make it?”

“How?”

“Your aunt loves me.” He grinned then—a devilishly delicious, cocky grin.

“You think you’re so—”

Ben didn’t let me finish. So suddenly I couldn’t have anticipated it, he pressed my body against his and kissed me. The kind of kiss that had me gripping tightly to the cotton of his T-shirt, so certain was I that I’d float off the ground if I let go. Our very first kiss. In my favorite room, in front of my favorite wall at The Treasure Chest Motel.

Now, standing in the empty space, my fingers moved to my lips, and the memory slid away, replaced by a haunting thought. Most days, Aunt Ingrid didn’t even remember Ben, let alone love him. So what did that mean for us?