nina

I am good at exactly one thing and it’s folding a fitted sheet.

I worked at the Twin Pines Motel off Route 49 the summer I was twenty-two. Before that a lumberyard. Before that a warehouse. A few other places I can’t remember. The Twin Pines was two stories and shaped like an L around a parking lot, with a pool that had been drained, leaves sitting in the bottom of it. The sign said COLOR TV and FREE WIFI and VACANCY. Mr. Boyd hired me on a Tuesday and said the girls would show me what to do. There were three girls. Two were older and went home at three. The third was Nina. She was maybe thirty. She had a face that had been pretty and was still pretty in a way, once you looked long enough. She smoked Camel Crushes on the walkway between rooms. Her hair was the color of dry hay and she wore it up in a clip that was always slipping. She showed me how to strip a bed and how to fold the toilet paper into a point. She called me kid.

One morning in early July she tore a breakfast sandwich in two and held the bigger half out to me. We were on the walkway outside 112, waiting for the people inside to leave. She nodded at a man loading a cooler into a truck across the lot and said he looked like somebody who had cheated on his wife. I asked how she could tell and she said it was the way he carried his shoulders. That became our thing. We picked people apart. The man in 109 who left his Bible open on the nightstand and a bottle in the trash. The woman who came every other Thursday and signed a different name each time and always asked for a receipt. Nina had them all figured. She’d watch them cross the lot and tell me what they were lying about. We’d be stripping a bed and she’d do somebody’s voice and I’d laugh so hard I had to sit down on the mattress. It was a mean way to pass a day. I have not laughed like that since.

In August some couple trashed 217. They had checked in Friday and checked out Sunday morning. Mr. Boyd had gone to look at the room and came back swearing. He said don’t bother with the deposit, it was on a card he was going to dispute. He said clean it and burn the sheets. Nina and I got the room at the end of the day. The sun was coming through the blinds casting stripes on the wall opposite, going orange. The bed was off its frame and pushed sideways. There were cigarette burns on the dresser in little constellations and the carpet had a wet patch by the bathroom door. There was a bottle of Jim Beam on the nightstand three quarters full, an open bottle of red wine standing upright on the carpet, and a six pack of Modelo in the bathtub with the ice melted around it, the cans floating. Nina shut the door behind us and leaned on it. She looked at the room. She looked at the bottle.

Nina laughed. She poured wine into a motel cup for herself and moved a little with her hips. She sat down on the edge of the bed where the mattress was half off the frame, so the whole thing sagged toward her. She kicked her shoes off. She had a blister on the back of one heel and she rubbed at it. Boyd ever tell you why he calls it Twin Pines, she said. There’s only one pine on the property and it’s half dead.

No.

There used to be two. One came down in a storm before I started. He never changed the sign.

Huh.

That’s the kind of place this is, you know? Half a name.

The couple had left things behind. That happened sometimes when people tore out fast. There was a suitcase open on the floor with clothes spilling out of it and a duffel by the dresser. Nina toed the suitcase and looked in it. She held up a dress, a red one, cheap and shiny. Look at this, she said. Who packs this to come to the Twin Pines. She stood and held it against herself in the mirror and turned. Then she looked at me. Hold still, she said. No, I said, laughing already, get away. I had my hands up. She came at me with it anyway and I caught her wrists and she was laughing too, and the dress was between us, and she got loose and went for my head again. I ducked. She got it over my head while I was bent and I came up with it on, my arms still going through, the shiny stuff catching on my ears, and I was saying no the whole time and not once putting a stop to it. It would not go past my shoulders. It hung there, the skirt of it stopping at my ribs. She stepped back and put a hand over her mouth. Beautiful, she said.

Then she went into the duffel and came out with a man’s shirt, western style, with snaps, and she put it on over her tank, the shoulders coming down past hers, and rolled the cuffs. She found the cowboy hat under the clothes, an actual one, and set it on her own head and tipped it back. She did a voice, low. I sell the best insurance in the tristate, she said, thumbs hooked in her belt loops. I lost it, standing there in the dress. She had to put the cup down. The bourbon was lower now. The wine bottle was half full. We left the clothes on. The light on the wall had gone from orange to blue. We weren’t in love. I need to make that clear. We were just two animals in a cheap room with the AC ticking.

Eventually we got tired of standing. She lay back on the bed in the snap shirt and the hat and reached down for the wine bottle on the floor and drank from it that way, on her back, most of it going right. I lay down next to her, the dress still caught on my shoulders. Not next to her. A foot off. The mattress sagged us both toward the middle anyway and my shoulder came against hers. We looked up at the ceiling. There was a water stain on it shaped like nothing. Where are you from, Tyler, she said, I never asked.

Lot of places.

That’s not an answer.

Started in Missouri. My mom moved us around.

Where’s she now? She turned her head and looked at me.

Don’t know. Arizona last I heard.

Phoenix. She made a little sound like a laugh. The clip in her hair had slipped further down and a piece had come loose by her ear. My aunt lived out there. Said it was the saddest place she ever lived.

Sad how?

I don’t know. I’ve never been. She just said sad.

She passed me the bottle and I took another pull. It was easier the second time. She drank her wine. A slow song was coming out of her phone now, she had put it on at some point and I had not noticed. She hummed a couple bars and then stopped. I have a boy, she said.

Yeah?

He’s six. He lives with my mother in Laurel.

Yeah?

Yeah.

She didn’t say anything for a while. She drank. I drank. The light on the wall had gone full blue. It was almost gone. I could hear a truck on 49 going by. Then another one after it. The Doppler stretched out and away. I left him, she said. When he was four. I left him with my mother and I got in the car and I meant to come back the next day. I didn’t come back for two months.

Why?

She turned on her side toward me and reached over and put her hand under my head, in my hair, the way you’d cup a dog’s skull. She held it like that. It was the first time she had looked at me square since we lay down. Her eyes were a pale brown I had only ever seen in the parking lot light, and they were different inside, closer to green.

That’s the question?

You don’t have to say.

I know I don’t. She drank with her free hand. I sat in a Walmart parking lot in Mobile for three hours one night and I couldn’t make my hands turn the key toward home. That’s the answer I have. It’s not a good one.

I did not know what to say. I thought of three things to say and none of them were any good. Her hand stayed where it was.

He looks like his daddy, she said. That’s the worst part. I look at him and it’s not him I’m seeing. And then I feel like the devil for it and I don’t go down to Laurel for a month. Then I go down and bring him a toy and he won’t look at me. He won’t look at me, Tyler. Six years old. She looked away when she said it. The cowboy hat was still on her head and it should have been funny and it was not. Her fingers moved once in my hair and went still.

He’ll look at you.

You don’t know that.

No. I don’t.

She nodded like that was the right answer. She took her hand back. She drank. The song ended. Another one started, faster. She took the hat off and set it on the nightstand. She pulled the shirt off over her head and dropped it on the floor and looked at me until I worked the dress back off my shoulders. She looked at the clothes all over the floor like she had forgotten they were there.

We better finish the room, she said.

Yeah.

We got dressed in our own things. We put the strangers’ clothes back in their bags, the red dress and the snap shirt and the hat, and zipped them, and set them by the door for Boyd to deal with. We did not talk much. She hummed along to her phone. We made the bed and got it back on its frame and straightened the lamp, and the shade kept going crooked, and I left it. When we were done she picked the phone up and the music cut off mid-song. We stood in the doorway and looked at the made bed and the straightened lamp and the empty tub and the bags by the door. Good as new, she said, and laughed at her own joke. We shut the door and walked out across the parking lot to our cars. The sky was full of stars I had not noticed going in.

She was gone in September. Boyd said she had texted and quit. He said her mother was sick or her boy was sick, he had not got it straight. He asked if I knew anyone who wanted work. I said no. I left the Twin Pines in November and drove the Civic north. A guy I knew said there was work at a factory outside Scranton. The work was there. I took it. It is colder here than I knew cold could be. In the mornings I scrape the inside of the windshield with a credit card before I can drive. My breath goes up white in front of me and the engine takes a long time to warm up. I sit there with my hands on the wheel and wait for the heat to come.

I am going back. I have not told anyone. I have not told myself in so many words. But I am going back.