Read Online Fitting Ends by Dan Chaon - Free Book Online Page B

Motor Lodge, was not the most profitable business around. The town was in a valley, and couldn’t be seen by cars passing on the interstate. All they could see were the mesas and treeless hills, the empty pastureland that surrounded us, and despite the cheerful signs that promised food, gas, and lodging, most drivers just kept on going. Still, there were always a few forced to straggle in come nightfall, enough to keep us in business.
    I liked to watch them in the mornings as they loaded up their vehicles and went on their various ways. This time of year, there weren’t too many vacationers. They were mostly, I imagined, off on more desperate pursuits: nomadic men and women; fugitives; lovers; addled old folks; young families on their way to new jobs; working men fleeing their dying cities; or parts of families, single mothers and fathers, escaping some domestic situation. There was something heroic about these people, I thought. I would walk down the row, glancing at the license plates, peeking in the windows of the cars. You could tell a lot about people from what they left in the backseat of their cars: toys, books, empty beer cans, little barking dogs with their toenails painted bright red. Once I saw a semiautomatic, tossed casually on a blanket in the back; another time, a limbless mannequin gazed blankly at me when I peered into a hatchback. For a minute, I thought it was a body. Sometimes, when I was sure no one was looking, I would trace my name or my initials in the dusty film on the back of a car. Sometimes, I would be out there when a guest would come out the door, and I’d talk to them for a bit—ask them if they slept comfortably, inquire casually as to where they were headed. Mostly, people didn’t have much to say. To them, I was just another provincial busy-body, another obstacle in their path.
    In the afternoon, after all the keys had been turned in, and while the maids were cleaning out the rooms, my sister stopped by for lunch. She was working at the courthouse, in the county attorney’s office, and she hadn’t been getting along with her coworkers—she didn’t want to spend her lunch period with them. They were all secretary types, dumb as dirt, she said. Besides, she suspected they had been gossiping about her and Mr. Trencher, her boss.
    She’d brought a bucket of chicken from a local fast-food place, and we ate in the apartment in back of the office, in the old kitchen. The table we’d had when we were kids was still there, though the kitchen itself was cluttered with fresh towels and boxes of toilet paper and complimentary soap. “Don’t you find it a little creepy, eating back here,” Joan said as she spread out the plastic silverware and plates, and opened the Styrofoam containers of mashed potatoes and gravy. “I think of all the hours Mother spent in this kitchen, and now look at it. It would kill her to see.”
    â€œI think it’s sort of comforting, actually,” I said. “Nostalgic.”
    â€œYou would,” she said. She peeled the crisp skin off her chicken and set it on my plate. “Trencher’s been moon-eyed all morning,” she said. “It’s really driving me crazy.”
    â€œTell him to cut it out,” I said. “Give him a karate chop.”
    She grimaced. “Well,” she said. “It’s not like he’s chasing me around the desk or something. That’s the trouble. It’s this very subtle thing—little looks—and this weird tension in the air. So if I tell him to cut it out, he can act like I’m just paranoid. He’ll say I’m reading things into it.”
    I nodded slowly, scoping my mind for good advice. I didn’t know what she expected me to say. I didn’t understand this Mr. Trencher, any more than I understood Rhonda, or Joan herself, whose unfaithful ex-husband used to call late at night, used to drive hundreds of miles to camp out on