Home Sweet Motel

by Chris Grabenstein

  “I love it, too, Grandpa,” I said, because I knew he needed to hear somebody say it. Plus, I do love the Wonderland, the motel that Walt Wilkie’s Wonder World turned into.

  “On her last Saturday, after we took our train ride together, she told me she was hungry. Wanted pancakes. That made me smile. I thought I was the only one who liked a short stack of strawberry-banana pancakes for dinner. She headed down the boulevard to the IHOP. I never saw her again.”

  Grandpa sniffled a little. I think he might’ve been tearing up.

  “I don’t know why she never came back,” Grandpa said with a sigh. “But I will never, ever forget her face. Like an angel, she was. An angel with a red polka-dot scarf instead of a halo.”

  I nodded.

  We sat and didn’t say anything.

  After a few minutes, I asked him, “You ever think about running the railroad again? Putting the train back on the tracks?”

  “Sometimes. But it would take a lot of work, P.T. A lot of work.” He stood up and started wandering off. “First I’d need to overhaul the engine, repaint the cars and the caboose, find my engineer’s cap….”

  He was in that dreamy zone again, heading back to his workshop behind the swimming pool to tinker with his oversized toy train.

  I bolted to the lobby to unlock the front door.

  I didn’t need to.

  The man in the dark suit was already seated in his purring convertible. Mom was trying to talk to him over the engine noise.

  “We need more than a month, Mr. Pompano,” I heard her say.

  “It’s Pom-PAN-o,” shouted the banker, checking his reflection, once again, in the rearview mirror. “And you and your motel are standing in the way of progress, Ms. Wilkie. This property could be huge. I mean colossal. Hey, if you have to think, why not think big? Enjoy the rest of your day.”

  He sped out of the parking lot.

  Mom didn’t look very happy.

  In fact, if I didn’t know her better, I’d say she looked like she might cry.

  But I’d be wrong.

  My mother, Ms. Wanda Wilkie, never cries.

  That queasy look I saw on her face?

  That was just anger. Mom was mad.

  “How dare he,” she muttered, storming back into the lobby. She was talking to herself, not me. “One month? How can anybody scrape together one hundred thousand dollars in one month?”

  She banged the Coke machine in the sweet spot between the Sprite and Fanta buttons. A frosty bottle of diet cola clunked down into the pickup bin.

  Mom started feeding quarters into the machine’s money slot anyway.

  “No more freebies, P.T.”

  “Okay.”

  As her coins plunked, one by one, into the machine, she said, “Now we only have to come up with ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars.”

  “Why does that man want all that money?”

  “Because we owe it to him. Five years ago, Grandpa took out a one-hundred-thousand-dollar loan with a balloon payment. Of course, he never told me about it.”

  “You have to pay with balloons?”

  “P.T.?”

  Mom gave me the double raised eyebrows. That always means my cute remarks are not currently considered to be all that cute.

  “Okay,” I said, “so what does a balloon payment really mean?”

  “It means that at a certain point in time—let’s say thirty days from today—the entire loan has to be paid back in full.”

  “But what if we can’t pay it back?”

  “The bank takes over the motel.”

  “You mean that guy in the suit will be working behind the front desk?”

  “No, P.T. If we can’t pay off our debt, the bank will sell the Wonderland to somebody else. Probably somebody with ‘huge’ and ‘colossal’ plans, like tearing it down so they can put in condos and a strip mall. But I’m not going to let that happen.”

  Mom stomped into the office, probably to try to come up with a way to save the only home I’ve ever known. I never dreamed somebody would want to tear it down and build something ordinary and boring.

  Come on. This is the Wonderland.

  There’s nothing ordinary or boring about it!

  At least there won’t be as long as my family owns it.

  Now, if this were one of my stories, this is when Grandpa’s glamorous friend in the red polka-dot scarf would dramatically return to the Wonderland.

  Turns out, she really is a movie star, just like Grandpa suspected, and she has come back to Florida to film Alligator Allie Six, the fifth sequel in her blockbuster superhero series. She insists that movie scenes need to be filmed at our motel and that the movie people pay us at least one million dollars.

  “I want a train chase,” she tells her producers. “With tiny trains.”

  So the movie people give us all the money we need to pay off the balloon loan, and Grandpa gets to rebuild his railroad. Only, this time, the Wonderland Express is a levitating bullet train that floats above the rails as it whooshes along at supersonic speeds.

  The action scenes from the new movie are awesome.

  Alligator Allie turns into the masked avenger known as Gator Girl. With her steel-trap, razor-sharp jaws of death, she goes up against the archvillain Banker Boy, who destroys people’s lives by flinging paperwork at them like ninja stars. He also likes to bop people on the head with lead balloons.

  “Beware of paper cuts, Gator Girl!” Banker Boy giggles maniacally, because that’s just the way super villains roll.

  “Thanks for the heads-up, pencil pusher,” replies Gator Girl. “But it looks like you’ve been sitting behind a desk a little too long. You’ve really given me something to sink my teeth into—your ginormous butt!”

  Yeah. That would be awesome.

  Cold, hard fact: not gonna happen.

  No Hollywood superhero is going to swoop in and save the day. No movie people are going to show up with a one-million-dollar check made out to the Wonderland Motel.

  Maybe that’s why I like stories so much more than facts. Facts are for bankers and Mr. Frumpkes. They usually don’t do me, or my family, much good.

  While Mom flipped through her ledgers and clacked computer keys, looking for a way out of the motel’s financial mess, I went into my room to watch TV.

  I passed over that CNBC channel with all the numbers crowding the screen and paused on an old black-and-white movie starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. It was called Babes in Arms. The kids in it save their families from financial ruin by putting on a show in a barn.

  Too bad the Wonderland doesn’t have a barn.

  Cheeseball, our cat, jumped into my lap.

  “Guess what, Cheeseball. Grandpa wants to move your litter box out into the lobby so everybody can smell why we named you after a chunk of stinky cheese.”

  She purred like a motorboat and kneaded my stomach with her paws.

  I think she wanted me to change the channel.

  Cheeseball wasn’t big on movies with major musical numbers and people singing at each other. They were way too loud.

  I thumbed the remote and stopped on a true crime show. It was one of those Unsolved Mysteries stories. Apparently, back in 1973, two brothers, Sidney and Stanley Sneemer, cracked open a swanky Miami hotel’s safe and stole five million dollars’ worth of diamonds and jewelry.

  A few days after the burglary, the cops, following up on an anonymous phone tip, arrested Stanley Sneemer in Miami. Stanley didn’t want to go to jail without his little brother, so he told the police where they could find Sidney. Both brothers were sentenced to long jail terms (they were still behind bars—in separate prisons), but the police never recovered any of the stolen jewels.

  “Although the jewel thieves went to prison, where they remain to this day,” boomed the TV announcer, “the Miami Palm Tree Hotel heist remains…an Unsolved Mystery!”

  The last three words were said in some kind of weird echo chamber. The effect was so loud and
spooky that Cheeseball leapt out of my lap.

  I clicked off the TV.

  “I wish I had a big brother,” I said to Cheeseball, who was hiding under my bed. “The two of us could steal one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry and give it to Mom. Not that Mom likes jewelry…”

  Cheeseball crawled out just far enough to look up at me disapprovingly.

  “Okay. You’re right. Stealing’s wrong. I wouldn’t actually do it. But somebody’s got to do something. We could lose the motel. Do you know what that means? No more amenities. No more maid service, free HBO, or Morty D. Mouse. No more ice cream poolside. No more pool!”

  Cheeseball meowed. I might’ve been scaring her.

  “Relax,” I said. “We’ll be okay. I don’t know how, but Mom’ll figure something out. She always does.”

  I just hoped she had one more miracle left.

  “Who knows?” I said to Cheeseball, who’d hopped back into my lap. “Maybe my dad will actually show up sometime in the next thirty days and save us.”

  Cheeseball started purring again.

  “Maybe he’s some kind of Texas oil baron. This new kid at school, Brendan, told me about all the billionaire oil barons they have in Texas. That’s probably why my father had to leave Florida. One of his oil wells hit a gusher, and he had to go man the pumps before it spewed black gold and Texas tea all over his next-door neighbor’s front lawn. But if you ask me, my dad made a huge mistake not staying here with Mom and me. Sure, he probably eats barbecued ribs and brisket on a daily basis, but face it, Cheeseball: even a Dallas mansion isn’t as awesome as a beachfront motel.”

  Cheeseball rolled over so I could scratch her tummy.

  “Mansions might have swimming pools, but they don’t have gigantic ice machines or ice buckets lined with plastic bags. They definitely don’t have giant fiberglass statues of dinosaurs.”

  Yep, my father had definitely made a bad move when he left the Wonderland.

  I just hoped Mom, Grandpa, and I wouldn’t have to leave our motel home, too.

  The next morning, Saturday, Mom woke me up at seven o’clock with even worse news.

  “I need you to help around the motel, P.T.,” she said while I was still rubbing the sleep gunk out of my eyes. “Since next week is Spring Break, you can work here.”

  “Work? What exactly do you mean when you say the word ‘work’?”

  “Well, for starters, you can pick up your towels and make your own bed.”

  “And what are the housekeepers going to do?”

  “I had to let two of them go.”

  “What? How come?”

  “To save money. And no more free sodas or snacks from the vending machines.”

  Wow. This was way worse than I’d thought it would be.

  “What about ice?” I asked. “Is that still free?”

  “There is no such thing as free ice, P.T. We have to pay for the water and the electricity and the plastic liners for the ice buckets and…”

  Youch.

  If this kept up, we might as well let the bank take the motel and move into a house. Then again, I wasn’t exactly sure how we’d be able to afford a house if Mom didn’t have any money. Unless, of course, we could trade our one motel for four little green houses, like in Monopoly.

  Fact: life doesn’t usually have the same rules as a board game.

  And if we couldn’t pay off the banker, we might lose more than just a turn.

  Mom and I went into our little kitchenette.

  I noticed that she hadn’t brought in our usual two doughnuts from the free breakfast buffet: a chocolate frosted with sprinkles for me, a powdered cinnamon for her.

  Instead, I saw two half grapefruits sitting in bowls. I was pretty sure they’d come from the grapefruit tree out back in the middle of Grandpa’s Putt-Putt golf course.

  For lunch, we’d probably have to eat the insides of the coconuts Grandpa scoops clean to make pirate-head souvenirs for the gift shop. Did you know you can ship a Welcome to Wonderland coconut to anyone anywhere in America just by slapping an address label and some stamps on its hairy husk? You don’t need a box or anything; you just mail the coconut. It’s a fact. You can look it up.

  Of course, not too many people wanted to mail souvenir coconuts from the Wonderland Motel to their friends. If more did, maybe we wouldn’t have owed the bank one hundred thousand dollars.

  “It’s the first week of Spring Break and only half of our rooms are booked,” said Mom.

  I sank my serrated spoon into the edge of the pinkish fruit wedge—and accidentally squirted Mom in the eye.

  She didn’t even flinch.

  She was too focused on motel money matters.

  “We need to keep trimming the budget,” she said, mostly to herself. “Maybe auction off some of your grandfather’s knickknacks to collectors.”

  “Knickknacks?”

  “The rocket ship. The jackalope. Morty D. Mouse. That giant smiling peanut he bought in Georgia.”

  “It’s a Hawaiian Happy-Stinky Fruit now,” I told her.

  “Fine. Maybe somebody in Hawaii will bid on it. I’ll take a picture and post it on eBay this afternoon.”

  “But Grandpa loves all that stuff.”

  “So do I. But we have to do what we have to do.”

  She locked eyes with me.

  I had a feeling I was about to find out what else I had to do that had to be done.

  “I need you to clean the pool today, P.T.”

  “What about the underwater vacuuming robot?”

  “We’re sending it back. They’ll give me a fifty percent refund. So that’s another four hundred ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. The ice-cream company will pick up their swirl-cone dispenser next week. No more free ice cream poolside…”

  I swallowed hard. “What about giving out towels and water bottles and stuff? Is Johnny still doing that?”

  Mom shook her head. “Johnny quit. He heard we were having financial trouble, so he took a job over at the Sea Spray.”

  She reached under the breakfast table and handed me a sweat-stained baseball cap and a walkie-talkie.

  Yep.

  I was officially the Wonderland’s brand-new cabana boy.

  Around noon, my best buds from school—Pinky, Kip, and Porter—dropped by the pool for a dip.

  I noticed that the new girl, Gloria Ortega, was sitting poolside in a lounge chair. She was wearing big bug-eye sunglasses, shorts, and a bright yellow T-shirt. It looked like she was doing homework. She kept running numbers through a calculator and jotting down notes in the same kind of ledger Mom keeps in her office. It was extremely weird. Who sits by the side of a swimming pool and does math problems?

  Fact: swimming pools are not supposed to be study halls.

  Since we didn’t have many other paying guests (maybe six college students, plus two families with toddlers who, judging by their strange smiles, were definitely not obeying the We Don’t Swim in Your Toilet, So Please Don’t Pee in Our Pool sign), there was plenty of room in the sparkling water for my three buds to thrash through a couple of rounds of Marco Polo. Gloria rolled her eyes when the guys splashed water out of the pool onto her calculator.

  She closed up her ledger book and stomped away, saying to one of the college girls, “I’ll show you how to set up that Excel homework tracker for your MBA later, Dawn.”

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t really join in the fun with Pinky, Kip, and Porter, because of my new pool-boy duties. While they played Marco Polo and jousted with pool noodles, I skimmed leaves out of the water with a net on a pole. When I was done doing that, I needed to scrub the sides of the pool.

  Skimming and scrubbing used to be Pool Boy Johnny’s jobs.

  Now, of course, they were mine.

  I also had to tote warm beach towels from the hot dryer in the laundry room to the even hotter (and unventilated) towel hut. Constantly. Why did people need so many towels? Did they use a different one for each toe? Anyway, since we were enjoy
ing a freakishly high end-of-March temperature of eighty-two degrees with 82 percent humidity, by noon I had a freakishly bad case of B.O.

  Another cold, hard fact: when the sun shines in the Sunshine State, Florida turns into a steam bath.

  “Yo,” said the Kipster, seeing the Out of Order sign Mom had hung on the ice-cream dispenser, “what’s wrong with it?”

  “It was swirling ice cream the wrong way,” I told him.

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep. The nozzle is backward. We had counterclockwise spiraling action instead of the standard clockwise movement.”

  “So?”

  “So counterclockwise ice cream never tastes as rich and creamy as the clockwise stuff.”

  Pinky Nelligan was nodding. “I thought something was a little off with that ice cream. I didn’t want to say anything at the time….”

  “So who was that girl with the calculator?” asked Porter. “She was kind of cute. That’s why I splashed water at her.”

  “Her name is Gloria Ortega,” I told him. “Her dad’s new on the sports crew at channel ten, WTSP.”

  “Awesome,” said Kip, who’s a total sports nut.

  “Speaking of sports,” hollered Pinky, “jump in, P.T. We need four players to make this an official chicken fight!”

  I was wearing my bathing suit, so I was definitely tempted. I could peel off my Wonderland polo, kick off my sneakers, and dive into the refreshing blue water. Have I mentioned how hot it was?

  But as much as I would’ve loved to cool off, I couldn’t join in the fun. There was serious pool scum to be scrubbed.