by Jung Yun
“Excuse me. Would you mind letting me into my room please? My key’s not working.”
The woman looks up, blowing a strand of hair out of her eyes. It’s the same one Elinor saw the day she checked in, the one muttering about pigs.
“Which room?”
“I’m in three fifteen, at the end of the hall. On the left.”
The woman follows the direction of Elinor’s pointed finger, and then motions toward the elevator. “You go to front desk,” she says in heavily accented English. “They help you.”
“But couldn’t you just—”
“They help with bags at front desk.”
“No. I don’t need any bags. I’m locked out.” She waves her key card at her. “Locked out?” Elinor repeats, the words loud and slow and pronounced with too much pique. She feels like a hypocrite, doing the same thing that strangers sometimes do to her when they assume she doesn’t understand. It’s startling, how quickly she resorted to this. She, of all people, who knows how insulting it is. “I’m sorry,” she says, jabbing the elevator button until the car finally arrives. “Never mind.”
Elinor returns to the lobby, bracing herself for the run-in with Hannah that she was trying to avoid. She caught a glimpse of her behind the desk when she first walked in, and sure enough, Hannah’s round pink face is the one waiting for her when she moves to the front of the line. There are too many things going on right now to spend what little energy she has crafting an apology. She doesn’t know why she would. She was concerned that Hannah might be doing something harmful to her child. She’s not about to apologize for that.
“Could you please reprogram this?” Elinor slides her card across the counter. “I think I demagnetized it. I’m in three fifteen.”
“No, we’ve removed you from three fifteen.”
She pauses, expecting more to follow, but Hannah just stands there, tapping her palm with one of the Thrifty’s complimentary pens.
“Moved me where?”
“Removed, as in checked out. Not moved.”
“But that’s a mistake. I have a reservation through next Wednesday.”
Instead of consulting her computer or running the key card through the machine, Hannah simply tosses it into a small pile on her desk. “You were reserved through Wednesday, but you violated the hotel’s no smoking policy, so we’ve removed you from your room and charged you a two hundred and fifty dollar cleaning fee. Here…” She reaches under the counter and pulls out Elinor’s bag. “Housekeeping packed your things for you. You should find everything inside, but it’s your responsibility to double-check before leaving the property.” Suddenly, she’s looking past Elinor’s left shoulder. “May I help the next customer, please?”
In the corner of her eye, Elinor sees the person behind her take a few steps forward. She places both hands on the counter and widens her stance, blocking his approach as she processes everything she just heard.
“You’re kicking me out for smoking?”
“We’re a nonsmoking property, ma’am. We’re very strict about that. And the housekeeper said she did give you a warning.”
Hannah is stone-faced as she speaks, but Elinor senses that she’s enjoying this, using what little power she has to make things difficult. Does the cleaning woman putting a NO SMOKING sign next to her ashtray really count as a warning? Aren’t there other rules being broken here, bigger ones that matter more? Elinor thinks through how best to respond, aware that asking these questions is unlikely to get her anywhere.
“I didn’t realize I could be kicked out for something like this. Obviously, I won’t do it again. And I’m happy to pay the cleaning fee—”
“We already charged you for that, so it’s not like you have a choice.”
“That’s fine, but this isn’t really about me smoking, is it?”
“Well, what else could it be about?” This time, Hannah’s expression cracks a little, flickering with amusement.
“We had a misunderstanding last night. I’m really—”
“Ma’am, when you checked in, you initialed on your paperwork that you’d reviewed our guest agreement, which includes our rules and policies. The fact that we’re a nonsmoking property—that’s like the very first rule on the list. Would you like me to show you?”
“But no one actually reads all that fine print.”
“Well, next time, you probably should. Because it says we have the right to remove any guest who causes a disturbance to—”
“A disturbance?” Elinor finally snaps, incensed by Hannah’s repeated use of the word “we,” as if anyone else was involved in this decision besides her. “I’ve been living next door to half a dozen guys who keep banging around at all hours of the night, and I’m the disturbance for having a couple of cigarettes?” She pauses, reminding herself not to argue the wrong point. She’s not being kicked out for smoking. She’s being kicked out because of what she said at the Depot. “Look. I’m sorry I misspoke yesterday. I wasn’t trying to offend you or your boyfriend, or imply that you’re bad parents or anything. I just wanted to—”
Hannah’s jaw visibly tightens. Elinor regrets saying “bad parents” out loud, within earshot of her coworkers and customers. The change in Hannah’s demeanor is immediate. She seems agitated and ready for their conversation to end, as if she was looking forward to the sport of it at first, but now the whole thing has gone on for much longer than she expected.
“Ma’am, I’m not going to keep repeating myself,” she says curtly. “This is a nonsmoking property. That’s all this has ever been about.”
“Then I’d like to speak to the manager on duty.”
“I am the manager on duty.”
“The person you report to then.”
“Come on, lady,” groans the man behind her. “Don’t you see all of us waiting back here?”
Elinor glances over her shoulder. The line for the front desk is now curled around a column, extending into the breakfast buffet area. The men standing in it aren’t admiring or ogling her anymore. They’re staring at her with dark expressions, their steel-toed boots tapping impatiently against the tile. Riskier than being wanted by these men is being in their way. Elinor turns back and stares at Hannah’s bright blue eyes, framed by spidery black lashes.
“Do you mind, ma’am?” She blinks innocently. “I’ve got a lot of customers to take care of.” Noticeably, Hannah is speaking louder now, probably to ensure that the men in line know who’s to blame for the wait.
It’s the blinking that sets Elinor off—the playfulness of it, as if this is all just a game and not a decision with real repercussions, at least for one of them.
“You know there’s not another vacant room for at least a hundred miles. So where the hell do you expect me to go?”
Hannah shrugs. “I’m not sure, ma’am. But that’s really not my problem. Maybe—maybe you should just go home.”
32
In the parking lot of the Thrifty, Elinor sits in her car, smoking cigarettes and making calls. At first, she tries the big hotel chains up and down the length of Highway 12, hoping to stumble into a last-minute cancellation. Then she calls the lodge at the River Bend Casino, followed by the cluster of roadside motels with the bright blue swimming pools on the outskirts of town. She searches online for other housing options, finding bare bones websites for random RV parks and old Craigslist postings that people forgot to take down. She calls every number she finds despite knowing what she’ll hear, if she can get through to a person at all. No vacancy. No vacancy. No vacancy. When she has to turn on the engine to charge her dying phone, Elinor reluctantly tries Peg, the travel booker at the Standard. The line rings and rings until it finally goes to voice mail. With the time difference in New York, she realizes that the office is probably closed for the evening, so she hangs up without leaving a message. It’s better this way, she thinks. Given what Peg went through to find her a room at the Thrifty, Elinor doesn’t know how to explain that she lost it, or what kinds of flags it might rais
e, and with whom.
Her only real choice, if she can call it that, is to stay with Maren. But the thought of this makes her uneasy. It’s not because the farm is two hours away from Avery; two-hour drives are nothing in North Dakota. It’s not even because Elinor feels embarrassed about how much she drank last night at the bar. It’s the discomfort of being near Maren’s family given what she knows about Gary. She can’t imagine talking to her nephews or sitting across from them at the dinner table without thinking about the children that she and her sister used to be. She worries that Maren will leave her boys as they were left.
When a tow truck appears, slowly making laps around the lot, she knows her time is almost up. Elinor dials her sister’s number. She barely has a chance to brace herself for the conversation before Maren answers, as if she’s been waiting for her call.
“Well, look who it is. What have you been up to, I wonder?”
“Working,” Elinor says sharply, put off by her greeting, the way it sounded like she was smiling when she said it. Through the window of the Thrifty, she can still see Hannah behind the front desk, chatting pleasantly with customers. Elinor can’t handle another smug woman smiling at her today.
“I was just kidding. You don’t have to bite my head off.”
Elinor thinks this is an exaggeration, but she’s about to ask for a favor, so she decides not to argue the point. “What’s that noise?” she asks, trying to identify the tap-tap-tapping in the background.
“I’m chopping onions for dinner. Your favorite,” Maren says dryly. “Mrs. Sievert’s cheeseburger casserole.”
Mrs. Sievert was their next-door neighbor on the base, a former home economics teacher married to a likable airman from Des Moines. Everyone assumed she was barren, a cruel little rumor that made the rounds because Mrs. Sievert always stopped to coo at babies in strollers but never had any of her own. Twice a month, she’d arrange with Ed to come over and give Elinor and Maren a cooking lesson. She was well meaning enough, and even went to the trouble of sewing personalized aprons for them both, but Elinor was too small for hers. She had to tie a baseball-sized knot in the strap so it would hang properly. The knot sat right at the base of her neck, making it stiffen and ache. She hated wearing it. She also hated learning how to cook a stranger’s family recipes, all of which relied heavily on cans of condensed soup and frozen hash browns and big, rubbery blocks of Velveeta. Although she didn’t make mistakes on purpose, she eventually learned that making enough of them flustered Mrs. Sievert, so she began substituting sugar for salt, measuring out too many cups of flour, and leaving bits of shell in the mixing bowl after cracking the eggs. For her ineptitude, Elinor eventually found herself banished from the kitchen.
“You don’t have any sense for cooking at all, do you?” Mrs. Sievert used to ask good-naturedly. “You and your dad are lucky to have your sister around or else you’d probably starve.”
Compliments like this would make Maren visibly swell with pride. Her rounded posture improved; she stood what appeared to be several inches taller whenever she put on her apron. Mrs. Sievert seemed to enjoy watching Maren’s progress, treating it as evidence of her skills as a teacher. She referred to Maren as her “star pupil,” a fairly meaningless title since she had no other students. Still, it made Maren and their father beam whenever they heard it. Don’t you understand? Elinor wanted to ask. If you keep trying so hard, she’ll keep coming over. But someone in their household had to cook. By now, Maren has probably made Mrs. Sievert’s cheeseburger casserole a hundred times over, and Elinor understands that her sister had to learn because she wouldn’t.
“So what are you up to?” she asks.
“I already told you. I’m making dinner.” There’s a clunk of something in the background, and then a quick burst of water from the sink. “What did you do today?”
Elinor mentally runs through the list of things she wishes she could tell her. I showed up late and hungover for a meeting. I learned that my ex is being sued for sexual harassment. And I was just kicked out of my hotel, so I’m hoping to stay with you.
“I interviewed someone on the reservation.”
“Oh, really? Who?”
“The chairman of the Mahua Nation.”
“Randy Hudson? He’s kind of a character, I’ve heard.”
It’s not clear how she means this. Elinor is about to ask when the tow truck loops toward her again, temporarily blinding her with its headlights even though it’s too early to use them. She wonders if the driver is doing this on purpose, telling her it’s time to go without actually telling her.
“I didn’t really get a good sense of him. He had to cut the meeting short.”
“I’ll bet. You hear that one of his wells blew up?”
“His wells?”
“A well that his company services, I mean. I think that’s the third or fourth accident they’ve had this year. They’ll probably get shut down after this, or fined, at least.”
Elinor remembers how the color drained from Randy’s face as he scrolled through the messages on his phone, the way the dust swirled behind his truck in violent clouds as he sped toward the drill site. She assumed he was worried about injuries on the reservation, or maybe even deaths. She should have known it was about money. Everything in the Bakken seems to be about money.
“How did you find out about the explosion already?”
“Tom heard it on the radio.”
In the background, a young boy’s voice whines, “Mommmmm!” Maren covers her phone, muffling their conversation to the occasional word or phrase: “Stop … Not kidding … Your brother … Right now…” When she returns to the line, there’s a distinct, firm click of a closing door. Elinor imagines her ducking into the pantry, probably surrounded by jars of colorful fruit, preserved the way Mrs. Sievert taught her.
“So, you must have had one hell of a hangover this morning.” Again, it sounds like she’s smiling.
Elinor doesn’t know what the better response is, saying she did or she didn’t. She can’t bring herself to admit to either. “The aspirin and water helped. Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For setting them out for me.”
Maren is silent.
“What’s the matter?”
“You don’t remember who took you home last night?” She says this in the form of a question, but there’s no mistaking the undertone of judgment.
Elinor scans what little remains of her memories. She had a cigarette with the bartender. She saw a fight in the alley. Then she ran into Hannah and her boyfriend. Afterward, everything turns to mud.
“It wasn’t you?”
“No, it wasn’t me,” Maren says, more annoyed than incredulous now. “Dani was the one who took you.”
At first, Elinor thinks she hears the name “Danny” and her heart begins to pound at the thought of being left alone in that state with a man. Although it only takes a few seconds to corral back the memory of who Dani is, it forces her to see Dani bent over the bathroom sink again, the image as disturbing now as it was then. Elinor’s alarm quickly turns into anger. She shouldn’t have gotten so drunk last night. Of course, she knows this. But still—how could her sister pawn her off on a stranger?
“So you just sent me back to my hotel with someone you barely know?”
“It’s not like I met her for the first time last night, and the two of you really seemed to be hitting it off. I saw you exchanging numbers at one point. Besides, she said your hotel was on her way home.”
There’s nothing in Maren’s voice to suggest that she understands what she’s done, or why this is so upsetting, which is the thing that bothers Elinor most.
“You really couldn’t cut your date night short with Gary to make sure I was okay?” The way she says his name—loudly, obnoxiously, emphasizing each stupid syllable—makes it clear what she thinks of him.
“No,” Maren almost shouts. “No, I’m not doing that aga—” She catches herself, as if she realizes that her kids might o
verhear. Then she resumes in a whisper, her volume low but her tone vicious. “I’m sick of always being the one who has to take care of everybody, like I don’t have any other purpose in life. So excuse me for deciding I’m done with all that, especially for you. It’s not like you ever showed me the tiniest bit of gratitude anyways.”
Suddenly they’re at it again. Having the same old argument, cast in the same old roles. The selfish one. The sacrificed one. Back and forth they go. Still resentful about things they did to each other long before they understood the weight of a grudge. Maren’s constant warnings that Elinor would turn into a slut if she wasn’t careful, just like their mother. Elinor’s decision not to return home for their father’s funeral. The two of them, locked in this unwinnable battle over which parent was wrong, which parent was more wronged. The only difference is the mention of gratitude, which Maren has never said out loud before. Elinor can’t believe she’d expect it. The thought that she does is ridiculous. It makes her want to act out, to be cruel.
“What exactly should I be grateful for? Not having a mother and getting stuck with you instead?”
“How is that my fault though? She was the one who ran out.”
“Because she hated it here, and you were as miserable to her as everyone else.”
“No, Elinor. You’ve been telling yourself that same old story all these years, but you never put any of the responsibility on her. She didn’t want to be our mom. She definitely didn’t want to be a wife. Some women just aren’t like that. Don’t you get it? She wanted to come to America and Dad was her ride. But she didn’t love him any more than she loved us; otherwise, it would have been impossible for her to leave.”
By the end of her sentence, Maren is almost yelling again, the sound of her voice creating an echo in the closet or pantry she’s standing in. Elinor has to jerk the phone away from her ear as the tow truck stops in front of her car. The driver lowers his window and stares at her for a moment before making an exaggerated gesture of tapping on his watch. Previously, she found his oblique signals and attempts to communicate with her annoying. But he’s exactly the parachute she needs right now.