“That’s the county courthouse,” she says. “Let’s go over there.”
Cheyenne Wells seems like a pleasant town, and Sheila Renfro seems like a well-regarded resident. She is greeted by name at the lumberyard and outside a bar. Three cars honk at her, and she waves to all of them.
“You know everybody,” I say.
“I should. I’ve lived here all my life. There’s only a little more than a thousand people here. It’s not hard to know them.”
“There are more than a hundred thousand people in Billings,” I say.
“Too many.”
“I don’t know them all.”
“I should think not.”
“My father might have, though. He was very popular.”
“Really? You made him sound kind of mean.”
“He was sometimes.” I feel defensive about my father, even though Sheila Renfro is only reacting to what I’ve told her. “He was a complicated person. But people loved him.”
“Edward, let’s sit down,” Sheila Renfro says. She guides us to a bench outside the courthouse. “I’d like to talk to you.”
I ease myself onto the wooden bench. It has a sturdy back, which is good, as that allows me to keep from putting too much stress on my ribs.
“Do you like me?” Sheila Renfro asks me.
“Of course I do.”
“Why do you like me?”
This question flummoxes me. Where do I start? “You’re nice, and you’ve been friendly to me.”
“That’s true.”
“You’ve been very helpful since I got hurt.”
“That’s also true. Do you like anything else?”
“You’re pretty.” My cheeks flush with warmth, and I’m embarrassed.
“Thank you. Anything else?”
“You smell good.”
“Thank you again.”
“That’s about it,” I say. That’s not even close to it. I don’t like to lie, but I’m too embarrassed to say anything more.
Sheila Renfro takes my left hand in her right hand. She is wearing gloves. I am not.
“I want to tell you something,” she says.
“OK.”
“Do you remember last night when I said that you and I are more alike than your mother knows?”
“Yes.”
“I want to tell you what I meant.”
“OK.”
“When I was in school, a lot of the other kids didn’t like me. They called me names like ‘tard.’ Do you know what that means?”
“Retard.”
“Yes.”
“You’re not a retard, Sheila Renfro.”
“No, I’m not. And neither are you.”
“No one has ever called me a tard. I got called a spaz a lot.”
“Well,” she says, “you’re not one of those, either. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t have any friends, and that was hard when I was a kid. My daddy used to tell me all the time that I was a special girl, and it would take a special person to see me for who I am.”
I like Sheila Renfro’s daddy, even if he is in the ground. “That’s nice,” I say.
“Yes. But I’ve been waiting a long time, and I haven’t found that person. I don’t like to think that my daddy was wrong about something, but so far, he is.”
“Yes. I understand.” I keep looking down at my hand in Sheila Renfro’s. She notices this.
“Does this bother you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
I have an answer that flummoxes us both. “No.”
I don’t make sense anymore.
“I’m sorry about fighting with your mother,” Sheila Renfro says, and she grips my hand tight. “I know she loves you, like my daddy loved me. I know she’s worried about my intentions. I like you, Edward. I want to learn more about you. I want to see where this goes.”
My mind is scattered. I put my other hand over the top of hers and squeeze, and when she looks at me, I smile and look away.
“Why do you like me?” I ask.
“Because you have good taste in football teams.” She laughs, but when I don’t, she stops.
“You’re kind,” she says. “You give to other people. You were so good with Kyle, and he worships you. I think you can tell a lot about a person from how he treats children. You’re a special man, Edward. That’s why I like you.”
I like her, too, and it makes me feel warm inside to hear her say these things. But I’m flummoxed by the idea of this going somewhere. In a few days, I will have to go back to Billings, where my life is. This isn’t going somewhere. I’m going somewhere.
And I’m not ready to do that yet.
— • —
Sheila Renfro asks me to keep holding her hand as we walk back to the motel. I do as she requests.
“Have you ever had a girlfriend?” she asks.
“No.”
“Never?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
That’s an unanswerable question. I tell her about my one disastrous venture into online dating, when Joy Annette wigged out (I love the slang phrase “wigged out”) on me after I told her we couldn’t have sex on our first date. She ended up writing me a series of increasingly bizarre e-mails, until I unplugged my account. Since then, I’ve been fearful of trying to date someone again.
“Have you ever had sex?” Sheila Renfro asks. I’m taken aback by this.
“No.”
“Really?”
“How could I have sex if I didn’t have a girlfriend?”
Sheila Renfro laughs. “There are people in the world who don’t consider a boyfriend or a girlfriend a necessity for sex, Edward.”
This perplexes me, until I remember Kyle and Jersey Shore. Those guidos would have sex at the drop of their pants.
I just made a joke where I take a common phrase—“the drop of a hat”—and turn it into something fresh and new by referencing the droopy trousers of the guidos on Jersey Shore.
I’m pretty funny sometimes.
— • —
We have a lunch of spaghetti—my favorite—in Sheila Renfro’s cottage.
After her interrogation of me earlier, I feel bold enough to ask my own questions.
“Have you ever had a boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“You have?”
“Why are you surprised?”
“I’m not, I guess. Did he live around here?”
Sheila Renfro goes to the refrigerator to pour some more cold water into her glass.
“Yes. Still does. His name is Bradley Sutherland. He owns one of the bars in town.”
“Did you have sex with him?”
“Yes.”
I don’t make my earlier mistake of suggesting surprise. I just pick a saucer off the table and smash it. It shatters. Sheila Renfro, at the refrigerator and with her back to me, turns around.
“What happened?”
“I accidentally dropped it.” This is a lie.
“Well, don’t hurt yourself.” She comes to the table with the trash can and sweeps the shattered pieces of the saucer into it.
“Why isn’t he your boyfriend anymore?” I ask.
“I told you, my daddy said it would take a special person to see how special I am.”
“I remember that.”
“Bradley Sutherland is not special enough.”
— • —
Before Sheila Renfro leaves for the grocery store to stock up on supplies, she shows me how the guest register and the credit card machine work. She says she’ll be gone for about an hour and doesn’t want to close the motel. She asks me to run things, if there’s anything to run.
I am happy to do this. And sure enough, four minutes after she leaves, a man and a woman who look to be in their twenties come through the door.
“Any vacancies?” the man asks.
“Sixteen of them,” I say. “Wait. Fifteen.”
“We just need one.”
I c
onsult the list of questions Sheila Renfro wrote down for me.
“How many nights?” I ask.
“We’re not sure yet.”
“Business or pleasure?”
The man looks at the woman—I almost said wife, but that would be an imprudent (I love the word “imprudent”) assumption on my part—and shrugs his shoulders.
“Business, I guess,” she says.
“One king bed or two queens?”
“Two is fine,” he says, and this intrigues me.
“We’ll put you in room number sixteen, upstairs.”
“Do you have anything on the ground floor?”
I consult the motel layout. I’m in room number four, which has two beds. Room number eight does, too, but that room is under repair. Everything else is one bed.
“No, I’m sorry, I don’t.”
“OK, one bed is fine.”
I consult the layout again. “We’ll put you in room number six.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll just need you to fill this out”—I push a registration card across the desk to him—“and I’ll need your credit card.”
“I’ll pay in cash.”
I consult Sheila Renfro’s instructions again.
“I need to know how many days you’re staying. And there will be a three-hundred-dollar deposit for damage, which will be refunded after—”
“We’re not going to damage your room, man.”
“I’m just telling you the rules.”
“Oh, yes, the rules. We must obey the rules.”
I agree with what this man is saying, but I don’t think he does. He’s saying it in a mocking manner.
“OK, buddy, let’s call it three days, and I’ll add more if I need them. What’s that plus the deposit come to?”
I start punching numbers into the calculator, using the base room rental fee and the state sales tax and local lodging tax.
“It comes to $491.21, sir.”
The man reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a thick roll of bills. He peels them off one by one and puts them in my hand.
“One hundred…two hundred…three hundred…” He says this and I hear the voice of U2’s lead singer Bono in my head. “Four hundred…five hundred.”
“Let me get your change.”
“Keep it,” he says. He swipes the key off the desk, and he and the woman turn and walk down the hall. I don’t even get a chance to tell him about our continental breakfast.
Still, that was fun. It made me feel responsible again. Also, I made Sheila Renfro $8.79 extra. Cha-ching! That’s how the saying goes, right? Cha-ching? I’m feeling a little whimsical (I love the word “whimsical”) today.
— • —
When Sheila Renfro comes home, she’s not as happy about the extra $8.79 as I assumed she would be. Once again, the danger of assumptions is made clear to me.
“Let me see the registration card,” she says. I hand it to her.
“Steve and Sandy Smith,” she says. “I’ll bet.” She carries the card outside and then returns perhaps fifteen seconds later.
“The license number matches. Probably figured we’d check that.”
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“I don’t have a good feeling,” Sheila Renfro says. “I don’t like cash payers.”
Sheila Renfro clearly is more willing to trust gut feelings than I am. I prefer to let the facts of a situation bear out.
“Keep manning the front desk, Edward. I’ll be back.”
— • —
Sheila Renfro’s motel is jumping today. Again while she’s gone, another lodger shows up. This time, it’s just a single man, and he says he needs one night.
“Gotta be in Denver in the morning,” he says.
I put him in room number seven, across the hall from our other guests. He pays with a credit card. He writes down his name as “Ed Piewicz,” which matches the card. I tell him about breakfast, and he says he knows. I can’t imagine that Sheila Renfro will have a problem with him. She should be thrilled. She needs the money.
— • —
Sheila Renfro returns and I fill her in on the new guest. She knows him.
“Oh, sure, Ed,” she says. “He drives a run between Salina and Denver. Must have had a delivery in Oakley. He stays here a few times a year.”
“Where did you go?”
“Sheriff.”
“Why?”
“Told him about our mystery guests.”
“You think Steve and Sandy Smith are criminals?”
“No, Edward, I don’t. At least, I hope they’re not. But I’ve had trouble here before and I know what trouble looks like. I can’t be too careful. If they’re trouble, the law will know what to do.”
“What did the sheriff say?”
“He thanked me for the information and told me to run the place like I normally would. So that’s what I’m going to do. Do you want to help me replace the hand soap in the rooms?”
This is a silly question. Of course I do.
— • —
Perhaps I should not have been so eager to help Sheila Renfro with her chores around the motel. When we made it upstairs to replace the soap in those rooms, I was so out of breath that I had to sit down on the bed in room number fifteen and wait for my heartbeat to slow. Dr. Ira Banning warned me about this, that my freshly repaired lung would need some time to work itself back to capacity. The way to do that, he said, is through exercise, which is what I just did.
“You can wait for me downstairs,” Sheila Renfro says.
“I’m OK.”
“After I’m done here, we can take a break. I’ll make some hot tea.”
“That sounds nice.”
“I’m glad you’re here, Edward.”
“So am I.”
— • —
Sheila Renfro asks me a question that causes me to spit my tea back into my cup.
“Edward, have you ever kissed a girl?”
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Yes.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“What—”
“Remember, I kissed you right before you went to bed. You were there.”
Sheila Renfro smiles and grips her teacup with both hands.
“That was more me kissing you than you kissing me. Have you ever kissed a girl besides me?”
“No, not with my mouth. Donna Middleton—she’s now Donna Hays—has kissed me on the cheek, but I’ve never kissed her back. This girl in high school let me kiss her, but it was just so she could embarrass me in front of her friends.”
“I hate that girl.”
“She was pretty mean.”
“Tell me about Donna Middleton.”
“Donna Hays.”
“Yes. Tell me about her.”
This is one of my favorite subjects. I tell Sheila Renfro about how Donna didn’t trust me initially because men had been mean to her, but that Kyle and I were friends first, and then Donna and I became friends. I tell her about how we threw snowballs at each other and had pizza, and how bad things kept happening but we hung in there together and remained friends. I tell her about Donna marrying Victor and moving away. I also tell her what happened with Kyle.
“She sounds like a wonderful friend,” Sheila Renfro says, and she is correct about that. “I wish I had a friend like that here.”
“Donna Middleton has been very good to me. I mean, Donna Hays. I always forget to use her married name.”
“I don’t think she liked me.”
I was hurt when I was in the hospital, so I don’t remember all of Sheila Renfro’s interactions with Donna.
“It was a tense situation,” I say, and Sheila Renfro nods.
“Did you ever want to kiss Donna?” she asks.
I consider this for a moment. It’s true that I developed strong feelings for Donna as we were becoming friends, but I don’t think those feelings were romantic. At the time, I was much more interested in Joy Annette, my bl
ind date, and that turned out to be a disaster.
“No,” I say. “She was just my friend.”
“Would you like to kiss me?” Sheila Renfro asks.
I look down at my cup. I don’t like making eye contact with people when I’m uncomfortable, or at all.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“That’s not how you talk confidently to a girl.”
“I’m afraid I won’t be good at it. Also, mouths are gross.”
“I could teach you. And we could brush our teeth first.”
“Can we also floss and use mouthwash?”
Sheila Renfro laughs. “Yes.”
“Because mouths are gross.”
“I know, Edward.”
— • —
Sheila Renfro gives me my own new toothbrush and a tiny tube of Crest brand toothpaste, along with a tiny bottle of Oral-B brand mouthwash and Johnson & Johnson brand dental floss. She says she keeps these small items on hand for lodgers who forget to bring their own supplies.
We stand together at the mirror in Sheila Renfro’s bathroom and we floss, brush, and swig mouthwash. In the reflection in the mirror, it looks like we choreographed it. I have to give Sheila Renfro credit. She is a very competent steward of her dental health. She brushes with at least one hundred strokes, just like I do. Some people rush through things like brushing their teeth, but they shouldn’t. It’s important to take the time to do the most important things the proper way.
— • —
We sit facing each other at an angle on Sheila Renfro’s couch.
“I’m nervous,” I say.
She puts her hands on my thighs and leans in.
“It’s going to be all right. Now, stop leaning away from me, or this won’t work.”
I return to an upright sitting position. Sheila Renfro leans in again. Her breath smells good.
Her eyes are closed when her lips touch mine. My eyes are open, which is how I know hers are closed. She moves her head in small, tight circles, and I try to move mine in the same direction along with her. Her lips feel warm against mine.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy what we’re doing. I do. It’s that I don’t know what to do. I’m trying to do what I’ve seen in movies, but it feels weird.
Sheila Renfro, her mouth now removed from mine but still very close, gives me instructions.
“Put your hands on my hips,” she says.
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