Places to Stay the Night

by Ann Hood

  She turned the car suddenly down the old dirt road where she had heard he used to live. The tires squealed and Millie giggled.

  “Sometimes,” Renata said, “you’ve just got to give people a piece of your mind. Somebody is mean to you, you have to go up to them and say, ‘What’s your problem?’”

  “They’re not mean, Mama,” Millie said. “They just don’t understand.”

  “Who?”

  “The other children. At school.”

  “They did make fun of you, didn’t they?” Renata said. She slowed down as she passed mailboxes so she could read the names on them.

  “Only Boyce Franklin.” Millie’s eyes widened. “Are we going to Boyce Franklin’s house?”

  “No,” Renata said, HARPER, she read. She jerked the car into reverse and slammed on the brakes. “You wait right here.”

  The place was a disaster. Whatever Libby Holliday was doing with herself these days, keeping up her house was not part of it.

  Renata banged on the door, hard.

  Tom Harper himself opened it. He looked past her, to the car, then back to her face. “Car trouble again?” he said.

  “Why did you pretend you didn’t see me today?” she asked him. “At the mall. I was going to say hello and you looked away. Just like in school. I am not a thing, you know. I have feelings.”

  “I—”

  “Out of this dumb town you would be nothing. Do you know that?” She took a breath. “Nothing,” she said again. She turned and walked back to the car.

  “Who lives there?” Millie said. “Boyce?”

  Renata shook her head. As soon as she was out of sight of the Harper house, she pulled over. She imagined Libby in there, laughing at her. Both of them having a good laugh over weird Renata Handy. Renata rested her head on the steering wheel and tried not to cry.

  Tom Harper appeared on Renata’s doorstep the very next morning, while she was getting ready for work.

  “You,” he said, “are not an easy person to find.” She had not yet finished dressing. She had tucked her nightgown into her jeans and she felt ridiculous.

  “I saw you,” he said. “You were buying toys or something.”

  She frowned. “I guess you and Libby had a big laugh over me coming over like that yesterday. But you deserved it.”

  He seemed startled. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Yeah. Well, I came to say I’m sorry. It’s just that after I saw you in that bookstore I felt so stupid—”

  “What?”

  “Give me a car that needs to be fixed and I feel great. Even a foreign car. Put me in a bookstore …” He raised his hands as if he were surrendering.

  Renata tried to figure out if what he was saying was true. He was embarrassed? she thought.

  Tom blushed a little. “So,” he said. “I’m sorry. You misunderstood, I think.”

  She nodded.

  When he turned to leave she called after him. “Hey! How was Spain?”

  “Spain?”

  “You bought a travel book,” she said. “Spain.”

  He laughed. “Oh. That’s right. It was for my daughter.”

  Renata remembered that in high school, Tom Harper had been voted Best Looking and Cutest Smile. She used to think that was stupid but looking at him now, she could see it wasn’t stupid at all.

  Tom did not know why he kept thinking about Renata Handy. She looked stranger than ever. And she was not one of those women who age well. Renata Handy had crow’s-feet and lines like parentheses enclosing her mouth. It looked as if she never combed her hair but just left it all tangled and confused. Still, he kept thinking about her, wondering why she’d moved back, where she’d been all this time.

  In school, it used to be everyone’s favorite pastime to make fun of her. Guys would hunch their shoulders forward and walk like an ape. “Guess who I am?” they’d say. The girls always had strange stories about her. She used to read fortunes in the ladies’ room, they said. She did not shave under her arms. In the showers after gym class, she would walk around all hairy, broad-hipped and thick-thighed. There had been a rumor that she’d slept with dozens of men, all older. There had been a rumor that she’d given blow jobs to an entire motorcycle gang from Vermont who had passed through town. Tom himself used to call her Renata Putana. Italian for whore. He would walk like an ape and say, “Guess who I am?” Libby gave him details about Renata’s strange musky smell, of her body covered with thick dark hair that she refused to shave, and her strange habits like wearing a gold ring on her big toe or painting her breasts paisley.

  Maybe seeing her again, having her confront him as she did, had made him guilty. She still looked strange to him. When she’d stood at her front door, he had smelled a musky animal odor coming from her. Like the smell of something wild and unwashed. On the ride back home, he’d found himself wondering if she still had that famous dense thatch of pubic hair, that thick growth under her arms. But it was a different kind of wondering than it used to be. Now there was something exciting about her. She still seemed slightly scary, but in a good way.

  And here it was November, almost Thanksgiving. The air in Holly this time of year took on something special. Anticipation of good things to come. Already the post office had hired holiday employees to stamp the Holly postmark on letters from all over the country. The red and green garland and the bells made of red and green lights were strung downtown. A sign in front of the drugstore counted down the days until Santa’s arrival in Holly. Tom could not help but be infected with the holiday spirit. With good cheer.

  He kept thinking of Renata Handy coming up to his front door and telling him off like that. Hell, he probably deserved it. He had certainly done his share of laughing at her. She was brave and unusual. That wild smell of hers seemed to be all around him, mingling in the air with the smell of winter, of snow, of anticipation. And, like him, she was alone.

  So on the morning before Thanksgiving, Tom again went to the old house she rented. This time the little girl answered the door. In the steel gray morning light, the kid looked even stranger than she had that day at the garage. She was too small and skinny and she had a haircut that made her look like a punk rock singer, all spotted with peach fuzz. Her skin was a funny color, not unlike that morning’s sky. An iron gray that made him think of war, of battleships.

  “I know you,” she said right off. “You fixed Jack’s car.”

  “I guess so,” he said. “I thought it was your car, though.”

  Millie was wearing a thin T-shirt from the 1986 World Series, so faded that the writing was almost impossible to make out. Underneath, her collarbone jutted against the fabric and her shoulders poked out like doorknobs. The kid was definitely creepy.

  “What do you want?” she asked him. “I have to get to school.”

  “I wanted to see your mother.”

  She didn’t seem surprised. She seemed, in fact, almost bored and as he followed the little girl through the cluttered foyer, past piles of old newspapers and National Geographies, Tom wondered if she was used to ushering men in to see her mother. He thought briefly of the old rumor about the motorcycle gang from Vermont. Satan’s Assistants, they’d been called.

  Renata was making sandwiches, cutting up bananas and laying the slices on top of grainy bread thick with peanut butter. She didn’t look quite so fat in the loose print dress she was wearing. And with her hair pulled back into a girlish ponytail, she seemed younger, almost sweet.

  She looked up, surprised.

  “What happened?” she said. “The check bounce or something?”

  “What check?”

  “For fixing the car.”

  The little girl perched on a stool between them.

  “Millie,” Renata said, still looking at Tom, “you didn’t finish your health shake or your french toast.” Then she added, “I’m trying to fatten her up.”

  Tom glanced down at Millie and nodded.

  “This shake,” Millie told him, “has brewer’s yeast in it.” She wrinkled her face
in disgust.

  A few weeks ago Sally Jessy Raphael had on these children who suffered from a strange disease that made them age prematurely. By the time they were seven or eight, they looked ten times their age. He wondered if Millie had that disease.

  He was aware of a loud silence, of both Millie and Renata staring at him, waiting.

  Tom cleared his throat. “I figured since you just got back to town and everything that maybe you didn’t have any plans yet for Thanksgiving.”

  “We bought Cornish game hens,” Millie told him. “Little birds with their legs all tied up. Want to see?”

  She started to get off the stool.

  “No,” he said, resting his hand on her bony shoulder to stop her. “I thought you might want to come to my house.”

  Renata frowned. “Does Libby want us to come over?”

  He had forgotten to tell her about Libby leaving. He had said everything backward. He had imagined a different scenario—no little girl, just him and Renata sitting on the couch, a whiff of that wild smell of hers, a story about both of them being alone, needing a family. But this scene was completely different. It was the ponytail that threw him. And the smell of maple syrup and peanut butter.

  The paper bag that Renata was putting the sandwiches in was decorated with little yellow ducks. The ducks had bright orange feet and bills.

  He cleared his throat again. “Uh … Libby and I split up,” he said.

  If Renata was surprised she didn’t show it. Instead, she put an apple in the lunch bag and carefully folded over the top.

  “It’s just me and my kids.”

  “How many kids do you have?” she asked him. Her voice was different, softer.

  “Two. A girl and a boy.”

  “Are they little or big?” Millie asked him. Her lips and chin were glossed with maple syrup.

  He picked up a napkin from the counter and wiped her face. “Big,” he said. “Teenagers.”

  Millie let him clean her hands too. “What about our Cornish game hens?” she said, looking at her mother.

  The tops of Millie’s hands were dotted with pale bruises. Tom gently finished wiping them.

  “We could bring pies,” Renata said. When she smiled, the parentheses deepened.

  “Pies would be good,” he said.

  They each had a duty. Dana was making the vegetables. Tom had to stuff and cook the turkey. Troy was in charge of salad and appetizers. But Troy knew that wasn’t enough. A real dinner had a fancy tablecloth, linen napkins, candles. He looked through his mother’s old hope chest, the one his father had given her back when they were in high school. She hardly ever used the stuff inside.

  He sat in the attic on the night before Thanksgiving searching for the things he needed. The hope chest still smelled faintly of a flowery scented sachet that his mother had long ago placed in it. The sachet was filled with pale pink and yellow dried petals, covered in lace that had once been white, and tied with a pink ribbon.

  Outside, the wind rattled the attic windows. There were no storm windows up here, and Troy could feel a draft. It reminded him of a ghost, watching him, ruffling his hair. He knew that somewhere outside, Nadine was huddled, waiting. Thinking of her, made him tug on his shirtsleeve. Lately, he found himself remembering movies like Fatal Attraction or Play Misty for Me, movies where old girlfriends came back for revenge, wielding knives. Sometimes when he stepped outside in the dark he called to Nadine. “I know you’re out there,” he’d shout. “Leave me alone. Go away.” But she never answered.

  He shivered in the cold room, tugged on his sleeves, again, and began to pull things from the chest. There was an unfinished quality to what his mother had put in there, as if her enthusiasm had left her at some point and she’d given up.

  “Hey,” Dana said.

  Troy jumped. “You scared the shit out of me,” he said. “Damn.”

  “What are you doing up here?” she said, kneeling beside him on the dusty floor. She wore jeans torn at the knees and thigh.

  “I need some stuff,” he said. “For tomorrow.”

  “You’re in charge of salad,” she said. “What are you looking for? Some old lettuce or something?” She lifted the old sachet to her nose and sniffed. “Yuck.”

  “Real families have real dinners,” Troy said. “They lay out the silverware in a special order. They use cloth napkins instead of paper towels torn in half. They make things look nice.”

  “Cloth napkins?” Dana said. “Aren’t you fancy?

  Every Saturday night for almost two months now Troy had taken Jenny out. Each time, he rang her doorbell and listened to the soft chiming. It played a tune that he could not identify. He listened to her mother’s high heels moving across the floor toward him. Her mother always smiled when she saw him. She led him down a hallway that smelled like floor wax and furniture polish to the family room, a large room with plaid sofas and dark red leather chairs. He shook her father’s hand, sipped a soda from a tall glass rimmed in dark blue while her mother went off upstairs somewhere to get Jenny. He sat there, talking about baseball with her father and thinking, This is how real people live. The cat always climbed onto his lap and went to sleep, purring loudly. This is a family, Troy would think. This is a home.

  Then, two weeks ago, Jenny invited him to her house for dinner. Until then, their dates had remained the same, chaste and quiet. A movie, ice cream at Friendly’s afterward. They sometimes sat parked in front of her house and kissed for a while before she went inside. Jenny called it necking and somehow that made Troy think she was limiting him to just that—her neck and above. It was when they were sitting there like that, after a lot of kissing, that she asked him to dinner. After making out with her, it always took Troy time to control his breathing again, to stop thinking about what lay underneath her pastel snowflake sweaters and smooth khaki pants. He had to work hard to not think of all those days and nights with Nadine.

  So that when Jenny asked him, he couldn’t even answer. He was concentrating too hard on not thinking about what kind of underwear she wore, or on the hardness inside his own pants, or on Nadine all skinny and tattooed straddling him, tossing her head back, closing her eyes.

  Jenny was saying something about an aunt and uncle visiting from Minnesota and coq au vin and a lot of other things that he could not focus on.

  Her face floated in front of his. “Are you listening to me?” she said. Her lips were a little swollen from so much kissing.

  “Of course,” he said. “Coq au vin.” He pronounced it slowly, carefully. Wrong.

  She giggled. “Coq,” she said. “Like Coke, you know. Oh. Vin. It means chicken with wine. It’s my mother’s specialty. She always makes it for company.”

  He nodded. He wondered if she was a virgin. She’d had a boyfriend back in Minnesota for a couple of years. Could two people just neck for two whole years?

  “My uncle is a pilot for Northwest,” she said, settling back in the seat. “They travel everywhere and bring us exotic presents. And my aunt is from Denmark. She’s gorgeous.”

  Troy nodded again. An old song by Van Morrison was playing on the radio. That image of Nadine flashed through his mind again. Nadine would try absolutely anything. He felt himself growing hard again. Shit, he thought, fidgeting in the seat, trying to rearrange his hard-on.

  “You are so antsy,” Jenny said.

  She moved closer to him again and kissed him. Her lips always tasted like berries, like summer. “I could kiss you forever,” she said.

  But she didn’t. She stopped almost right away. “So you’ll come to dinner next week?”

  “Sure,” he said, and started to kiss her again. He thought he might die from wanting her.

  She spoke inside his mouth. “Dress nice,” she said. “Bring flowers.”

  Necking, he thought. He let his fingers trace her neck, to the collarbone. Once, when he’d first been with Nadine, she had taken his hand in hers and slowly made him trace every part of her body. Even her feet. Light, she’d told
him. And slow. Over Jenny’s sweater he moved his fingers slowly, lightly, down. Past the collarbone, to her right breast. He did not hesitate. He drew careful circles until he felt her nipple harden under the wool. He could hear her breathing now.

  “Troy,” she said.

  He waited for the next word. Stop. Or no. When it didn’t come, he moved to her left breast and did the same motion. He had never felt anything so wonderful as those sweater-covered breasts under his hand. He thought he might explode from the feeling of her hardening nipples.

  Jenny did not move his hand away, but she stopped kissing him and looked at him very intensely. The windows were steamed up. She lifted her finger to the windshield and wrote in the mist. An I, then she drew a heart, and then the letter U.

  Troy could not believe it when Jenny said she’d spend Thanksgiving at his house. Really? he’d kept asking her. Really? But that night, when he got home and looked around at the house, at its fading wallpaper and the stacks of mail and magazines everywhere and the stale smell of beer from the cans that sat in the garbage bag by the door, Troy wanted to take back the invitation. How could Jenny come here? It was too embarrassing.

  And then he thought of their plates with the chipped edges, their odd assortment of glasses and silverware and he felt even worse. Jenny’s house was like a palace, everything ordered and perfect. Troy tried to imagine what his mother would do if she were here, if she came out of her room and organized a special Thanksgiving dinner, like the special meals she’d sometimes made for them. Troy could even remember tea parties with miniature cookies sprinkled with colored toppings and birthday parties when she baked him elaborate cakes, coconut-covered snowmen with licorice smiles or bright yellow Big Birds. Somewhere, he thought, his mother had all the accouterments for family life.

  That was why he’d gone up to the attic and peeked into boxes filled with old winter clothes that no one wore anymore and extra blankets and camping equipment for family weekend trips that never happened. And there, underneath some of the boxes, dusty and almost hidden, was his mother’s hope chest. When Troy opened the lid a fine layer of dust swarmed around him. Inside he found a white tablecloth with matching napkins that had never even been taken out of the package. They were bordered in embroidered tulips, pink and purple and yellow. It was exactly what he needed to show Jenny a real Thanksgiving.