The Rest of the Story(26)

“No?” I asked Trinity, spraying down the mirror in front of me, then starting to wipe it from the center out, as she’d showed me earlier.

“Not really.” She added two folded dish towels to the dish rack, hanging them just so. “It’s more the idea of you.”

I looked over at her. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s not supposed to make you feel anything,” she replied. “It’s just the truth.”

“You called me the spoiled rich cousin,” I pointed out.

“Okay, well, I can see how that might have seemed bitchy.”

Might? I thought. But I stayed quiet, taking my annoyance out on a stubborn streak.

“But look at it from my point of view,” she continued. “Here I am, hugely pregnant and uncomfortable—”

“Not my fault,” I pointed out quietly.

“—and alone, because my fiancé is still deployed even though he was supposed to be back last month,” she continued. “And I’m on my feet all day doing this incredibly physical job, because no one else but my grandmother wants to hire someone almost eight months along at the beginning of summer.”

“Again, not my fault,” I told her. “Also technically not legal.”

“And then,” she went on, spraying some cleaner with jabs of the bottle, “here you come, with your hot dad in a fancy car, just to chill out for a while and take it easy. And we’re told that, specifically. That you are here to have a good time, like that’s our responsibility.”

I turned to look at her, surprised. “You think my dad’s hot?”

She shrugged. “Yeah.”

Ugh. I made a face, then turned back to the mirror. Behind me, she laughed—which also took me by surprise, as I’d hardly even seen her smile—then said, “My point is, I made up my mind about you based on the information I was given. That’s not mean. It’s science.”

“Science?” I repeated.

“What?” she replied, running some water into the sink. “Lake girls can’t be good in school?”

“Just didn’t peg you as a science nerd,” I said.

“I’m not.” She turned off the faucet. “Math is my favorite. And half my double major.”

“What’s the other?”

“Education,” she said, wiping a bit of something off the stove handle. “I want to teach middle school algebra. I mean, once the baby comes and I finish my degree.”

Hearing this, I realized she wasn’t the only one who had made assumptions. I was embarrassed—ashamed, really. “I bet you’ll make a good teacher.”

This seemed to please her. “Yeah?”

“After that cleaning tutorial you gave me earlier? You bet.”

Now, she did smile—briefly—and we both went back to work. It had been like this all day, into the late afternoon. Us working together, talking sometimes, but just as often, letting silences fall.

After our standoff by room seven—as I had a feeling I’d be remembering it—I’d done as she said, going down to the office, where I found Mimi deep in discussion with the window guy. Not surprisingly, it was freezing.

“Saylor?” she said as the wind chimes hanging from the door handle clanked behind me. “You need something?”

I took a breath. “Trinity said I should get the keys to room ten to meet the A/C repair guy?”

Mimi looked at me a moment, then walked over behind the counter, grabbing a set of keys from the board hanging there. “Here,” she said. “Tell him it’s been blowing warm since last weekend.”

I nodded, taking the keys. That was easy, I thought, as I left to help Tom access the A/C. When I returned to Trinity, she was shaking a clean sheet over one of the double beds. As it billowed out and the edges fluttered down, our eyes met across all that whiteness.

“Grab the other side and pull it tight,” she instructed me. When I did, she said, “Tighter.”

Thus began my course in motel room cleaning, which was short, harsh, and brutally to the point, much like Trinity herself. Luckily, she wasn’t the only one who was a good student.

There were two types of room cleaning at Calvander’s, she told me as we made those first beds. Housekeeping, which was for rooms with guests staying on another night, and turnover, for rooms that had been vacated and needed a full clean before being occupied again. Both included what I’d come to think of as the defaults: vacuuming, emptying trash cans, cleaning toilets and wiping down sinks, replacing towels, and so on. For turnover, you then added changing the bed linens, wiping down the kitchen, mirror, and shower, and putting away all dishes and silverware, plus cleaning out whatever was left in the small fridges provided for guests. Which, so far, had been mostly beer, soda, and, in one case, a to-go box with a piece of leftover something, coated with mold.

“Turnover is mandatory,” Trinity said as we loaded fresh towels onto the racks in the bathroom. “New guests, clean room. Housekeeping, however, is a courtesy. But people always want it, as long as they’re not inconvenienced. Like exhibit A over there.”

This referred to a woman staying in room four, who had been sleeping when we knocked, then let ourselves in. She woke up yelling, keeping it up until we beat a quick retreat, Trinity cursing back under her own breath. An hour later, she found us and said the room was ready to be serviced, and not to forget extra towels and to vacuum under the beds. As she departed, she nicked a bunch of our soaps from our cart, something Trinity clearly viewed as an insult.