Sunburn: A Novel(2)

“I do now.”

“That sunburn—I just assumed you were someone who got a day or two of beach, was headed back to Baltimore or D.C.”

“No. I’m living here.”

He sees a flicker of surprise on the barmaid’s face.

“As of when?”

“Now.”

A joke, he thinks. A person doesn’t just stop for a drink in a strange town and decide to live there. Not this town. It’s not like she’s rolled into Tuscany or Oaxaca, two places he knows well and can imagine a person saying, Yes, here, this is where I’m going to plant myself. She’s in Belleville, Delaware, with its saggy, sad Main Street, a town of not even two thousand people surrounded by cornfields and chicken farms. Does she have connections here? The barmaid sure doesn’t treat her like a local, even a potential one. To the barmaid, blond and busty with a carefully nurtured tan, the redhead is furniture. The barmaid is interested in him, however, trying to figure out whether he’s passing through tonight or hanging around.

Which has not yet been determined.

“Let me know if you want someone to give you the skinny on this place,” the barmaid says to him with a wink. “It would take all of five minutes.”

Barmaids and waitresses who flirt this overtly make him a little nervous. Bringing a man food or beer is intimate enough.

He lets both women alone, drinks his beer, watches the inevitable Orioles games on the inevitable TV with the inevitable shimmy in its reception. The team is good again, or, at least, better. As the redhead’s third drink reaches its last quarter inch, he settles up, leaves without saying good-bye to anyone, goes to his truck in the gravel parking lot, and sits in the dark. Not hiding because there’s no better way to be found than to try to hide.

Ten minutes later, the redhead comes out. She crosses the highway, heads to the old-fashioned motel on the other side, the kind they call a motor court. This one is named Valley View, although there’s no valley and no view. The High-Ho, the Valley View, Main Street—it’s like this whole town was put together from some other town’s leftovers.

He waits fifteen minutes, then enters the little office at the end, and inquires if there’s a room, despite the big red vacancy sign filling the window.

“How many nights?” the clerk, a pencil-necked guy in his thirties, asks.

“Open-ended. I can give you a credit card, if you like.”

“Funny. You’re the second person today to ask for an open-ended stay.”

He doesn’t have to ask who the first one was. He makes a note to himself that the chatty clerk will be chatty about him, too.

“You need my credit card?”

“Cash is fine, too. If you commit to a week, we can give you the room for two hundred fifty. We don’t get many people Monday through Friday. But, you know, there’s no kitchenette, no refrigerator. You gotta eat your meals out or bring stuff in that won’t spoil.” He adds, “If the maid sees stuff sitting out, she’ll tell me. I don’t want ants or roaches.”

“Can I keep a cooler in the room?”

“As long as it doesn’t leak.”

He hands the credit card over.

“I can give you a better rate if you pay cash,” the guy says, clearing his throat. “Two hundred twenty dollars.”

Guy’s got some sort of scam going, must be skimming the cash payments, but what does he care? He can last a long time in a place that’s $220 a week, even if there’s no refrigerator or stove.

He wonders how long she can last.





2


She steps out of room 5 into a bright, hot morning, unseasonably hot, just as the weekend at the beach had been, but at least there the breeze from the ocean took the edge off. People said how lucky it was, getting such a hot day in early June, when the water is too cold for anyone but the kids. School not even out yet, lines at the most popular restaurants were manageable. Lucky, people kept saying, as if to convince themselves. Lucky. So lucky.

Is there anything sadder than losers telling themselves that they’re fortunate? She used to be that way, but not anymore. She calls things the way they are, starting with herself.

When Gregg had started talking about a week at the beach, she had assumed a rental house in Rehoboth or Dewey. Maybe not on the beach proper, but at least on the east side of the highway.

Well, they had been close to the beach. But it was Fenwick, on the bayside, and it was a two-story cinder block with four small apartments that were basically studios. One big rectangular room for them and Jani, a galley kitchen, a bathroom with only a shower, no tub. And ants. Wavy black lines of ants everywhere.

“It’s what was available, last minute,” Gregg said. She amended in her head. It’s what was available, last minute, if you’re cheap. There had to be a better place to stay along the Delaware shore, even last minute.

Jani couldn’t sleep unless the room was in complete blackout. So they kept her up late, to nine or ten, because the alternative was to go to bed together at eight, and lie there in the dark without touching. The first night, about 2 a.m., Gregg made a move. Maybe a year or two ago, it would have been sexy, trying to go at it silently in the dark. But it had been a long time since she found anything about Gregg sexy.

“No, no, no, she’ll wake up.”

“We could give her a little Benadryl.”