VenCo(23)

“Dammit.” She stuffed both hands into her jacket pockets and found a skinny joint. She must have put it there months ago and forgotten about it. Thank god she hadn’t been searched at the border.

She held it up and gave it a quick kiss. This was exactly what she needed right now. She went to the end of the hallway and opened the heavy glass door to the parking lot.

She breathed deep, appreciating the moment of solitude. Silence in an outdoor space had a presence instead of an absence. She blew out and watched her breath condense in the cool night air. She looked around the half-filled parking lot, picked a spot on a concrete curb lit by the orange glow of a pole light, and sat.

She lit the joint and took a pull. “Oh, gross!”

It was stale and half tobacco. Still, after a moment, it started to do its job. She felt her shoulders relax and settled into a long lean, watching the navy night.

She was actually doing this. Was she actually doing this? True, so far they had only made it, like, three hours into their nine-hour journey to Salem, and, yes, she was still refusing to consider the concrete steps that would take Stella from her lifelong apartment into some other kind of care, but she was definitely at the beginning of doing this. She had an appointment at VenCo tomorrow.

Never had something felt so good and so horrible at the same time. And yet she couldn’t help but think there was something deeply romantic about this. She was finally focused: not like Stella, always off on the next weird tangent, not like Arnya, always rushing after the next man or the next gig. This time, for once, Lucky was going for herself. She was going to take the leap. She was already mid-air.

When she went back to the room, she was lighter from the weed and heavy with snacks. She hadn’t been able to decide on salt or sugar, so she’d grabbed a good cross section of both: chips, pretzels, chocolate, chocolate with peanut butter, chocolate with almonds, gummy bears . . .

“Ready to eat?” she called as she unlocked the door and pushed it open.

The lights were off. The TV was still on, but the beds were empty.

“Grandma?”

She stepped inside and let the door close behind her. No one by the window.

“Stella?”

She dropped the crinkly snacks onto the first bed, the comforter wrinkled from where her grandmother had sat.

She checked the bathroom. The soap and plastic cups had all been unwrapped, and the towels had been unfolded and rolled into the little sausage shapes her grandmother preferred. No Stella.

“Shit.” Lucky went back out into the hall and headed for the lobby.

As she passed the closed doors, she could hear TV news, very loud porn, kids jumping on a bed, someone crying, a man’s loud snoring, what sounded like someone practicing karate, and a quiet argument in the tone reserved for breakups. An audio tour of motel life.

The lobby smelled of industrial cleaner. There was no one at the front desk, no one in the little area reserved for guests to gather in front of a TV mounted above an electric fireplace. She took the hallway to the left of the desk to the breakfast area. It was closed with the lights off. Coming back up the hallway, she saw that the clerk had returned.

“Has an elderly woman come this way? I’m looking for my grandmother.” Her voice sounded a bit panicked.

The clerk, a woman of about twenty-five with her long hair in two tight French braids, asked, “Do you mean Stella?”

“Yes, that’s her!”

“I just opened the pool for her.” She smiled and leaned in conspiratorially, her beaded earrings swinging. “It closes at five, but Stella convinced me to give her an hour to swim.”

Lucky had never seen her grandmother swim. She didn’t know she could swim. God, what if she couldn’t swim? “Which way is the pool?”

“Past the breakfast room and through the metal door at the end.”

Lucky took off running.

She pushed the door open and entered a quiet, chlorine-filled space. The high ceiling was lit by reflections of the water that wavered like knockoff northern lights. Hands on knees, she caught her breath, looking up just as Stella dove into the pool, curving her body so that she slid along the turquoise-painted bottom and broke the surface with barely a ripple at the halfway mark.

Stella sliced pointed hands through the water in a graceful breaststroke, then treaded water, her limbs moving like pale, wide fish.

“Gram?”

“Hey, Luck. I feel great.” She said it as if she had been asked how she was. “I’m good. You should come in.”

What the hell was going on? She really shouldn’t have smoked up. It was way too much watching her senile granny move with all the grace of a silver-haired mermaid in a motel pool on the side of a lonely American highway.

Stella made her way back towards the deep end, waving the girl on. “Come in.”

“No, no, that’s okay. I don’t have a bathing suit.”

“Neither do I,” Stella answered, dunking her head back under.

Lucky looked to the side of the pool then and saw a pile of clothes—her grandmother’s clothes, big wired brassiere and all.

“Oh no.” She shook her head, watching the pale, naked shine of skin as Stella began climbing the ladder. “Oh god, no.”



Back in their room, one of them exhausted from exercise, the other from weed and trauma, they relaxed in front of the TV, sharing small bags of chips. They watched a sitcom about a family living with a robot and then a crime show about detectives working in a Florida city with way too many murders for anyone to think it was normal. By the time the late-night news started, Lucky was passed out, a bag of M&M’S in her hand.