Chapter Thirty-One
Lucy
Carol Sterling opened her front door before I’d finished climbing the three concrete steps, which meant she’d been watching the street from behind the curtain, which meant she’d seen me sit in the car at the curb for eleven minutes with the engine running.
“You’re letting the heat out,” she said. “Yours and mine. Come in. Bring the dog.”
“She sheds.”
“I cleaned hotel rooms for twenty-five years, honey. I’ve cleaned worse than a dog.”
Her house was small and stucco and the color of a manila envelope, on a street in old southwest Reno where every yard had a chain-link fence and a rosebush wrapped in burlap for the winter.
Inside, it was so clean it made my teeth hum.
The carpet had vacuum lines in it, straight as a ruled page.
There was a folded towel on the back of the bathroom door, visible from the hall, and it was folded in thirds, then in half, the hotel way, with the edge facing out.
Juniper went directly to the heating vent in the kitchen and lay down on it with a groan of pure gratitude.
“Smart dog,” Carol said. “Coffee?”
“Please.”
She poured it into two mugs from a casino I’d never heard of, the gold paint on the logo half worn away by the dishwasher. On the refrigerator, under a magnet shaped like a slot machine, was the back page of Alpine Living, cut out along the edges with kitchen scissors, perfectly straight.
I looked at it, and she watched me look at it.
“Jonah brought me a copy,” she said. “Then I went and bought three more. I don’t know what for.
You can’t mail a thing like that to anybody.
Everybody’s already read it.” She set my mug down in front of me and sat across the little table with her hands wrapped around her own.
They were square hands, the knuckles thick, the nails cut short.
“He didn’t tell me he was going to do it. ”
“He didn’t tell me either.”
“No. He wouldn’t.” She drank. “So. You drove all the way down the hill. What are you here for?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Yes, you do.”
I held the mug. It was too hot to drink, and I held it anyway.
“I’ve been married to your son for ten years,” I said, “and I don’t think I know where he came from.
I know the story. I’ve heard him tell the story to investors a hundred times.
The trailer outside Reno, the ski lift at nineteen, the guy who built four lodges out of nothing.
It gets a laugh in all the right places. I don’t know if any of it’s true.”
Carol laughed, one short dry note. “It’s all true. He just tells it like it was an adventure.”
“It wasn’t?”
She got up. She went down the hall and came back with a shoebox, a real one, from a department store that doesn’t exist anymore, and set it on the table between us and took the lid off.
Photographs. Not many. A single-wide trailer the color of old teeth, on a lot of gravel and sagebrush, with the Virginia Range brown behind it. Two small boys on the step. The older one grinning straight into the lens, the younger one squinting at something off to the side.
“Jonah was always looking at whatever the real thing was,” she said. “Rhys was always looking at the camera.”
“What happened to their father?” I asked. I knew the investor version. My dad wasn’t around much. That was all I’d ever gotten.
“Their father could lose a paycheck between the cashier’s cage and the parking lot,” Carol said.
She said it plainly. “He wasn’t cruel. I want you to know that.
He was charming. Lord, he was charming. He could sell you a Tuesday.
And then he’d go down to the tables on a Friday night with the rent, and he’d come home Sunday without it, and he’d have a story about why it wasn’t his fault that was so good you’d almost thank him.
” She turned her mug a quarter-turn on the table.
“He left for good when Rhys was twelve. By then I’d stopped counting the times he left for a little while. ”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was a long time ago, and I had a job.” She reached into the box and took out one more picture, and held it for a second before she turned it around.
A boy of about nine in a jacket too big for him, a canvas bag of newspapers slung across his chest, standing under the neon awning of a casino in daylight.
His hair stuck up in the back exactly the way it still did when he slept on it wrong.
He had one arm out, a paper held up, and his mouth was open mid-word.
“Sunday mornings,” Carol said. “He sold the Gazette at the casino doors. People coming out after all night at the tables. Grown men sold papers on those corners too, and he outsold every one of them, at nine years old. You know how?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t take my eyes off his mouth.
“He’d read the paper first. The whole thing, on the bus.
And then he’d look at you coming out the door, all gray in the face, and he’d find the one story in there that was about you.
Lost money? He’d show you the man who won a car.
Fighting with your wife? Here’s the horoscope.
He could tell in two seconds what you wanted to hear, and he’d sell it to you for a quarter.
” She put the picture down, face up, between us.
“And I figured out, a lot later than I should have, why he loved it so much. When he was selling, nobody looked at the trailer. Nobody looked at his shoes. They looked at whatever he was holding up.”
The heating vent ticked. Juniper sighed on it and rolled half over.
I thought of him on the dock in June, with a glass held up. I thought of three hundred faces turned toward whatever he was holding up.
“He was good at it,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.
“He’s the best I ever saw. That’s the trouble.
” Carol looked at me steadily. She had Jonah’s eyes, not Rhys’s: the kind that stayed on the real thing.
“Jonah showed me the video, you know. From the party. On his phone. I watched it right up to the part about the hell of a party, and I turned it off.”
“You didn’t have to see it.”
“I’ve been the wife who threw a hell of a party,” she said. “I cleaned up after it, too.”
I put my coffee down. My hands weren’t steady enough to hold it.
She let me sit there. She didn’t fill the quiet. She got up and ran a dish towel over a counter that didn’t need it and came back.
“He comped me a room at Glenbrook, the first winter it was open,” she said. “Did you know that?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so. Wouldn’t have occurred to him to mention it.
I drove up in my Buick, and they carried my bag, and I went up to that room with the window over the lake, and it was the first time in my life I ever slept in a hotel bed I didn’t have to make in the morning.
” She smiled, a small, private smile, at the table.
“I didn’t sleep much. I walked around looking at everything.
The way you look at a house somebody else keeps. And you know what I noticed?”
I knew. My throat had closed, but I knew.
“The towel hooks,” she said. “Low. Right by the shower. Where you don’t have to stretch across the wet tile with a stack of six towels on your arm.
Twenty-five years in that business, and I never once saw a hotel do that.
I thought, my son did that. My son remembered.
” She tapped the clipping on the fridge with one short fingernail without turning to look at it. “And then I read this.”
“I asked the housekeepers,” I said. “At three hotels on the lake, before we ever broke ground. I asked them what they hated. They made me a list.”
“I know you did,” Carol said. “Now I know you did.”
I cried then, a little, not hard, the kind that just leaks. She pushed a box of tissues across the table without comment, the way she must have pushed a thousand fresh towels onto a thousand bathroom counters.
“There’s one more thing,” she said, after a while. “And then I’ll feed you, because you’re too thin and you drove too far.”
I waited.
“In 2020. He called me from a parking lot. He didn’t tell me which one.
He didn’t say anything, Lucy. I said hello and Rhys?
and Rhys, honey, are you hurt? and he just breathed.
Twenty minutes. I could hear cars. Then he said, ‘Sorry, Mom, pocket dial,’ and hung up.
” She looked at me. “Jonah told me about the baby a month later. Rhys never has. Not once. Not to this day.”
I pressed the tissue against my mouth.
I’d thought for seven years that I was the only one who’d stood in that loss.
That he’d stepped over it on his way to a meeting.
That he’d gone back to the office on the Tuesday because it hadn’t happened to him.
And it was true that he hadn’t stood in it with me.
That was still true. It didn’t stop being true because he’d stood in a parking lot, alone, and breathed into a phone at his mother.
“That doesn’t fix it,” I said.
“No. I’m not telling you so it fixes anything.” She put the lid back on the shoebox. “I’m telling you so you know what you’re looking at.”
She made grilled cheese in a cast-iron pan with the crusts cut off, the way you’d make it for a child, and I ate two.
She gave Juniper the crusts. At the door, when I had my coat on and my keys in my hand and the dog was already standing by the car, she put her hand on my arm, and her square fingers held on hard.
“Can I tell you something about my son?”
“Please.”
“He’s been selling since he was nine. You might be the only thing he never tried to sell. Don’t let him start now.”