Chapter 3 #2
“Yes. Mostly,” I had answered, and when she’d asked again if there was anything happening in the classroom that I might want to discuss with her, I’d said no. She’d seemed relieved and then told me that she’d just heard about a janitorial problem in the middle school.
“It turns out, they were replacing the paper products but never really cleaning. There are some rumors about bedbugs, too. I thought you could use that,” she’d said.
“Use it?”
“Aren’t you doing an exposé on hidden problems in our schools?” she had prompted me.
“Oh, right. Thank you,” I’d answered. I hadn’t explicitly told her that I needed all the weird information for an exposé.
She had made assumptions and it had seemed easier to go along with them rather than explaining that I’d been quizzing her for the benefit of a former Woodsmen/current Junior Woodsmen quarterback who was trying to get custody of a child whom he hardly knew, and that his strategy for that was collecting insider information about our district.
At least he was making an effort, which not everyone did for kids.
I’d seen that both in the classes where I’d student-taught and in other areas of my life.
I yawned behind my hand, turning my head away from the wall-mounted camera that was focused on me and the reception desk.
I did my best to stay awake here and I was perfecting the art of sleeping while sitting.
I hardly ever fell off my stool onto the floor—only twice, or maybe three times if you counted when I caught myself on the desk and went on my knees.
So far, the motel owner hadn’t spoken to me about it but I was aware that I shouldn’t do it again.
Maybe I needed to perfect the art a little more.
I was doing that when the automatic doors slid open, and I jerked awake so hard that it scared me and I almost fell off the stool again. Then I frowned and rubbed my eyes, not because I had yet another headache but because I didn’t really believe what I was seeing.
“Everett Ford?”
“Most people call me one or the other,” he said, “but rarely both, unless I’m in trouble.”
“Like you’re under arrest?”
His eyes widened. “No, I’ve never been arrested. You can look it up, I really haven’t.”
“Me neither,” I told him. I got off the stool and held on to the desk, because…
had I eaten? I had meant to bring the energy bar in my bag but I’d given it to my sister.
That could have been why I felt a little woozy, but waking would help me stand up.
No, standing would help me wake up…something like that.
“Do you need a room? Why?” I asked him. “Is your house being fumigated?” The exterminators had just left the motel when I’d arrived, so I was ready to explain that he needed to choose a different place to stay if he wanted a respite from roaches.
“Again, no.” He shook his head. “I feel like I’ve walked into a weird dream.”
That made two of us. “I don’t understand why you’re here,” I told him, and he explained a little.
“I was at the bar where you work,” he said, and that made me worry.
“I thought you had quit drinking. Wasn’t losing your job and the public humiliation of a demotion enough for you? What else has to happen before you recognize that you have a problem?”
“No, hold on,” he ordered. “Yes, I did stop drinking after my, uh, public humiliation. But I don’t think I had a problem with alcohol.”
They never did.
“Really,” he continued earnestly. “I stopped because I didn’t ever want to act like that again, but it wasn’t normal behavior for me.
Not since college,” he added. “I haven’t been getting drunk all the time and I wasn’t even drinking every day.
I wasn’t trying to hide it, I wasn’t…” He paused. “What else do alcoholics do?”
“They hurt their families,” I said.
“I wasn’t hurting anyone, I swear. I overdid it before your class showed up for the field trip because my wife—my ex-wife sent me pictures of herself with someone else and I also got served with divorce papers.”
I had questions. “Why did she want to end things with you?”
He guessed what I was hinting at. “It wasn’t because I had a problem with alcohol,” he promised.
“Eris and I had been fighting a lot. We probably shouldn’t have gotten married to begin with and the distance, with me living up here, didn’t help.
I knew there were problems and I was doubting that we were going to last, but seeing that stuff was awful. ”
“Were they naked pictures?”
The expression he got said yes, but he discussed something else. “In the divorce papers, she accused me of all kinds of shit, like that I was abusive and cruel, that I was an addict, you name it. I couldn’t believe that someone I’d thought that I loved would lie about me that way.”
I hoped that everything his wife had said really was a lie and everything he was saying now was true.
“I went to that bar tonight because I was looking for you,” Everett continued.
“You had texted me about the janitor sleeping through his shift instead of cleaning and I thought we could talk about it, but you weren’t there and a woman wearing a Dixie Cup like a Navy seaman sent me over here instead. ”
That had been Jannie, and the white sailor hat was one of her favorites.
“Thanks for letting me know about the dirty bathrooms and the bugs at your school. What else is going on?”
“That was in the middle school, and our janitor is great,” I corrected. “I don’t have anything else to tell you. I’m sorry you came here.”
“You are?”
“Because I don’t have any additional information,” I explained.
“Oh. I was asking what was going on with you. You have a new job,” he said, looking around the lobby.
“And my sister and I made other changes, too. The good news is, we don’t have to worry about the water being shut off.”
“That was going to happen? The last thing I heard from you was that your mother had moved out of your house.”
“She did,” I said, and yawned. “We were actually having several issues but a lot of them have been resolved.” I glanced at the security camera, sorry now about the yawn and thinking that the owner probably wouldn’t like it if I had friends visiting, either.
Not that Everett was a friend—why was he here?
“Could you stand a few feet back? And also, could you explain why you came to this motel if you don’t want a room? ”
“Is that a personal space issue?” he asked. He did move away, out of the range of the lens. “I came because…I had the time, I guess. You texted about the janitor and I started thinking about the last time we’d talked, when you said that your mom left you guys. Did she come back?”
I tilted my body so that the camera couldn’t spot that I was talking, and therefore I wouldn’t appear to be carrying on a conversation with myself.
“No, and I haven’t heard from her. I think she really did block me, or at least, she doesn’t mind ignoring my messages and calls.
I hope she’s all right. The last time this happened, it wasn’t anything good. ”
“She took off before?”
“No, my dad did,” I said. “My mom had stuck around until recently.” That reminded me of Everett’s own issues with running out on children. “How is your custody fight going?”
“Not great.” He stepped to the side and accidentally triggered the doors, which opened and let snow blow in.
He waited until they slid shut before he spoke again.
“As a stepfather in a short-lived marriage, I don’t have much standing.
My wife—my soon-to-be-ex-wife—and her attorney claim that I’m trying to hold on to the relationship and make things difficult, like I’m using her son to extend the divorce and somehow get out of paying alimony. ”
“But you’re not?”
“No. No, I’m not, definitely not. Not at all.”
He sounded just like my sister when I asked her if she was using fake accounts to track her ex-boyfriend, Boyd, because she still cared about him. No, she told me. No, don’t be stupid, Zoey! No, no chance, absolutely no way. I’m not looking, because I don’t care at all, none.
I didn’t believe either of them. Willow had been acting furtive lately, tilting her phone so that I couldn’t see her screen and once I’d woken up to her having a late-night, whispered conversation in the bathroom.
I hadn’t ever been married like Everett or in a serious relationship like my sister’s, but even I could understand that it was a losing proposition to try to hold on to a person who wanted to get away from you. It wasn’t ever going to work.
“Why was your water going to be shut off?” he asked me, which was also what my sister did. She was good at changing the subject to something I didn’t really want to talk about, like my own lack of a boyfriend or that I still hadn’t learned how to do anything with my hair.
“It turned out that my mom had planned her exit for a while,” I said.
“She stopped paying bills a few months ago and she had taken days off to use up her vacation, which I didn’t know about.
” If I had, then I probably would have pestered her to spend that time doing things that she had never liked, such as cleaning, laundry, or hanging out with Willow.
Instead, Mom had probably been with the person she said she’d fallen in love with.
“She was scheming,” he noted.
“I guess so. She had put in her notice at work without letting anyone know. She also sold her wedding ring and some other things she had from my dad,” I said.
“When she walked through the door for the last time, she was only carrying one bag, so I was really surprised when I went down to her room and looked around. It was almost totally empty. She’d been moving out for a while, but she’d been hiding it from me.
There wasn’t much left and nobody wanted to buy any of it. ”
“Why?” Everett asked. “Why did she do that?”