Llama Trek Exes

The bus dropped me off on the main street of town at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday, and I stood there with my two bags and my laptop case and thought, well, here we go again.

My name is Kat. I'm forty-four years old, a Black woman, and I've been a journalist for twenty years, which means I have spent more nights than I can count in towns like this one. Small, flat, built around a base, full of people who either can't wait to leave or can't imagine leaving. The sky was huge and pale over the grid of low buildings, and the wind smelled like hay and dust. I checked my phone. One bar. Great.

My editor, Mia, had set me up with an interview slot at Fort Morrison for Thursday. I was writing a piece about the unit out there, something about how the town and the base depend on each other, the kind of assignment that pays the bills and doesn't light me up. She had also arranged lodging for me, which was a favor I appreciated, because I was tired of motels with beds that creak when you breathe.

The address I'd been given was a ten minute walk from the bus stop. I dragged my bags down the sidewalk and found myself standing in front of a long, low building with a sign that read Dry Gulch Llama Trekking. There was a corral. There were, in fact, three llamas in the corral, staring at me with the flat judgment llamas are famous for.

"This can't be right," I said out loud. One of the llamas blinked at me.

I went inside anyway, because there was a person at a desk, a guy around my age but younger, maybe thirty-eight, with a sunburned face and a plaid shirt and the look of a man whose week had gone badly.

"Hi," I said. "I'm looking for lodging. I have an address here, 44 Corral Road."

He looked at the paper I held out, and his face did something complicated.

"Okay," he said. "So. I'm Chad. I run this place. And I have to tell you, the address is right, but I think there's been a mix-up."

"Mix-up how?"

"So the town clerk handles overflow lodging for base visitors, and she's been renting out our back rooms, the ones over the supply room, when we don't have trekking clients. And your booking came through her. But last night the basement flooded. A pipe, or maybe the sump pump, nobody's sure yet. The supply room is soaked. The rooms above are fine but they smell like wet hay and I can't in good conscience..."

He stopped and rubbed his eyes with both hands.

"I am so sorry," he said. "You came all this way."

"It's fine," I said, though it wasn't really fine, I was tired and my bags were heavy. "Do you know where I can stay tonight?"

"There's the Wagoneer Motel, but the base filled it up Monday with a training rotation. There's Gwen's bed and breakfast but Gwen is visiting her sister in Billings. I'm not kidding, this is the worst week we've had in five years."

Behind him, through a doorway, I could see a big room with a long table, and papers. A lot of papers, spread out everywhere, some of them pinned flat, some of them laid on towels.

"Can I at least charge my phone?" I asked, and Chad waved me in like I was doing him a favor.

That's when I saw the man at the table.

He was standing over the papers with a hair dryer in one hand, going back and forth over a page like he was grooming a small dog. He was forty-five now. He'd been forty-two the last time I saw him, three years ago, in an apartment in the city where we'd had the talk about his job taking him to Denver and my job keeping me wherever the stories were. Six months we'd lasted. Six months, two cities, and a goodbye that was polite and clean and had never actually felt finished.

"Manny," I said.

He looked up. The hair dryer kept running for a second before he noticed it and clicked it off.

"Kat." He said it like he was testing whether the word worked. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm writing a piece on the base. I'm supposed to be staying here, apparently. The rooms over the supply room." I looked at the papers, at the water-warped edges, at the towels. "That looks bad."

"It is bad," he said. "Two years of research notes. UX field studies, forty interviews, usability sessions. The whole thing was in a box in the basement storage because Chad offered me the cheap room down there while I do contract work for the base's training software. The pipe went at two in the morning."

"Did you lose it all?"

"Most of it's readable if I dry every page flat. It's just slow." He set the hair dryer down and looked at me, and I looked at him, and the room got very quiet in that way rooms do when two people have history they haven't dealt with. "You look good," he said.

"You look tired," I said, which came out wrong, and we both knew it, and neither of us fixed it.

Chad, to his enormous credit, picked that moment to disappear into the office, and I heard him on the phone saying "no, Gwen, I understand, I do, but she's standing right here" in a low, pained voice.

"So you're doing work for the base too," I said, to fill the space.

"Contract research. The unit's training software is a nightmare and they know it. I came out here in March. I've been living in the basement room." He gestured at the table. "Which is now a shallow lake."

I set my bags down by the door. The llamas outside made a noise I couldn't identify. Manny started picking up a page, then put it down, then picked it up again, like his hands needed something to do and nothing was working.

"They didn't tell me you'd be here," he said.

"Nobody tells me anything. I found out my hotel was a llama farm twenty minutes ago."

"It's not a farm, it's a trekking outfit," he said, and then winced. "Sorry. That was pedantic. You look good, I already said that. Did I say that?"

"You said it."

"Okay. Well. It's still true."

I pulled out a chair at the far end of the table and sat down, because my feet had decided that sitting was not negotiable. From here I could see the whole spread of ruined paper and the drying racks Chad had improvised out of wire shelving and two sawhorses. It was, I had to admit, a thorough rescue operation. Manny had always been thorough. It was one of the things I'd liked about him, along with about nine things I hadn't.

"So how long are you here?" he asked.

"Through Friday, probably. Interview Thursday, write Friday, bus Saturday morning."

"I'm here until the software project wraps. Which keeps sliding."

"Of course it does."

"Kat." He stood there holding the hair dryer like it was a drink at a party. "I'm glad it's you, is the strange thing. I know I'm not supposed to be. But I am."

I didn't have an answer for that, and before I could find one, Chad came back in with his hands up.

"Okay," he said. "So here's where we are. The motel's full, Gwen's out of town, and the town clerk says there is one remaining emergency lodging option, which is the dry room, the actual storage room that didn't flood, and it has a cot and a space heater and it's yours if you want it, Ms. Kat, and I will drive you to the Wagoneer myself the minute a room opens up."

I looked at the dry room door. I looked at Manny.

"Well," I said. "How bad could it be?"

Chad showed me the dry room, which was less a room than a closet that had ambitions. A cot, a space heater, a bare bulb, and a smell of hay and cardboard. I dropped my bags on the cot and stood there doing the math on my evening, which was looking long.

"There's coffee in the office," Chad said. "And if Manny starts talking about wireframes, just nod. It works for me." He was thirty-eight, built as if he carried saddles for a living, and clearly exhausted. "I'll be in the basement till midnight if either of you needs anything. Which I hope you don't."

He left, and I wandered back into the kitchen, where Manny had resumed his drying