Locked In Lodge Heat

I reminded myself that thirty-three wasn't old, even though my reflection in the dark lodge window said otherwise. It was a hundred and ten feet of glass facing the empty chairlifts, and in the off-season with the lights down low it worked better than any mirror I'd ever owned. Thirty-three, Nancy. Two years into running this place, one year into no boyfriend, and a body I'd stopped apologizing for somewhere around last Tuesday, or maybe I hadn't, hard to say.

The plan that night was simple, lock the gift shop, kill the lounge lights, run the gate, and drive the twelve minutes down to Pineridge where my apartment waited with a frozen pizza and a half bottle of red I'd been saving for no particular reason. It was a warm week for September in the Colorado high country, seventy degrees at sunset, and the lodge was so empty I'd stopped renting half the floor. That's why I nearly had a heart attack when the gate made its noise.

You'd know the sound if you heard it once. It's a grinding clunk, then a beep, then nothing, like the whole mechanism just gave up on life. The arm of the gate dropped halfway across the exit road and stayed there, and the keypad went dark, and the little red light that usually means everything's fine came on in a way that clearly meant the opposite of fine.

"No, no, no," I said, out loud, to a machine, which is the level of dignity I was at by nine on a Thursday.

I tried the override, which did nothing, and then the breaker panel in the back hall, which also did nothing except confirm that the gate motor had burned itself out doing whatever it did all day, which was sit there. I called the repair company and got the after-hours recording, a woman's flat voice telling me a crew would come up the mountain in the morning, sometime between eight and noon, and that the gate should be treated as a full closure. Full closure meant nobody in, nobody out. Including the guests I'd completely forgotten were still on the property.

Because what I'd missed was that the last two guests of the week were supposed to have left at six, and apparently they hadn't left, because when I walked back into the lounge to tell them the bad news, a man was standing by the fireplace holding a glass of scotch and looking at the gate situation on his phone like it had personally offended him.

"So the road's closed," he said. Not a question, just a man named Samson, twenty-eight, built like the kind of guy who did crossfit and talked about it, laying it out for himself. "The actual road. We can't drive out of a ski lodge."

"I'm so sorry," I told him, and I meant it, and then I gave him the whole spiel, the motor, the crew, the eight to noon window, the fact that dinner and the bar were technically open if you didn't ask too many questions about liability. "I'll comp the rooms, obviously. And the drinks. Consider it a free extra night, just a weird one."

His girlfriend came around the corner from the hallway then, Beatrice, thirty-six, dark hair going gray at the temples and clearly somebody who'd decided not to fight it, wearing one of those knit sweaters that costs more than my car payment. She'd been in the gift shop, apparently, browsing postcards at nine p.m. in a locked lodge.

"We heard the noise," she said. "Is it bad?"

"Dead motor. You're stuck with me till morning, I'm afraid."

She laughed at that, a real laugh, and something about it loosened my shoulders a little. "Stuck with the manager. Well, I've had worse Thursdays."

"It's Thursday," Samson said.

"It's Thursday," she agreed, "and I've had worse Thursdays too, actually."

We were standing there sorting out the room situation when a third voice came from the game room doorway, and I have to tell you I'd forgotten about this one entirely, a guy named Tobias who'd missed the last shuttle down the mountain that afternoon and had been living on bar snacks and pool since roughly three o'clock. Twenty-nine, curly hair, flannel, the general energy of a golden retriever that had been left alone with a pool table.

"Okay, so, small question," he said, leaning on the doorframe. "Why is the parking lot exit blocked by a giant horizontal bar, and also, is anyone else getting drinks, because I've been playing myself at pool for six hours and I could use a human."

"You missed the excitement," Beatrice told him. "We're snowed in. Except with no snow. Trapped in, is maybe the word."

"Trapped in with an open bar," Tobias said, and looked at me. "I'm not complaining. I want that understood by everyone."

So that's how it started, the four of us drifting to the bar in the dim lounge, me pouring without charging because the till was basically a suggestion at that point, Samson nursing his scotch, Beatrice on white wine, Tobias with a beer the size of a fire extinguisher. The lights over the pool table were the only bright thing in the room, and outside the windows the chairlifts stood there in the dark like skeletons of the actual season, and I could say I felt like a hostess but really it felt more like being stranded on an island with three castaways who'd decided the island was fine.

Tobias racked the balls and played winner-stays against Samson, and Beatrice and I sat at the bar with our drinks and did the small talk thing, where you're from, how long here, what do you do, the standard surface scrape. She and Samson had been together about a year, met at a bar in a town two hours south of here, which she called "our one good bar story." She was a physical therapist from Denver. I told her I ran this place year-round, winters for the crowds and summers for the silence and the maintenance guys.

"The silence is the selling point for me," she said, turning her glass by the stem. "I'd stay a whole week in that silence."

"Off-season discount," I said, joking, sort of.

Then Tobias sank a long shot, Samson groaned, and somehow the conversation slid sideways, the way bar conversations do when nobody has anywhere to be and the drinks are free. Relationships first, in the abstract, then less abstract. Tobias mentioned a woman he'd dated for a year when he was twenty-seven, how they'd split clean and still texted birthday wishes. Samson said he'd never lived with anyone before Beatrice. And then Beatrice, maybe two wines deep by then, said the thing that changed the temperature of the whole night.

"I keep thinking I'm too old for this," she said, gesturing at the room, the bar, the four strangers, the general situation. "This kind of adventure. Random nights, strangers, whatever this is. I was thirty-five when I last did anything spontaneous that worked out and it went so badly I swore off the whole category."

"Thirty-six isn't old," Tobias said from the pool table, honest and immediate.

"You're twenty-nine, sweetie, your opinion on this is legally inadmissible."

I laughed, and then, because she looked at me like she wanted a real answer, I told her the truth. "I'm thirty-three and I had a whole argument with my reflection about it an hour ago. The window said otherwise. I lost the argument."

"What did the window say?" she asked, quiet.

"That I'm the manager of a ski lodge and not a person in a ski lodge commercial," I said, and she laughed, and Samson looked over from the pool table with a kind of attention I hadn't earned yet, and Beatrice touched my forearm with two fingers, light, like we'd known each other longer than ninety minutes.

"Same," she said. "Basically the same exact thing."

So the drinks kept coming and the conversation kept sliding, and at some point Tobias finished off Samson and declared himself champion of the lounge, which nobody had agreed to, and I set down my wine and said, "You know I've run this pool table for two years, right? I could beat you blind drunk, which lucky for you I'm not."

"Is that a challenge?" he asked, already chalking a cue like it was a duel.

"That's a challenge."

We set up a game, winner takes bragging rights, and Samson and Beatrice took the big couch by the window to watch, her legs over his lap, his hand resting on her ankle like it lived there. I broke and sank two stripes and Tobias made a wounded noise about it, and honestly the game was closer than I expected because the man had six hours of table time in his hands even if his brain was five beers past sharp. We traded the lead back and forth, and between shots we talked, the way you do, and he asked me how a person ends up managing a ski lodge in the off-season, and I told him about falling into it after a breakup that took a year to fully get over, which is more than I usually tell strangers, but the wine was doing its work.

"You ever feel like you're the person behind the counter instead of the person at the counter?" he said, leaning over the table, lining up the eight.

"That's literally my job."

"Yeah, but like, in general. Like the world's a lodge and you're