One Bed, No Privacy

The truck died halfway between nowhere and Sparrow, Texas, and I sat there in the cab with my thumb on the phone like an idiot for a good minute before I called her.

"You're my only ride, and I'm sorry," I said.

Delia laughed, that low laugh she does, the one I'd been hearing for two years now. "You're not sorry. You're hot and bored and you want company."

"I'm hot because the air conditioner quit two hours ago. I'm thirty-two years old and my delivery truck is forty feet of junk with my name on the work order."

"You called the shop?"

"Called the shop. Tow guy comes in the morning. Meanwhile I'm stuck on the shoulder of 287 watching a cow do nothing."

"That's a long walk from Sparrow."

"I'm fifteen miles out. Can you come?"

She was quiet a second. "It's Friday. I had plans. The plans were you, though, and you went and got yourself stranded, so yeah. Give me the mile marker."

I gave it to her and we hung up, and I sat on the guardrail in the sun and ate a gas station sandwich I'd been saving in the truck. The bread was stale. I ate it anyway. That's the kind of week it was.

Delia showed up ninety minutes later in her old beige sedan, the one with the cracked dash and a hula girl doing her little dance every time she hit a bump. She was thirty-four, had been since March, and she got out of the car in shorts and that blue tank top I like, and I forgot I was mad at the world for a second.

"Hey, stranded lady."

"Hey yourself." I hugged her and she smelled like sunscreen and cigarettes, which meant she'd been smoking in the car again, which meant I'd be rolling the window down all night. Fine. Worth it.

She kissed me, quick, then pulled back and looked at the truck. "That thing's never moving again."

"The tow guy says otherwise. Morning job."

"So you're stuck out here and I'm your hero."

"You're my only ride, I already said that."

"Say it again. I liked it."

"You're my only ride, Delia, and I'm sorry."

"Apology accepted. Get in."

The car started fine. She pulled out onto the highway and we got twenty miles, easy twenty miles, talking about her sister's wedding and whether the cake was going to be that lemon stuff again. Then the temperature gauge climbed, slow at first, and I watched it like watching a pot.

"D."

"I see it."

"It's in the red."

"I see it, Jocelyn." She eased off the gas. "There's steam."

"There's steam, yeah."

She coasted it onto the shoulder and we sat there while the engine ticked and hissed at us. She put her forehead on the wheel.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Don't apologize again, I can't take it."

"I'll stop."

She got out and opened the hood and stood back like the steam might bite her. A truck blew past and rocked the car. She cussed, good and loud, a word her mother would've washed her mouth out for.

"Radiator hose by the look of it," she said. "Or the radiator itself. Either way I'm not fixing it with a water bottle and hope."

"You have a water bottle?"

"I have half a water bottle. It wouldn't help and we both know it."

We stood there in the ditch grass. The sun was going down orange behind a feed silo, and there was a gas station maybe half a mile back, its sign flickering on and off like it couldn't decide. We walked it, because walking was better than sitting, and the heat had broken a little so it was almost tolerable.

The kid behind the counter was maybe twenty-one, maybe younger, name tag said DARREN. He had his feet up on a milk crate and a phone in his hand.

"Car died?" he said, before we said anything.

"Overheated," Delia said. "Twenty miles back."

"Radiator?"

"Probably."

"Everybody's radiator goes in this heat." He popped his gum. "Tow guy don't run till morning. There's a motel fifteen miles north, the Rusty Nail. Only game in town. Owner's name's Eddie Spock, tell him Darren sent you, he won't care but it's funny."

"Fifteen miles," I said. "How do we get fifteen miles?"

"Wish really hard." He shrugged. "Or I got a buddy who'll drive you for forty bucks. Cash."

Delia counted her cash on the counter. Thirty-eight dollars and some change.

"Thirty-five," I said. "And we'll throw in whatever's in the change cup."

Darren looked in the cup. "There's a button in there. Not money. It's a button."

"It's sentimental," Delia said.

Twenty minutes later we were bouncing down a county road in Darren's buddy's pickup, a guy named Luis who smelled like diesel and talked the whole way about his cousin's roofing business. I didn't follow most of it. Delia held my hand on the bench seat, thumb going over my knuckles, and I thought, this is bad luck but at least it's bad luck with her.

* * *

The Rusty Nail Motel looked exactly like a motel called the Rusty Nail should look. L-shaped, two stories, brown paint peeling off the railings, a big neon sign with half the letters lit. RU TY N IL. A cat was sitting on the office step like it paid rent.

Eddie Spock was behind the desk, an old guy in a western shirt with the sleeves rolled, watching a little TV mounted up in the corner. He looked us over the way a man looks over two women covered in road dust at nine at night.

"One room," he said. "You're in luck and you're not. It's the last one and it's got one bed."

"One bed's fine," Delia said, before I could open my mouth. I felt my face go warm. We'd been together two years. It's not like we hadn't shared a bed. But the way she said it, quick, like she was claiming territory.

"Forty-nine a night, cash or card," Eddie said. "And I'm gonna tell you what I tell everybody. The plumbing in that place is older than me. The shower's got a mind of its own. The pipe behind the wall in the bathroom, if you hear it start knocking, you call the front desk, extension one, and I'll come turn the valve. Don't try to turn it yourself. A man tried last summer and flooded the whole wing and his name is still in my book under 'idiot.'"

"He's in the book under idiot?" Delia asked.

"He is. Pencil. I keep the book for exactly this."

"That's fair," I said.

"Breakfast is the gas station up the road. Don't eat the diner across the highway. Kitty there is not mine but she eats here, and if you feed her she'll never leave, so think about that before you get soft." He slid the key across the desk, an actual metal key on a fob shaped like a horseshoe. "Room fourteen. End of the bottom row. Ice machine works. Everything else is a maybe."

We walked down the row and the cat followed us the whole way, talking to herself the whole way. Room fourteen smelled like bleach and old cigarettes and, faintly, like someone had once tried to cover that with potpourri. The bed was a full, not even a queen, with a bedspread the color of band-aids.

Delia dropped the bag on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed and bounced once, testing it.

"It's a rock," she said.

"It's a rock with a bedspread."

She looked at me, and the way she looked made my stomach do the thing.

"So," she said. "One bed."

"So. One bed."

The pipe behind the bathroom wall started knocking before either of us said another word.

Delia tilted her head at the bathroom door, where the knocking was coming from behind the tile.

"That's not a ghost, right?"

"Eddie said the pipe does that. Extension one."

"Extension one. Sexy." She patted the bed beside her. "Come sit down before something else in this room dies."

I sat. The mattress did not move at all under me, like sitting on a parking lot. Delia turned toward me and tucked one leg under herself, and she had that look again, the one where her whole face goes patient and a little hungry at the same time.

"Two years," she said. "You know what I was thinking in the truck today?"

"What."

"That we've never done it somewhere terrible. We've done your apartment, my apartment, my sister's lake cabin. All nice. All with working plumbing." She ran her hand up my thigh. "This could be our terrible place."

"My truck broke down three hours from home and you're pitching romance."

"I'm pitching the opposite of romance. I'm pitching room fourteen." Her hand stopped just below my hip. "Yes or no, Joss. Say it plain."

"Yes," I said. "Obviously yes. Come here."

She leaned in and kissed me, slow, one hand on the side of my neck, and I forgot about the pipe for a second. Her thumb was doing that thing on my jaw. Two years and she still kissed me like she was checking whether I'd stay, and I always stayed, and she still checked. I got my fingers under the hem of her shirt and she pulled back just enough to grin