The Last Bedroom

The last bus out of Waskom left at 6:40, and I know this now with the kind of precision you only get from watching it happen. I was standing in the parking lot of the diner, maybe forty feet away, holding a box of my dead mother's hair dryers because I had been cleaning out the bathroom cabinet that afternoon and for some reason I couldn't make myself throw them away. The driver of the bus announced the departure, I'm sure he did, but I couldn't hear him over the sound of a hair dryer fan running at full blast, because I had, in a moment of what I can only call grief-related idiocy, plugged one of them in at the outdoor outlet by the door to see if it still worked.

It worked great. That was the problem.

So I stood there in the blue dusk with a running hair dryer in one hand and a cardboard box of five more just like it in the other, watching the bus pull onto the highway and shrink down to a pair of taillights and then nothing. I turned the dryer off. The lot went very quiet, except for the buzz of the diner's sign and a wind coming off the feed store, and I said, out loud, to nobody, "Well."

I'm Agnes Holcomb, I'm twenty-eight, and I fix broken data for a living, which means I'm the person you call when your server catches fire and your backups turn out to be a rumor. I am good at recovery. I am, as it turns out, not good at basic situational awareness, like hearing a bus.

The motel in Waskom had closed for renovation in March, which I knew, and which I had been planning to not need, because my flight out of North Platte was supposed to leave at noon the next day and my plan had been bus, airport, fly, done, lease over, new life in the city, mother's house sold to a nice couple who wanted the acreage. The house was empty now except for the smell, which was menthol and dust and would probably still be menthol and dust when the nice couple moved in, since smell soaks into carpet the way regret soaks into everything.

I sat down on the curb with the box and did the math on my phone. No rental cars in Waskom. Next bus, tomorrow night, which meant missing the flight, which meant the whole chain of things I'd arranged coming apart one link at a time. My phone said 41 degrees and dropping. I was wearing a light jacket because I had packed for the city, not for Nebraska in April, and I could feel the cold coming up through my jeans from the curb like the ground had a personal grudge.

That's when the county truck pulled in.

It was a white pickup with the water district logo on the door, dented along the passenger side like it had argued with a fence and lost, and the man who got out was tall and wearing a reflective vest over a flannel shirt, and I knew who he was before he even said anything because I'd spent three days clearing out my mother's house and he'd spent those same three days being the only person who talked to me. Patel Reeves. He lived across the gravel lane in the old Pruitt place, which he'd bought at an estate sale and was fixing up one weekend at a time. He'd waved at me every morning. He'd brought me coffee on the second day, in a thermos, and said, "You look like you're doing archaeology over there," and I'd liked him immediately in a way I hadn't quite examined.

"Heard you missed the bus," he said, walking over, hands in his pockets. "Word travels. Diner's still open, Marlene saw the whole thing and everything."

"Of course she did," I said. "Did she describe my face?"

"She described it as 'a look.'" He crouched down a little to look at me on the curb, which I appreciated, because people who stand over you when you're sitting feel like weather. "You need a ride somewhere? Bus doesn't run again till tomorrow night."

"It's not just a ride," I said. "It's the bus. It's the flight. It's the whole domino arrangement of my life." I looked up at him and tried to be funny about it, because that's my move. "I'm stranded, Patel. Formally. You could put it in a report."

"Well," he said, and he rubbed the back of his neck, and I watched him have an internal argument with himself for about four seconds, which I could actually see happening, like watching someone work a puzzle behind their eyes. "Motel's boarded up. Next motel's thirty miles. There's the church, but Pastor Clark keeps the fairgrounds locked since the carousel thing."

"The carousel thing," I said. "You can't just say that and not explain."

"Kids, maybe eight years ago, took it apart. Not vandalized, just, taken apart, laid out on the grass in pieces, very orderly. Nobody's ever known why." He said this completely flat, and I laughed for the first time in three days, an actual laugh, which surprised both of us I think. "Anyway. Look. I have a spare room. It's got paint fumes in it, but only a little, I finished the walls Sunday. There's a bed. It's not glamorous but it beats the curb."

Because this is the part where a smart person would list the reasons to say no, and I did list them, silently, at about the speed of a scroll. I had known him three days. He was a stranger. But he was also the man who brought coffee to a stranger doing grief archaeology in her dead mother's yard, and I had spent three days watching him carry lumber and wave at me, and there's a kind of assessment you make that isn't a list, it's just a read, and my read was that I was safer on his property than I was freezing on a curb waiting for Marlene to invent a second chapter to the story.

"That'd be great," I said. "I'll pay you."

"You will not," he said, opening the passenger door, which had to be lifted and pushed at the same time, a two-handed operation he did with the ease of long practice. "You can make me breakfast. That's the rate."

"That's a terrible rate," I said, getting in with the box of hair dryers, which rode between us like a weird chaperone. "I charge two hundred an hour."

"For breakfast?"

"For anything, professionally. It's why I have money and no life."

He grinned at that, and I noticed his grin, and then I made myself stop noticing it, because the truck was cold and the seat was torn and we had a fifteen-minute drive through dark Nebraska, which is a lot of minutes when you've just decided not to notice something.

The spare room was small and clean and the far wall was a soft green that was about ninety percent done, with a strip of bare drywall near the ceiling he called "an intentional reminder." There was a twin bed with a blue quilt, a lamp with a pull chain, and a stack of home improvement magazines arranged with the spines out, which told me he'd tidied up in a hurry and I chose not to embarrass him about it.

" Towels are in the hall closet," he said from the doorway. "Bathroom's the first door. There's a lock, it sticks, you have to kind of lift the handle while you turn it."

"Lift and turn. Got it. This room has a lot of technique requirements."

"You'll get the hang of it," he said, and went, and I heard his boots on the stairs and then the furnace came on, a click and a low rush, and then some minutes later it clicked off, and the house ticked and settled around me.

I lay on the twin bed with the quilt up to my chin, staring at the ceiling, listening to the furnace do its slow breathing, and I thought, very calmly, the way I think about a file system: I could just go to sleep. That's the reasonable thing. Eight hours, breakfast, his truck to North Platte, flight, done.

But I didn't sleep, and it wasn't the paint fumes, and it wasn't the strange bed. It was that I had lain down in a stranger's house and my whole body was awake in a way it hadn't been in, well, ever, and I lay there in the dark with the furnace clicking on and off, thinking about the sound of his boots on the stairs, and I understood, with the same clarity I get when I open a corrupted file and see exactly where the damage is, that I was in trouble of a completely new kind.

I gave up on sleep around midnight, which for me is practically disciplined, and went downstairs in my socks looking for water. The house was dark except for the kitchen window, and Patel was standing at the sink in a t-shirt and sweatpants drinking a glass of tap water like it was the most interesting thing in Nebraska.

"Sorry," I said, stopping in the doorway. "I heard the furnace and thought I was the only one awake."

"You're not. I sleep bad in new houses. This one I've owned eight months and it still counts." He rinsed the glass and set it upside down on the rack. "There's water, obviously. There's also half a jug of milk and some mustard. That's the full inventory."

"You don't have any wine?"

"I have a bottle of cooking sherry from the previous owners that I'm too scared to open. It's in the cabinet above the stove, but I want it on record that I'm not recommending it." He opened the fridge and looked into it like it might have changed since dinner. "Diner's got a liquor license, if you want to drive."

"I don't want to drive. I want to sit somewhere." I pulled out a chair, then changed my mind and pointed at the back door. "Can we go outside? I've been indoors for three days sorting my mother's socks."

So we sat on his back steps, which were concrete and cold through my socks, and looked at his half-built fence and the dark line of the gravel lane and my mother's house sitting across from it with one porch light on, the way she always left it. A dog barked twice somewhere near the feed store and then thought better of it. He had his forearms on his knees and I had my arms around my shins, and for a while we just drank our water.

"Can I ask you something weird," I said, after the dog had gone quiet.

"Those are my favorite kind."

"What's it like? Knowing a body. Somebody else's. I mean actually knowing it, not, like, anatomy." I said it fast, the way you pull a bandage, and then watched the fence so I wouldn't have to watch his face.

He was quiet for a long moment, long enough that I thought about retracting the question, filing it, deleting it. Then he said, "You're asking the wrong guy. I've only ever known one."

"One body?"

"One woman. College. Lasted about a year. She moved to Denver and I stayed here and that was that." He turned the glass in his hands. "So I know exactly one body, and it was a long time ago, and honestly most of what I remember is being terrified of doing it wrong."

"That's not reassuring."

"I'm not trying to be reassuring. You asked." He shrugged. "It's like, you know how when you fix a pump you get to where you can hear which bearing is going by sound alone? It's sort of like that. You learn the sounds. You learn where things are. And it's not really about the mechanics at all, it's about being allowed. That's the part I remember most. Being allowed."

I turned that over. Being allowed. My mother had not been allowed anything, the last six years, not even her own staircase without the rail and the countdown of her pills in the little plastic tray.

"Here's my thing," I said, and my voice came out steadier than I expected. "I've never done this. Any of it. Not like a vow, I wasn't saving myself for anything, I just, I got interested in other stuff. File systems. Smoking brisket. There was always something more interesting to learn and there was never a person, and then there were years where there wasn't even the possibility of a person, and now I'm twenty-eight and I've never even been held. Like at all. Not once by anyone who wasn't a doctor."

"That's the weirdest résumé gap," he said, and then winced. "Sorry. That came out wrong."

"No, it's accurate. It's the one gap. Everything else on my résumé is genuinely excellent." I looked at him then, because I'd made myself stop noticing him in the truck and I was done pretending. "And I've been lying on that bed doing the math, and the math says this is insane, and I don't care. I want to try. I want to know what it feels like."

"To be held."

"To be held, yeah. To start there. I'm not, I don't have a whole agenda