The Storage Room Strangers

The tow truck pulled into the empty lot around seven and I watched Kathryn step down from the cab with a suitcase in one hand and a step stool in the other, which is such a Kathryn thing to carry that I laughed before she even saw me. She's fifty-one, three years younger than me, a freckled white woman from Ohio, and she'd been working the dinner shift at the diner with me for about eight months by then. Foley artist, back in the day. Los Angeles, ages twenty-three to forty, and she could make a whole rainstorm with a bag of spinach if you asked her to.

She spotted me standing by the office door and held up the step stool like a trophy.

"Oscar! Tell me you're not already here."

"I've been here twenty minutes. Nolan dropped me off early. You said seven."

"Well the car had other plans, didn't it." She came across the gravel careful in her sandals, dragging the suitcase, tucking the stool under her arm. "You're not gonna believe this. I'm not gonna believe this and I lived it."

"What happened?"

"Thelma died."

"Thelma?"

"The car, Oscar. My cousin's car I borrowed. Thelma. She made it all the way to the last exit and then she just, she quit. Steam everywhere. I sat on the shoulder for an hour waiting for the tow and the driver was very nice about it, very chatty, told me his whole life story, and now here we are."

"Here we are," I said, though I didn't exactly know where here was yet.

She did. She pointed at the motel behind the office, the long low row of doors with the empty pool in front of it, dried up so long it had weeds growing out of the deep end. The place had been closed for years and somebody was running the whole operation out of a storage unit, apparently.

"Come on," she said. "I'll show you."

Inside, past a front desk that was just a folding table with a cash box on it, there was a door marked STORAGE that opened into a room maybe twelve feet by fifteen, stacked with cardboard boxes along two walls and holding a single bed, a lamp with a crooked shade, and a window air conditioner that sounded like it was arguing with itself. Kathryn dropped her suitcase and sat right down on the bed like she owned the place.

"So here's the situation," she said. "The woman running it, Ellie, her name's Ellie Newsome, she's been here ten years, she says this room is being used for storage while they clean out the real rooms, but the real rooms have no water right now because the pipes are being replaced. So this is it. This is the room."

"There's a bed in the storage room."

"There's a bed in the storage room," she agreed. "One bed. I asked if she had another and she looked at me like I'd asked for a helicopter."

"And my ride?"

"Here's the part you're not gonna believe. I called Nolan to come back for us. He says no problem, except then he calls back twenty minutes later and his car won't start either. Battery. Dead battery. He's gonna bring the charger in the morning."

I sat down on the other end of the bed, because there wasn't anywhere else to sit, and looked around at the boxes. Dishes in one, labeled. Books in another. A box fan still in its plastic.

"Whose stuff is all this?"

"Somebody moving in, I think. Somebody moving in slow." She kicked off her sandals and stretched her legs out. "So. We're stuck. Until morning. Together. In a storage room with one bed and a lamp that works if you hit it."

"You seem awfully cheerful about being stuck."

"Oscar." She turned on the bed to face me, sitting cross-legged now, and she had that look she got when she was about to talk her way into something. "Can I tell you something honest? Well, honest-ish."

"Go ahead."

"I'm kind of glad. I mean, the car thing is a pain, and I'm gonna owe my cousin an apology and probably a tow bill, but." She waved a hand at the room. "It's kind of an adventure. And you're here. And we never get to talk at work, really, because there's always a ticket window full of people and Nolan humming."

"He does hum."

"He hums constantly. So we never get to talk." She picked at the corner of a box flap. "Which is a shame, because I like talking to you. I've liked it for a while, if you want to know."

I did want to know. I'd wanted to know for months, since around the time she started doing the rain sounds behind the counter on slow nights and I'd catch myself standing in the kitchen listening instead of cooking. But saying that out loud at the diner felt unwise, and saying it here felt like a different kind of idea, and I wasn't sure which kind yet.

"I like talking to you too," I said. "Obviously."

"Obviously?"

"I rode forty minutes with Nolan to bring you a phone charger and sit with you in a broken motel, Kathryn. I think the obviously is doing a lot of work in that sentence."

She laughed, that big laugh she does, the one that makes Ellie-in-the-office look up from her paperwork. Then she reached over and smacked my knee.

"Okay. So. Since we're stuck anyway, and since it's a weird room and a weird night, I have a proposal."

"That sounds ominous."

"It's fun, I promise. There's a whole story behind it, sort of. When I worked in sound, we did this thing on set sometimes, when a take wasn't working. You'd say, let's do a stranger take. Everybody pretends they've never met. Fresh eyes. It shakes things loose." She was grinning now. "So. Let's do a stranger take."

"A stranger take."

"You and me. Strangers. Just for the evening. We meet for the first time, right here, in this motel that has no right to have a bed in its storage room, and we see what happens. Nobody knows anything about anybody. No history. No humming coworkers. Just two people who met at a motel."

"And in the morning?"

"In the morning we're Oscar and Kathryn again and we go back to the diner and Nolan hums." She shrugged. "Or it's a dumb idea and we eat the vending machine crackers and go to sleep. But I kind of think it's not a dumb idea. I kind of think it's the only interesting thing that's happened to me all year."

I looked at her sitting there cross-legged on a mattress in a storage room, boxes of somebody's dishes behind her head, and I thought about all the months of careful nothing at the diner, every shift ending the same way, her saying see you tomorrow, me saying see you tomorrow, both of us meaning something else and saying nothing else.

"Where'd you even get the key?" I asked, because I'd been wondering. There was a brass key sitting on the box next to her, old style, like from a movie.

"Ellie gave it to me. There's a whole coffee can of them. She said the locks haven't been changed since the eighties and the key is basically ceremonial." She picked it up and turned it over. "It's kind of perfect, right? A real actual key. For a stranger take."

It was kind of perfect. Kathryn had spent twenty years making the world sound like itself with celery and cornstarch and a suitcase full of junk, and now she was making this sad little room sound like somewhere anything could happen.

"One condition," I said.

"Name it."

"We don't lie about anything that matters. Strangers, fine. But if a stranger asks you something true, you answer it true."

She thought about that for a second, turning the key over in her fingers.

"Deal," she said. "Same for me. Strangers, but honest strangers." She stood up, smoothing her skirt, and held the key out to me on her flat palm like a little ceremony. "Okay. Ready? I'm gonna go stand out by the pool for a minute. Give it a minute, then you come out. And when you see me, you've never seen me before in your life."

"And who am I?"

"Whoever you want to be. That's the fun part." She was already at the door, sandals in her hand. "I'm going to be a woman traveling alone whose car broke down. Who I really am under that, you'll have to find out."

The door clicked shut behind her and I sat there in the lamplight with a brass key in my hand and my heart doing things I hadn't let it do in a long time. Through the wall I heard the air conditioner rattling on, and somewhere outside, gravel, soft, her walking to the empty pool.

I counted to sixty. It felt like a year.

I walked out into the purple part of the evening, the sky doing that New Mexico thing where it goes orange on one side and deep blue on the other, and there she was, standing at the edge of the empty pool with her sandals off and her toes curled over the lip of the deep end, looking down at the weeds growing where the water used to be.

"Careful," I said, because it came out of me before I could stop it. "That edge is crumbly."

She turned around and I watched her do it, watched her put on the stranger face, this little polite smile that was nothing like her real smile. "Oh. Hi. Sorry, is this your motel? I wasn't sure if I was allowed to be back here."

"It's not my motel," I said, and I felt my own face doing something new, this easy thing I don't do at the diner. "I'm staying here. Well. Sort of staying. There's a bed in the storage room, which I understand is not how motels usually work."

"That's what the woman in the office said," she said, and her voice was different too, a little higher, a little brighter, a traveler's voice. "Ellie? She said the rooms with the plumbing don't have water and the rooms with the water don't have plumbing, and I kind of fell in love with the whole situation."

"She's been managing the storage facility for ten years. She knows what she's doing, even if what she's doing is insane."

"Are you the only guest? Because that would explain why she put you in the storage room." She hopped down from the pool edge and came a few steps closer, and even in the stranger game I could see her really looking at me, taking me in. "I'm sorry. Hi. I'm being rude. I'm the lady whose car died at the last exit before here, so my whole personality right now is car problems."

"Rough day?"

"Rough couple of hours. I waited on the shoulder for a tow truck for a whole hour, and the guy shows up around seven and looks at my car and says something in tow truck language that I'm pretty sure meant it's going to cost more than the car." She stuck out her hand. "I don't think I gave you a name."

"You didn't."

"Well then. I'm Talia."

"Talia," I said, and shook her hand, and her hand was warm from holding her sandals. "Oscar."

"Oscar what? No, wait." She held up a finger. "Are we doing rules? We should do rules. I always feel better with rules."

"Strangers who set rules. Very organized strangers."

"Organized strangers are the safest kind." She counted on her fingers, walking a slow little circle on the cracked pavement by the pool. "Rule one, no real names. Talia works for me. Whatever you say your name is works for you. Rule two, no work talk. Nobody asks anybody what they do for a living, because the answer is always boring and it kills the magic. Rule three, no talking about anybody we know. No coworkers, no exes, no hometown gossip. We are two people who do not exist until tonight."

"That's three rules and none of them are about what happens if the strangers like each other."

She stopped walking. The light was almost gone now, just enough left to see her raise one eyebrow at me. "Well. What happens if the strangers like each other, Oscar-with-no-last-name?"

"I figure that's up to the strangers."

"I figure so too." She sat down on the pool edge again, careful this time, and patted the concrete next to her, and I went and sat, and the evening had gotten to that temperature where the air is warm but the ground is cool. "Okay. Rule four, and this one's mine. Honest strangers. Whatever a stranger asks, you answer true. I think I made that rule already, actually, back in the room, but I'm making it again because it's the good one."

"You already made it. I'm holding you to it anyway."

"Good." She pulled her knees up and looked out past the motel at the black line of the highway, where a truck went by every little while