Grip

Chapter Two — Delia

I've run the Blue Heron since my husband died, twelve years now, six cabins and a sign that never lights, and I've learned that a man who walks in off the highway is not a man you ask about the car.

He came on a Tuesday, in canvas, wet through.

"Three nights, if you have them," he said, and put down two twenties.

I gave him cabin four and four dollars back. He didn't count it. That's the first thing I noticed and it is not a thing I'll explain.

That night he sat on the stoop of four and talked to me while I turned the vacancy light off. Told me he'd worked the docks in Astoria, and before that taught eighth grade, and before that there was a woman in Walla Walla he should have stayed with. I kept the three towns. I can't see his face while I'm saying them.

Wednesday he sat out again. He'd never been to Astoria. He'd spent his life in a factory outside Toledo and never taught anybody anything, and there was no woman in Walla Walla.

Now, I write things down. I keep a register, and not the one the state wants. Every night before I turn in, I put down the date and the cabin and whatever the guest said to me. Started in a slow season when the quiet got to me, and it's the only thing in my week with a beginning and an end.

Tuesday and Wednesday do not describe the same man.

I read them twice by the desk lamp. Then I went and looked in the window of four. He was sitting on the bed with his hands on his knees, doing nothing, like a man waiting on a bus that doesn't come here.

Thursday morning he was gone. I never heard a car.

The bed was made. The towels were folded. On the desk was a pencil, sharpened down to almost nothing, and I don't put pencils in the cabins, I put pens. I'll tell you why that bothers me and then I'll stop going on about it. A pencil leaves. You wear it down and it's gone. A pen stays in the room and waits to be used again.

I wrote Thursday anyway. I wrote: Nothing. He said nothing. He was not the man I talked to Tuesday and I cannot say which of them I talked to.

Here's the part I don't say out loud, not to the girl who does the linens, not to my sister.

Other guests I can see. Ask me about the man who skipped out on me in 2014, ask me anything, I'll give you his face, his shoes, the way he held the key like it might be wet. Him I cannot see. Not Tuesday, not Wednesday. There's the stoop, and the rain, and a shape standing in it, and the whole of what he said, word for word, and no face on the man saying it.

I thought it was grief coming back sideways. I thought I was tired, or that I'd stopped looking at people years ago and was only now finding out. I thought a lot of things in that week.

Then in March a man in a wet canvas jacket walked in off the highway with no car and asked for the room at the end and said three nights, and I gave him four dollars back, and he didn't count it.

And I couldn't see him either.

I don't know what to do with that. I keep every guest. I'm the one who remembers the guests. That's the whole of the job and most of my life. Fifty years of faces and I have never lost one. So this is the first thing the register has ever failed to hold.

I sat with that a while. Then I picked the pen back up, because a thing that gets written once is a thing that happened, and I'm the only one left who saw it.

Date. Cabin four. He said his work and his towns and the woman he should have stayed with, and I cannot tell you his face.

There. Now it's somewhere that stays.