Authors: Cameron Judd
Lorene drained the last of her beer and added one more empty to the collection at her feet. She wondered aloud why it was taking her husband so long to finish such simple business as securing a room. There were only three other cars in the lot and the VACANCY light glowed bright. Renting a room should have taken a couple of minutes.
Four more minutes passed. “Honey,” Lorene said to her daughter, “do Mama a favor and run up to the front office where Daddy went. Don’t go in and don’t let him see you. Just peek in the window and come back and tell me if there’s some pretty young thing in there, keeping his attention. Something’s sure got him slowed down, and there’s usually a woman involved when that happens.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“And honey, if he catches you, tell him you came up there looking for a restroom. I don’t want him knowing I sent you to spy on him.”
“Okay, Mama.” The girl was out of the car in half a moment, trotting toward the office.
EMMIE’S PEEP INTO THE front office window revealed her father leaning on the check-in counter, his back to her. He was talking intently to the night clerk, a red-haired woman in her early twenties wearing over-abundant makeup that made her eyes look striking in an otherwise average face. Emmie liked the look of the makeup. She told herself she’d make her own eyes look that way someday, and edged closer to the window to get a clearer look.
Her motion caught the eye of the clerk, who squinted toward the window and made some comment to Donnie that caused him to turn and take a look for himself.
The little spy was caught, and knew it. Remembering her mother’s instructions and knowing she could not now simply run back to the car, Emmie screwed up her courage, stepped over to the office door, and entered, hoping for the best.
“What are you doing here, girly?” her father snapped at her. “You were supposed to stay in the car.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” the girl said. “I gotta pee real bad.” She performed a very believable got-to-go dance, the performance enhanced by the fact it wasn’t entirely fake. They’d been on the road a good while.
Donnie glared. “Can’t you just hold it a couple more minutes, girly?” he said. “I’m almost done here. Did your mama send you?”
“No, Daddy. I just gotta pee, that’s all. I can’t wait no longer.”
“Yeah, I betcha.”
The red-haired young woman, momentarily more business-like with a watcher present, was taking a room key out of a cubbyhole on the wall behind her. She handed it to Donnie.
“Here you are, deary … room seven. It’s one of the better ones, fresh painted not two months back, and the carpet is new. A full bed and a twin-sized, plus a roll-away you’ll find folded up in the closet.” She paused. “There’s another roll-away just like it in a little room off the office here. Easy for me to get to in case I need to close the window blinds and lie down for some reason or another.” She smiled at him and maybe winked, though Emmie wasn’t sure about the wink.
Donnie took the key and muttered thanks to the young woman, who went on: “I think you’ll find the room is comfortable, but if you have any problems with it or need anything during the night – and I mean
anything
– you just come down here and let me know. I’m here in the office all night long tonight. All … night … long.”
“I’ll sure ’nough remember that,” Donnie said, and the red-head smiled. This time the wink was unmistakeable.
The clerk turned to the little girl. “Honey, we don’t have a public restroom up here, but there’s a little one off the hall there. It’s supposed to be just for us who work here, but it won’t hurt a thing if you use it. Tonight nobody’s here but me, so the boss won’t know. And what he don’t know don’t hurt him, right?” She paused and looked meaningfully at Donnie before she went on: “Yeah, with just me here, I could do about anything I might want to do here tonight and not get in trouble for it, because the boss won’t never know. Anything at all. You reading me, Donnie?
Anything.
”
“I read you, Amber. That is what you said your name was? Amber?”
“That’s right. Amber Goode. But for the life of me I have the worst kind of trouble living up to that last name.”
Donnie grinned and leaned a little closer.
Young though she was, Emmie understood everything that was going on. She had learned by her eighth birthday that adults were seldom as subtle as they imagined themselves to be, and children seldom as uncomprehending.
She weaved around the check-in counter toward the tiny one-seater restroom Amber pointed her to.
“Cute little girl,” Amber said to Donnie. “Except for her dark hair she could almost pass for my little sister, Lisa, when she was that age.”
“Little sister?” Donnie said. “My my! How old is she now?”
“Seventeen, and pretty as a picture. I’ve had people tell me they think I look nice – sometimes they even say I’m pretty – but it’s Lisa who really got the looks in the Goode family. I got the red hair and she got the pretty face and the long blonde hair. Life ain’t fair.”
“It ain’t. But it ain’t dealt you too bad a hand, Amber. You’re a fine-looking lady. The kind of fine that old Donnie here likes a lot.”
With the restroom door closed, the little girl could still hear the adults out front, but could not clearly make out what they said. She didn’t really want to, because the way her daddy was behaving made her sad.
AS PROMISED, THERE WAS a rollaway bed folded up inside the closet of Room Seven. Emmie was glad for it. Dale would sleep on the rollaway, leaving the more comfortable twin bed to her.
Emmie turned on the small television and fumbled with the antenna in a failing attempt to bring in a picture. Her mother was draining yet another beer as Donnie and son busied themselves with getting the family’s meager luggage indoors, Donnie all the while muttering about the need to get back to that garage before it got any later.
Within minutes Lorene was passed out and snoring on the larger bed, her hand loosely gripping the empty beer bottle. The bathroom door opened and Donnie emerged, just in time to catch his son sneaking a cigarette from Lorene’s pack of menthols on the bedside table. “Put it back, boy! Ain’t good for you. Makes you short of wind, gives you bad breath. Girls don’t like bad breath. Runs ’em right off.” He looked at his unconscious wife sprawled on her back across the bed, mouth flopped open. “On the other hand, maybe running ’em off ain’t always the worst thing you can do.”
Dale slid the cigarette back into the pack. Donnie, going out the door, said over his shoulder, “You kids stay here with Mama. If she wakes up, tell her I’ve gone back to that garage to work on the car, like we talked about.” Then he was gone and the boy took the cigarette again, and a second for good measure. He’d be outside smoking in minutes.
The Mercury’s engine, cooled now, started with a rumble. Tires slung gravel as Donnie left the parking lot.
YOUNG EMMIE STOOD IN the door of Room Seven and watched her father’s car make a right turn onto the road. Despite his talk of car repair, she had expected him merely to pull around and park nearer the motel office and sneak in to rejoin Amber the desk clerk.
The precocious little girl developed an instant suspicion. She turned to her brother, who was filching a matchbook from the bedside table.
“I’m going to take a walk,” Emmie said. “If Mama wakes up tell her I’ll be right back.”
“Where you going?”
“Got to see if I’m right about something,” she said, and darted out the door and across the gravel parking lot before Dale could ask any more questions.
THE BIG LIVER-SPOTTED MAN on the porch was sixty years old, looked seventy-five, and could have been a waxwork figure dumped in a sun-warmed metal porch chair to soften. His belly and sides bulged beneath his dirty v-neck tee-shirt, pressing the arms of the chair. He watched Donnie walking toward him from the garage.
“Hello, young fellow,” the man said in a gravelly voice. “Did you get your car-fixing done?”
“I did, sir, and I ’preciate you and your sons letting me use your place and your tools.”
“Just one’s my son. The other’s a nephew. Thermostat, was it?”
“Yep. Easy repair, except for having forgot to bring my tools with me. You folks saved my bacon. And didn’t charge me a penny for use of the space and tools. Mighty nice.”
“We’re neighborly folk. Name’s Millard,” the big man said, and put out a big hand. First name or last, he didn’t say.
“I’m Donnie. Good to meet you, sir.” Donnie shook Millard’s hand as his eyes darted over to the other person on the porch, a teenaged girl in a thin white frock, standing beside a porch support to which she was literally leashed by the neck. Just like Emmie had said. Donnie also had noticed the girl as they drove past, though he’d not been sure about the leash until now. It was the girl on the porch, much more than the garage and tools, that had drawn him back to this place.
“What can I do for you, son?” Millard asked.
Donnie glanced over toward the girl and gave a nervous, flickering grin. “It ain’t what you can do for me, sir, but maybe what this here young lady can. I seen her over here and it got to wondering if … well, if maybe there was more than the use of garage space that a man could get for himself around here. And I thought maybe you were her … uh, uh, business manager, you might say. If I’ve got the right idea about the situation.”
Millard cocked a brow. “Just what are you saying to me, young man?”
Donnie wondered if he’d blundered. Nothing to do now but play it out. “I think you probably know what I’m talking about. I hope so, anyway. But if I’m reading all this the wrong way, there’s no disrespect or harm intended by it, and I’ll just ask your pardon and move on.”
Millard’s meaty face broke into a grin and he winked slyly. “You’re a man with an eye for reading a situation, I can see. You betcha you can get more than garage space here. But it’s only the garage space that you get for free.”
Donnie glanced at the girl again and nodded. “No problem. I figured that was the way it’d be. Who is she?”
Millard chuckled and leaned forward in the chair, eyes glittering, elbows resting on his broad knees. “Who?”
“Who you reckon? This pretty little gal right here.”
“Son, that there gal don’t exist!”
Donnie took out a cigarette, lit it and wondered if he’d stumbled upon some sort of insane clan of rednecks. He offered a smoke to the old man, who declined, declaring that, while his son over in the garage loved his cigarettes, he himself had never smoked.
Donnie took a long, filtered drag and blew the smoke upward toward the porch ceiling. “She ‘don’t exist,’ you tell me. Hell, old man, I can see her right there! I’m close enough to touch her. Don’t play games with me.”
Millard laughed wheezingly, then said, “I’m messing with you, son, just messing with you. What I mean is, Junie there don’t exist in no
’ficial
way. No sosha-scurity number, no birth certificate, never set foot in a doctor’s office or health department, never had a shot, never been to school a day and never will.”
“Can she talk?”
“She can talk – hell, we even taught her to read – but she’s been taught to stay quiet most all the time. Smart as a whip, though. I know it for a fact.”
“Where’d she come from?”
“Her mama, gal name of Sadie, was my older son Roger’s woman for a time. They never got married, just kind of cohabertated or whatever that word is – and Sadie birthed Junie here. Roger wasn’t Junie’s father, though. Sadie wasn’t showing yet when Roger met her, and never really showed much even later on, being a big fat gal, but she was knocked up with Junie already and likely had no sure notion who the father was. Sadie was loosey-goosey for anything wearing pants, y’see. Other than that, she was a good old gal. Tough as nails, too. She never even let on to anybody that she was expecting, so Roger was pretty much the only one who knew it, Sadie looking big as a house even when she wasn’t pregnant. Junie here come into this world in a barn, just like baby Jesus, which I figure makes her special. That very barn over yonder, matter of fact.” He pointed. “Sadie got hit with her birthing cramps while she was setting on a stool in that barn milking a cow. No doctor, no midwife, nobody at all around. Sadie whelped that baby girl out of herself with not a lick of help. Cut the cord with a rusty paring knife that was lying on the barn floor. She held her baby in her arms and laid there for a spell in her own birthing mess, cleaned up her baby with a stray rag and puddle water, then got up and carried baby Junie up to the house when she heard Roger driving in from his road department job with the county. She walked through the kitchen door after him, handed him the baby, and headed for the stove, saying she’d cook up something for supper. That’s what I mean by Sadie being tough. But she never cooked no supper … she kind of give out and fell down instead. Nothing serious, just fainted. Roger took Junie to the crib they had bought for the baby, then carried Sadie to the bathtub – even though she weighed a right smart more than he did – and washed her up and revived her. He was good to that woman, Roger was. A good boy, Roger was.”
“Nobody ever brought in a doctor or nothing?”
“Never. Not for neither one of them, mother or baby. No need for it. Junie was fine, and Sadie was too. They never announced about Junie being born … Sadie’s family, over in Hawkins County, don’t know about Junie to this day.”