Check in at the Pine Away Motel (ARC)

by Katarina Bivald

  Michael had wanted to start with Derek, but unfortunately neither he nor Stacey were home. They live in separate apartment in his parents’ house, and Michael felt like he didn’t have any choice but to pop in and see his parents now that he was already here.

  “I was just passing by,” he says.

  “How lovely,” Joyce replies without any enthusiasm whatsoever. Still, she opens the door wide enough for him to step inside.

  The kitchen is full of warm, rustic colors, but it’s too big to feel either personal or cozy. There is a functional wooden table in the middle of the room, surrounded by what seems like an endless amount of counter space.

  They sit down opposite each other, a sea of polished wood between them.

  “How about a cup of coffee?” Michael eventually suggests.

  “How lovely,” Joyce says, but she doesn’t move.

  Michael gets up and searches the cupboards for some coffee. At least half of them are completely empty, and the rest contain roughly the same number of stainless-steel pots and Teflon-coated frying pans as we have at the motel. One of the cupboards contains enough canned food to survive an apocalypse.

  Michael finds a pack of instant coffee and decides to make do with that.

  “Okay, then,” he says.

  “How lovely,” says Joyce.

  “How are things, Mom?”

  Joyce gives him a blank look.

  “And Dad?”

  “Your father is always fine.”

  Joyce is perched on the very edge of her chair. She is thin and slender-limbed and looks more like a deer than anything, always primed to run. Her hands are in her lap, but she doesn’t seem relaxed. It actually feels more like she has no idea what to do with them. Her coffee is untouched on the table in front of her.

  “Any plans for the fall? I still don’t know how long I’ll be staying.”

  “How lovely.” Her voice is weaker now.

  “Mom…have you always been sure what you wanted in life? You never doubted where you were headed or wondered whether you made the right decisions?”

  “Oof,” Joyce says. She is out of her chair before I even have time to process her getting up.

  “I have to make lunch,” she says, picking a door at random. Unfortunately, it leads into the living room.

  Just a second later, the front door swings open. I hear Derek’s heavy, energetic footsteps in the hallway. “Mom!” he shouts. “I just need to borrow…” He peers around the kitchen, taking in Michael and the two coffee cups. “Where’s Mom?”

  “I think she ran off into the living room,” Michael says, confused.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing! I was just trying to get her to talk about her life.”

  “Nothing, you say,” Derek mutters sarcastically, shaking his head. He takes Michael by the arm and pulls him over to the front door. “Michael and I are leaving now!” he shouts over his shoulder, shoving Michael outside.

  I think I hear Joyce’s voice before the door swings shut behind them. It sounded like she said “How lovely.”

  “Just so she knows it’s safe to come out,” Derek says.

  “What did I do?”

  “Mom doesn’t like talking about herself.” He pauses to think. “Mom doesn’t like talking about anything.”

  He jumps into Michael’s car, and Michael stares at him in confusion.

  “Drive toward Elm Street,” Derek tells him.

  Michael seems much more relaxed with Derek than he was with his mother. He might hesitate for a second at being bossed around, but there is something so irresistible about falling back into the old childhood habit of following Derek. I sit down in the middle of the back seat so that I can rest my elbows on their seats and still be able to see them. Michael shakes his head at himself, but he is smiling, too, and I guess he must be thinking of all the times he followed his tough big brother on adventures.

  “How long has Mom been switched off like that?” he asks.

  “Has she ever liked reality? Why did you have to ask her about things? You know she doesn’t like thinking.”

  “I guess I knew that at one point in time.” Michael sounds hesitant. “But I don’t remember it always being this way. Shouldn’t we do something?”

  I wonder whether he is thinking up a new point for his list. Stop Mom from being so switched off.

  “Why?” Derek asks. “If you ask me, Mom’s the happiest person in this family.”

  “She ran off into the living room!”

  “What’s wrong with running away from things? It’s a goddamn talent. Mom’s definitely the smartest of all of us, not that that’s saying much.”

  Derek continues: “She might be switched off, and her social skills might leave a lot to be desired, but in her own little way, she manages to leave this town and reality and what the rest of us call life. She does it all the time. I’ve never done it, Dad’s never done it, and I doubt you’ve had much luck with it, either. We’ve had far more opportunities than Mom to get away from here, but she’s the only one who’s really managed it, and it’s all due to her internal resources.”

  “Internal resources?”

  “You should come over here one day and see her staring straight ahead. She’s the Mariota of escaping reality.”

  Typical Derek to use a football player as a sign of excellence.

  “She should write books,” Derek goes on. “Host a TV show. The art of not giving a damn and still smiling at everyone. If booze could switch me off like that, I’d never be sober.”

  “You think she secretly drinks?”

  “Not Mom, no. But the rest of the family probably do.”

  “And you? How’ve you been? Are you, uh, happy with your life?”

  “For God’s sake, Bro,” Derek begins, before changing tack. “Crap.” He slumps as low as he can in his seat and hisses: “Just keep driving.”

  It’s only once we reach the next intersection that he turns and looks back.

  “You think he saw me?”

  Michael glances in the rearview mirror. Coach Stevenson is standing on the sidewalk on Elm Street, shouting and shaking his fist in the air. We can’t hear what he’s saying, but his face is bright red and twisted in anger. As though we were some kind of idiotic referee in a football game.

  “Think so,” Michael says drily.

  Derek shrugs philosophically and sits up straight again. “Oh well, we got away,” he says.

  Michael turns to his brother. “Since when do you have to hide from Coach Stevenson?”

  “Since he started sharing how unhappy he was with an order he made through me. It should’ve been a good deal,” he adds indifferently. “I ordered team shirts from a company in China. I double-checked the spelling of every name several times. The foreign companies aren’t always great at American surnames. But everything was right!”

  “So why’s he so angry?”

  “They were a little on the small side. To put it mildly.” Derek can’t help but laugh. “They probably would’ve fit the kids’ team.”

  Michael doesn’t see the funny side of the situation. “You can’t keep hiding from him forever,” he says.

  “Are you kidding? That’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”

  “But it’s Coach Stevenson. He worshipped you.”

  “Yeah, well, times change.”

  “Never thought of getting a normal job?” Michael’s voice is excessively nonchalant, and I can tell that he is shaken by what Derek has become. He didn’t see it happen gradually like I did.

  “And what kind of job would that be, huh? Stacey would be beside herself. She’s been going on about it ever since we got married. I’m not going to give her the satisfaction. You can drop me off here.”

  They are driving by a small side road with no signs.

 
“How are you going to get home?”

  “I’m sure Jim’ll give me a ride. There are still a few people in town who like me.”

  * * *

  Michael drives back to the cabin and immediately turns his attention to his project. He makes coffee, throws his notepad onto the table, grabs his pen, and gets to work. He writes, strikes through, tears out a whole page, thinks, starts over. I’m sure he’s working on the list to avoid thinking about what Derek’s life has become. Michael is still determined to take charge of life using lists.

  I pat him on the shoulder and head off to the motel to see how MacKenzie is doing. I spot a cleaning cart outside one of the rooms and find her inside. Before long, Camila joins us.

  She sits down on the bed while MacKenzie cleans the bathroom. She is wearing a low-cut white shirt today, with jeans, boots, and a new sense of determination.

  MacKenzie is wearing a hoodie, a loose pair of jeans, and tiredness. I think it’s the scent of Camila’s perfume that she notices first, spiced and strong and fresh, a kind of tough sexiness that mixes with the smell of bleach.

  When MacKenzie emerges from the bathroom, Camila crosses her legs, leans forward, and eagerly says, “We can do more with the motel.”

  “Uh…” MacKenzie replies. Her eyes are drawn to Camila’s low-cut top.

  “We both know you’re not as indifferent as you pretend to be. You care.”

  MacKenzie forces herself to look up. “Do I?”

  “Yeah. You love this old place. You still care about the motel.”

  “Ah. The motel.”

  “So we should be able to do more. Redo things. Make it ours. It’s not Juan Esteban’s motel anymore.” She looks out of the window and smiles. “We could even buy a new sign. Something more…uniform, maybe?”

  MacKenzie isn’t smiling. “Camila, you can do whatever you want,” she says.

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to do it alone. I don’t want to take over your motel. I want to do it with you.”

  For some reason, MacKenzie blushes.

  “If you really want to do all that stuff, you should do it,” she says. “I mean it when I say the motel is yours. No, let me finish. I’ll try to help out, but I don’t know if… I don’t know if I can bring myself to be enthusiastic about it. I don’t know if I have the energy to be enthusiastic about anything right now. I don’t feel anything.”

  Some of the glow disappears from Camila’s eyes. “I understand,” she says, looking away.

  Her words don’t really seem to reassure MacKenzie. If anything, she looks disappointed. “All right,” she says, as though they have agreed on something.

  “I know that you don’t want to feel anything,” Camila says stubbornly. “And that’s okay, of course. But if we have to work here, we may as well do it properly. Things are starting to happen. I can feel it. We should be able to do more. I can do more.”

  MacKenzie throws the dirty towels into the laundry basket and grabs some fresh ones from the folded pile on the cleaning cart.

  Camila gets up and steps to one side so that MacKenzie can strip the bed. “I know I was only an assistant at the construction firm, but in reality I was left in charge of most things. When there weren’t any on-site emergencies going on, my boss preferred to spend his time trying to write movie scripts. Administration really wasn’t his thing. So I dealt with the accounting firm that looked after our books. I got them all the documents they needed, kept an eye on the cash flow, the accounts receivable and accounts payable, and I did most of the day-to-day discussion with clients and suppliers. Howard was a little…inconsistent. Unstructured.”

  “So you had to deal with everything?”

  Camila shrugs. “Howard gave his staff really generous health insurance. It covered my transition, and he let me take time off when I had my operations. That creates a certain sense of loyalty. There are so few trans people who get that kind of support from their employers, so I was grateful. Howard is generous by nature, and he was friendly as long as it didn’t require any personal effort from his side. I think he just thought it was easier to be cool.”

  The room is so small that they have to stand right next to one another, hemmed in by the chair in the corner, the bed, and the window out onto the parking lot. I’m on the other side of the bed, pressed up against the wall.

  “Still, it must’ve been asking a lot of him to let you take time off,” MacKenzie says. “If you looked after so much of the business.”

  Camila laughs. “I found my own temp and taught her how everything worked before I left. I’m not sure he even noticed I was gone. Maybe he just called her Camila the whole time. But the point of telling you all this is that I do actually know quite a lot about running a business. If I could take a look at our accounts, I can see whether I can come up with anything. Who knows? Maybe I’ll have a few ideas.”

  “If you want to go through boring numbers, why not?”

  “Only if it’s all right with you.”

  “It’s your motel. Knock yourself out.”

  * * *

  Camila spreads out balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements on the desk in front of her. I’m perched on the one small corner that isn’t covered in piles of old folders and printouts.

  She starts methodically, twelve years back. Skims through the reports. Moves on to the next year. After making her way through all of the folders, she gets up, stretches, grabs another cup of coffee, and starts over. She finds a notepad in our unsorted pile of cheap office materials, plus a pen advertising some kind of salvage company, and starts going through the files properly. She jots down a word or a figure from time to time, chews on the pen, and then moves on.

  Once she is finished, she finds MacKenzie in the parking lot. The hood of MacKenzie’s car is up, and she is hunched over the engine. She stands up as Camila approaches, oil and dirt on her cheek. Camila reaches out and wipes it away with her thumb. “Dirt,” she says with a smile.

  MacKenzie bends back down to the engine, but I’m sure I saw a flash of red on her cheeks.

  “Did you find anything in all the figures?” she asks.

  Camila leans against the car. “What happened three years ago?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You had unusually high staff costs. For eighteen months. Did we have an extra employee then?”

  MacKenzie reappears from beneath the hood. “Worried I’ve been embezzling your money?”

  “MacKenzie!”

  “I mean, you have been away a long time. Maybe the temptation got too much for me. I raised my own wage and opened a bank account in the Cayman Islands so that I can retire in the sun…”

  “The staff costs weren’t that high.”

  “I should have taken more, is that what you’re saying? But as you said, we have such small margins…”

  Camila hits her on the arm. “Come on. I’m just curious about the reason. And just to be clear, I wouldn’t have had anything against you taking the money and running off somewhere warm. You should have something to show for working so hard all this time. Though I guess I would’ve been annoyed if you hadn’t taken me with you.”

  “You, me, a beach, some palms…”

  “Heat,” Camila continues. The sun is shining, but there is no warmth in it. She shivers in the cold air. MacKenzie nods toward her jacket, which has been slung onto the roof of the car. It’s too small for Camila, but she drapes it over her shoulders.

  “Well, I don’t want to disappoint you,” MacKenzie says, “but unfortunately I don’t have an account in the Cayman Islands.”

  “I won’t bother chatting you up, then,” Camila mumbles under her breath.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. So what did you do with the money?”

  “Dolores was sick. She had to stop working for a while. Even with the health insurance we had, w
e weren’t sure she would be able to keep the house.”

  “Jesus, was she all right?”

  “She’s back in top form, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Still has the house, too.”

  “So you hired a temp to cover for her, or…?”

  “We raised Dolores’s wage.”

  “By how much?”

  MacKenzie shrugs. “One hundred forty percent.”

  “But that… So much… How did you manage to break even? I know you increased your staff costs, but not with anything close to that much.”

  “Oh, Henny and I took a pay cut. It’s like Henny said, she needed the money more than we did. And it all evens out in the end.”

  MacKenzie wipes her hands on an old handkerchief. She closes the hood of the car with a firm thud. “I know what you’re thinking,” she says.

  “What?”

  She pats the car. “Nothing works in this goddamn motel.”

  Camila gives MacKenzie a strange look. “Right,” she says. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  * * *

  By evening, a number of new points have appeared on Michael’s list. There are several sheets of paper spread out across his table, and it looks like he has decided to get Derek’s life in order. I guess he feels like someone has to. He has dismissed the idea of finding a job for his big brother but is determined to smooth things out between him and Coach Stevenson.

  On another sheet of paper, Michael has made a list of people to speak to about me. MacKenzie, Camila—even though she’s been away for so long—Dolores, Alejandro. Even Buddy and Clarence, mostly because he knows they hang around the motel and have plenty of time to spare. Dad is on the list, too, but with a question mark after his name. I suppose Michael has no idea of how to approach him. I could have told him that Dad didn’t know me, either.

  But Michael hasn’t written anything about how he is going to learn to like Pine Creek.

  Chapter 23

  Normal and Proud

  It started as a joke during early fall in our last year of high school. That’s how I remember it, anyway.