Check in at the Pine Away Motel (ARC)

by Katarina Bivald

  She takes his empty plate and cup. “It’s not my place to doubt the Lord,” she says. “But I really hope He’s doing the same for her up there in heaven.”

  * * *

  On his way out of the restaurant, Michael sees Buddy and Clarence sitting in the sun on Clarence’s usual bench, and he decides to go over and chat with them. They slide over to make room for him, and neither has anything against talking about me. There’s no room for me on the bench, so I sit down on the ground beside them.

  “A good woman, Henny,” Clarence says, filling his coffee cup from his hip flask. “And I want you to know that I’ve forgiven her for what she said about my dead wife.”

  Michael and Buddy are staring at him. I feel pretty shaken up, too. Surely I never said anything bad about his wife?

  “She said I would see her again in heaven!” Clarence’s dignity deserts him, and he knocks back the contents of his cup.

  “Wasn’t that was nice of her?” Michael asks.

  “Yeah, well, she couldn’t know that it’s the one thing I’m most scared of.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Seeing her again! The wife’ll have a thing or two to say to me, let me tell you, and she’ll have had plenty of years to practice. That woman knew more about my sins than God.”

  He takes another sip from his cup. “So you’re trying to get to know our Henny, are you?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “You won’t manage it. No one knows anyone else. Not really. We just see our own image of them. We don’t even know our damn selves.”

  “Do you know what Henny always said to me?” Buddy speaks up.

  “Booze?” Clarence asks, holding out his hip flask.

  “No. She said, ‘Hi, Buddy. How’s it going?’ She always had time for you, and she was always happy. Things aren’t the same now she’s gone. It’s those little things that make you feel welcome, you know? If you had a big problem or something that needed fixing, you’d go to MacKenzie. But it’s possible to feel down without really wanting to be helped, if you know what I mean. And then it was Henny that you wanted to see. Not to talk about your feelings, just to be with her. She was like…home.”

  That’s the most I’ve ever heard him say, and the most beautiful, too.

  “Take the whole thing with the Christmas tree,” he continues. Michael looks confused, but Clarence immediately knows what he is talking about. “I’d gotten hold of a Christmas tree. Thought it could be nice in the reception area, you know? But I’d, uh, misjudged the height.”

  “It was at least three feet too high,” Clarence adds.

  “Yeah, I was an idiot. And I said so, too. But MacKenzie just pulled out a saw and cut it in half. Henny insisted on putting up both halves in reception. It made it more unique, she said, because which other business in town had two Christmas trees? So MacKenzie might be good at fixing things, but it was Henny who made you feel good.”

  I don’t know whether I agree. In my eyes, it was always MacKenzie who made people feel good. I just helped out.

  There are two kinds of people who stay in cheap motels. Those who are only passing through, and those who don’t have anywhere else to go. For both, it’s a temporary thing. One just lasts a little longer than the other.

  Over the years, a number of people from town have found a temporary home with us at the motel. We’ve been a kind of safety net over the abyss—something that’s much closer than some would care to admit.

  The majority eventually find somewhere else to go. Sooner or later, they all move on. But here’s the interesting thing: sometimes, I think they were happier here. They were free. They enjoyed MacKenzie’s gallows humor and Dolores’ food; they started laughing again while they were here with us, possibly for the first time in a long while. The laughter always confused them, but once they had started, it came naturally. Deep down, their bodies still remembered what laughter felt like. They were able to rediscover it here, with us.

  And then they thought: This is only temporary, and then they moved on.

  No one came back. Ultimately, we probably just reminded them of some of the worst moments of their lives. As they rebuilt themselves, they also built up defensive walls, and they didn’t want to remember our particular brand of freedom, born as it was out of helplessness. The way the best freedom always is, if you ask me.

  * * *

  Throughout this whole conversation, Alejandro has been standing by the sign, taking pictures of it from different angles. He becomes Michael’s natural next port of call. Alejandro works extra shifts at the motel whenever we need help, and he also works part-time for a photographer in town. He spends his working life taking staged photos of bars, children, and pets, but he also likes to take pictures of the motel in his spare time. He says he loves it because there’s nothing touched up about it.

  “Henny?” he asks as he kneels down and snaps a picture of the dent in the sign where a drunk driver once…parked. “She was five years older than me, but I always thought of her like a little sister. There was something so innocent and vulnerable about her. She was so nice, I always thought that the world would gradually knock her down.”

  “Not the world,” I say. “A truck.”

  “Did it?”

  “No. At first, I thought, ‘Typical white woman. They can go through their whole lives being naive, without reality ever dealing them any serious blows.’ But then I thought that maybe kindness could be a self-defense strategy in and of itself. I assumed she was kind because she saw the world through rose-tinted lenses, and that her illusions would eventually be crushed. But she was nice because she didn’t have any illusions to lose. She knew how horrible the world could be, and that’s why she helped out whenever help was needed. You can be invincible if you don’t have any illusions.”

  He squats down to take yet another photo. I think he needs the distance the camera provides him to be able to go on.

  “She helped my mom when she got sick. Did you know that?” he says. “MacKenzie made sure I took a break from time to time, physically forcing me into the truck, throwing a bottle of whiskey into my lap, and driving me around while I cursed fate. Then she stopped the truck, looked me straight in the eye, and said, ‘I swear, Dolores is going to be fine.’ I can still remember it. It was like she was God and had power over life and death. And do you know the crazy part? I believed her.” He shakes his head as though to get rid of the memory and then quickly finishes his story. “Henny went to see Mom every day, and when she found out that Mom was struggling to keep up with the payments on the house, she just raised Mom’s wage.”

  He looks Michael straight in the eye. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t have done for Henny.”

  It sounds like he wants to warn Michael that he’ll crush him if he breaks my heart, but it’s a bit late for that.

  “What about you?” Michael asks. “I take it you don’t have any illusions, either. You see the world exactly as it is?”

  The dogged expression on Alejandro’s face is chased away by laughter. “Me? I’m the worst kind of romantic. Enough dreams to be stupid enough to try to realize them, but realistic enough to know that I never will. So, I take portraits of kids all day, and I’m grateful for that. And now: pictures of Mom’s food. I started an Instagram account for the motel. Right now, there are only five pictures of different dishes from breakfast on there, plus one of the back of the motel—with the stream, the haze over the meadow, and the pale-purple mountains in the background.”

  “Sounds beautiful.”

  “Sentimental crap. But you can’t take pictures of the rest of the motel. Everything just looks small and worn out.”

  “How many followers do you have?”

  “Seventeen. If you include me.”

  * * *

  “Alejandro is wrong,” I tell Michael.

  It’s evening, and we are lying on our bac
ks in bed. I can hear from his breathing that he isn’t asleep; we’re both just staring up at the ceiling.

  “I used to have illusions,” I say. “No one is born without them. It’s like the opposite of clothes. We’re born naked, and the older we get, the more clothes we put on, until eventually we’re ancient and wrapped up in shawls and warm sweaters and layers of scarves and socks. With illusions, it’s the other way around. We’re born wrapped up in them, but life takes them away from us one at a time. I kept mine for longer than most people, because life was kind to me and I wasn’t imaginative enough to think up things that I hadn’t experienced.

  “I didn’t connect MacKenzie’s bruises with Dad shaking his head, for example. ‘Poor girl,’ he said, and I always used to think, MacKenzie? There was no one stronger or braver than her. Then she broke her arm. She had been climbing a tree, she said, but Dad just shook his head again. Another day, she said, ‘Let’s do something. I don’t want to go home. Dad won’t have crashed yet.’ I lost another illusion right then, when I realized that there were fathers who drank and were violent and that there were homes people didn’t want to go back to.”

  I don’t want to think about this. I want to stay in that blissful summer. But I’ve started to realize that it was just the beginning. I can’t think about the story Michael and I share if I don’t also think about what came next.

  And I don’t want to do that.

  “Memories can be so unpredictable,” I say.

  Michael hasn’t closed the curtains, and the moonlight is filtering in through the window, illuminating the cracks in the ceiling. I trace them with my eyes, as if I’m trying to unravel a ball of yarn, one crack at a time, but they quickly become a confusing tangle.

  “The last year of high school,” I say, “I lost a lot of my illusions then, too. But…I was also so happy. That’s what I find so hard to understand. It’s like there are two different stories in my head. The one about you and me, and the one about everything else. I’ve been thinking about us this whole time, but I’ve always refused to think about that damn campaign. It upset me too much. I couldn’t have stayed here if I was thinking about it constantly. Can you understand that? But I guess it’s just a story, isn’t it? We met as a result of it, and we went our separate ways because of it, too.”

  PINE CREEK GAZETTE

  FORMER SPORTS STAR SHARES THE LOVE WITH FOOTBALL TEAM

  To date, no one has managed to break Derek Callahan’s record, but if we’re to believe the man himself, it’s high time someone did. This is the team that may do just that.

  The Pine Creek Gazette was present as Derek Callahan and Coach Stevenson, two legends from the world of Pine Creek football, joined the varsity team to visit our eager youngsters. Each junior player was given a shirt bearing the name and number of a varsity player, and that wasn’t the only thing offered. There was plenty of solid advice, as well as jokes and fun.

  Coach Stevenson is looking forward to seeing Derek Callahan’s record broken, and Callahan himself agreed that it was about time.

  “I’m sure one of these heroes will manage it,” he told the Pine Creek Gazette.

  HISTORY TO BE TORN DOWN OR MADE

  Some things in Pine Creek have been around for so long that they have become historical monuments. Whether they appeared by accident or design, they have, over the years, become a constant in our town. If the elms on Elm Street suddenly started to grow, many of us would surely miss the old trees. No one remembers who first made the decision to paint our high school baby blue, nor the decision not to repaint it when there was graffiti that needed to be covered up. Yet the town’s patchy school building is now part of our collective memory.

  Few historical monuments have been the source of such fierce debate as the sign—and the creative liberties taken with it—at Juan Esteban Alvarez’s motel. To some, it is an example of the American dream. Seventeen-year-old Alvarez arrived in San Francisco and bought a dilapidated motel in the far north, soon setting to work on renovating and replenishing it. He managed to build his cabins, but never got around to the bar or the pool.

  The most recent additions to the sign were not Juan Esteban’s. Instead, they bear witness to the dark history of both our town and state. They are a reminder of the way our town was divided by forces that tried to play one group against another.

  It is the Gazette’s hope that we continue to remember our history, even if—as sources suggest—the sign disappears tomorrow.

  Chapter 26

  Microwaves in Every Room!

  Microwave ovens in every room! hits the ground with a thud, momentarily overpowering Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball. It’s a depressing but fitting CD for tearing down a monument.

  The signs are so rusted together that they have to be sawed apart. Buddy is sitting calmly in the cherry picker, armed with a saw and pair of construction headphones, humming along with “Death to My Hometown” in an uncannily cheery way. Hmm hmm hmm, DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN, hmm hmm hmm. That’s what it sounds like, and then he gets to work on the next part of the sign.

  The restaurant is full of people wolfing down bacon and scrambled eggs, their eyes fixed on the spectacle. Several have taken their coffees outside so that they can watch from the parking lot. Others don’t even bother buying anything. They just park and lean against the hoods of their cars, watching either the destruction of history or the march of progress, depending on who you ask.

  A man with a rusty Toyota, a red cap, and slightly greasy hair mumbles, “I’ll be damned if I’m not going to miss the wretched thing.”

  “Should be put in a museum,” a man whose name I think is Jack agrees.

  That seems to be the general consensus.

  “It was unique, if nothing else,” says another man. “Who knows what boring crap they’ll put up now.”

  MacKenzie and Camila watch as the sign comes down. I guess they can’t stay away as piece after piece of our history falls.

  Clarence waves to them from his bench. “I wouldn’t miss this for all the microbreweries in Portland!” he shouts cheerily.

  “Come on,” MacKenzie whispers, pulling Camila over to the windowless stretch of wall nearby, where they can be alone. A small tree and a couple of bushes separate them from the doors into check-in, shielding them almost completely from view as they watch the sign being dismantled. Both have their hands in their pockets and seem to be playing it cool, but their shoulders keep brushing together, and I can’t help thinking that it looks deliberate.

  “I had no idea it would feel so weird,” Camila says.

  “It’s part of our history.”

  “I can’t decide whether I want to watch or not.”

  “Same.”

  Forest views! is the next part of the sign to come crashing down. Several people start clapping; there’s something quite liberating about being able to enjoy such wholehearted destruction.

  I’m worried about Juan Esteban’s spirit and keep stealing guilty glances toward his dark office. Maybe he’s still up there, being forced to watch all this.

  The men in the restaurant—and they are almost all men—have turned their chairs so they can see out through the window. Their fries lie cold and untouched in front of them. They drink their coffee, and Bruce sings about taking care of our own.

  “I mean, I know the sign lied,” someone out in the parking lot says, “but did it do any harm? Everyone knew there was no pool.”

  “Or bar.”

  MacKenzie and Camila glance at each other. MacKenzie’s eyes glitter, and Camila smiles and shakes her head.

  “It is a bit of a shame,” someone else says, but he is interrupted by scattered cheers.

  No to Measure 9 has just fallen.

  Both MacKenzie and Camila look away.

  * * *

  The crowd thins out during the afternoon, but people come flooding back to the motel t
hat evening to watch the new sign go up. Watching things being torn down may be more exciting than seeing things being built, but a new sign is still an event. It demands ritual.

  “Cheers,” Clarence says, taking a swig from his cup.

  “Almost time,” someone else says.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me if they’re expecting a speech,” MacKenzie tells Camila. “In which case, you’ll have to do it.”

  “Me?” Camila blurts out.

  “It’s your motel.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  But MacKenzie just gives her a gentle shove toward the new sign.

  “I hope the damn thing works,” Camila mutters. She reluctantly makes her way toward it, and smiles stiffly at everyone she passes.

  When Buddy hits Pause on his CD player, everyone knows that the time has come.

  “As I’m sure you all agree, the old sign was something of an institution,” Camila says in a loud, matter-of-fact voice. “But sometimes we have to move on and embrace change. We wanted a sign that would give a better idea of what we want the motel to be, and what the motel could mean for the town. We hope you’ll like it.”

  A few people clap. Everyone looks up at the sign.

  Everyone but MacKenzie. She is staring at Camila.

  In the silence that follows, we hear the click of Miguel hitting the switch and the buzzing sound as the lights come on. Suddenly, the parking lot is illuminated. Yellow, blue, and red lights flicker onto the upturned faces.

  A new sign. Uniform. Honest.

  A few people laugh, and then there is more applause.

  “Good choice,” someone shouts.

  “Definitely more accurate now.”

  “My family has been pining away here for generations,” says someone else.

  “Refreshingly honest,” says Clarence.

  PINE AWAY MOTEL AND CABINS

  MacKenzie has treated herself to one small extra sign. A memory of sorts, or possibly a tribute: