The Missing Place

by Sophie Littlefield

  “A per what?”

  “An increase in the rate you are charging her. To make up for the added use of your resources.”

  “Well, all right, then, because tanks are going to have to be taken care of twice as fast, plus there’s all that gas. And look, I could’ve called the cops on you. Almost did, look out my kitchen window and seen a stranger standing in my yard.”

  Colleen bit back a retort and forced a tight smile on her face. “I’m so glad you didn’t. I just had to call my husband, and I didn’t want to disturb Shay.”

  “That woman’s still asleep?”

  “Is it any of your business?”

  They both turned to look at Shay, who’d come out into the yard with a plaid blanket draped around her shoulders, her cigarettes and lighter in her hands. Her hair was a wild halo around her face. Smudged makeup ringed her eyes. “I’m not paying you rent to keep track of when I sleep, Brenda.”

  “I didn’t tell you she could stay,” the woman huffed. “And I told you no smoking, it’s a fire hazard.”

  Shay walked to the alley that ran behind the house and calmly lit up. “Don’t worry, I won’t smoke on your property. ’Sides, the stove doesn’t even work in this shitty tin can.”

  “You don’t like it, good luck finding something else.”

  The argument had an air of lifelong hostility, as though Shay and Brenda were sisters, not strangers. “We’re grateful to be staying here,” Colleen said quickly. “If you’ll just let me know about the per diem . . .”

  “And make sure you don’t run that generator all around the clock,” Brenda added, turning her back on Shay. “You don’t have to have it on all the time. You’re just wasting gas and it won’t make it a speck warmer in there.”

  “All right,” Colleen said. “Thanks so much.” She waited until Brenda went back inside to go stand with Shay in the alley.

  “Fuckin’ cold out here,” Shay said. “Look, I wish I could offer you some coffee, but the stove—”

  “Doesn’t work,” Colleen finished her sentence with a game smile. “Um, I know it’s gauche to ask, but just how much are you paying her to stay here?”

  “Well, I gave her two hundred on Tuesday and I told her I’d give her another couple hundred tomorrow. That’s three hundred for the week plus a deposit on next week so she doesn’t rent it out to someone else.”

  “Three hundred a week?” Colleen was stunned.

  “Yeah. Now you see why I hate that bitch? Here’s the thing that makes it worse—it never even occurred to her to rent it out until I got here. Then the minute she sees she can make some cash on it, she jacks up the price.”

  “How did you even find her?”

  “So this is the best part. When I was on the road I started calling up here. Taylor had told me about the housing shortage, but I went ahead and tried the motels anyway.”

  “I did too,” Colleen admitted.

  “Yeah. Fat lot of good that did. Then I called city hall. Took me three tries to even get anyone to answer over there, and then they tell me I’m crazy to try. Suggested I try Minot. That’s a good hour and a half from here, but by the time I hit Montana I was desperate enough I tried them too. Figured worst case I’d drive over during the day, drive back to sleep.”

  “Let me guess—nothing there, either?”

  “Nope. Only when I got hold of the chamber of commerce there, they told me that they got whole families sleeping in the basement of a church, and that gave me an idea. I pulled over the next place that had Wi-Fi and I started calling churches in Lawton. I got this one lady who sounded nice. Like she gave a shit, you know? And then I told her about Taylor, and . . .”

  Her voice trailed off and she stared out past Colleen’s shoulder. The day was slowly brightening, and a few rays of sunlight glinted off the windows on the opposite side of the street. “Well. It’s hard, talking about him, you know? Yeah, you know. Anyway, this lady at the church is the mother-in-law of this girl Brenda works with, and she knew about the motor home because I guess Brenda’s ex-husband used to hunt with her boyfriend. So she knew it had a generator and all, and she called Brenda up for me. ’Course I doubt she has any idea what Brenda’s charging me.”

  “Look, I’ll be glad to pay it,” Colleen said briskly. “I mean, you did all the legwork, and you let me stay.” A thought occurred to her, and she flushed. “I’m sorry, that—I mean, is it all right if I stay? I’m absolutely happy on the, um, table and I’ll buy more blankets today, and I can—”

  “Shut up,” Shay said. “Of course you can stay. What else are you going to do? Besides, we need to work together now. It doesn’t make any sense for us to duplicate our efforts, you know? With two of us, it’ll be harder for people to close doors in our faces.”

  Colleen thought about her vague plan from yesterday, to rent a car, set up a headquarters for her search in her motel room. It all seemed ludicrously naïve now. “Do you already have next steps in mind?”

  “I figure best thing is for us to get a shower and something to eat and go over what we both know. Maybe we’ll come up with something that way. Then we can head over to the lodge. There’s a guy there that might talk to us today—I got shut down when I tried yesterday. I figure someone over there has to know something. The Hunter-Cole crew, someone on the staff, something. And also they have Taylor’s things; they were hunting them down for me. I bet they have Paul’s too.”

  Colleen flinched at the thought of collecting her son’s belongings. Wouldn’t that be tantamount to admitting he wouldn’t be coming back for them? She could sense the despair slithering into the cracks in her composure. But that couldn’t happen. She couldn’t fall apart; she’d been in Lawton less than twelve hours.

  “A shower sounds good,” she said briskly. “Will Brenda let us come into the house to use hers?”

  Shay laughed. She had an unexpectedly lush laugh, at odds with her voice, which was cigarette-rough and almost coarse. “She didn’t offer. But I’ve got something better. You’re in for an education.”

  six

  SHAY CARRIED HER toiletries and a change of clothes in a pillowcase. Colleen used the laundry bag that matched her luggage. Shay gave her a washcloth she’d bought at Walmart, a thin orange one that she said was buy one, get one free.

  “Now that’s luck,” Shay said, and Colleen couldn’t tell if she was kidding.

  Shay’s car turned out to be the old white Explorer parked across the street. As she worked on the windshield using an ice scraper with the price sticker still attached, Colleen noted a mismatched side panel and several dents that had been patched and primed but not painted.

  She watched for a couple of minutes before she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Will you let me do that?”

  Shay handed her the scraper, eyebrows raised. Colleen, wishing she’d brought thicker gloves than her thin leather driving ones, scored a crosshatch of scratches in the ice with the point of the scraper, then chipped away the segmented areas with brief, hard jabs of the blade. A fine dusting of ice blew in her face as the ice came off in chunks, her body warming to the task.

  “Damn,” Shay said admiringly.

  “I didn’t get to park my car in a garage until I was thirty,” Colleen said, feeling awkwardly proud. “I’ve been scraping windshields since I was a kid. My dad used to give me a quarter to do his before work.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “Maine. Little inland town called Limerock. My dad worked for the railroad.”

  Inside the car, they put their hands in the blast of the heating vents, waiting for the wipers to sweep away the last of the snow. Colleen tried not to look like she was checking out the interior. The leather seats were worn and split, the seams popped and the foam visible underneath. A feather-and-bead ornament swayed gently from the rearview mirror. In the console were a handful of coins, a half-empty pack of gum, and a cheap lighter. The cup holder bore a dried coffee ring.

  But other than the ring, the car was surprisingly tid
y. Colleen had anticipated crumpled fast-food bags, a smell of stale coffee and unwashed flesh, dirt in all the crevices. Instead, it was every bit as clean as her Lexus back home.

  Shay eased the Explorer into drive and did a tight three-point turn, heading back into town.

  “Jesus, how can you stand to drive in this stuff? I’m a nervous wreck,” she said, turning onto Fourth Avenue, Lawton’s four-lane main street. Behind them, a truck bore down at what seemed an unsafe speed, tapping the horn as he passed.

  “You get used to it, I guess,” Colleen said, watching the scenery go by. The town looked cleaner in the light of day, dusted with fresh snow, but also less appealing. The busy traffic didn’t make up for the fact that the buildings they passed were run-down, low-slung brick and cinder-block shops appointed with modest signage and fronted with slushy parking lots. A huge billboard over a church parking lot advertised a cigarette shop. A school bus passed in the other direction, its wipers resolutely pushing off the swirling snow that had started up again.

  Shay pulled into a massive gas station with two sets of bays, one for trucks and one for cars. Pickups mostly kept to the car side, but a jacked-up model with enormous tires idled next to the pumps on the truck side. A sign large enough to be seen from the other end of town said STAR SUPER PLAZA FUEL—SHOWERS—DINER—HOT COFFEE—24 HOURS. The word CLEAN flashed in neon underneath.

  Shay found a space up next to the restaurant and cut the engine.

  “Here?” Colleen asked.

  “Yeah, what did you expect?”

  “I don’t know.” Actually she’d thought Shay might have found a health club, perhaps even a nice one. “Women can go in there? I mean—are there separate facilities for men and women?”

  “Nope, it’s just one big showerhead that sprays in every direction. You have to be aggressive, find yourself an opening and squeeze on in.” When Colleen was too horrified to respond, Shay flashed her a tight grin before opening her car door. “Come on, of course they have separate. You get your own private bathroom. Free shampoo and conditioner too, but I like to bring my own. And definitely you’re going to need some shower shoes, because I don’t trust them to disinfect enough after some of these guys, no matter how clean it looks in here.”

  In the convenience store, amid aisles of snack foods and coolers full of soft drinks, Colleen found rubber flip-flops and a package of hair elastics, and joined Shay in line.

  “Don’t buy those, I’ve got plenty,” Shay said, eyeing the elastics.

  “Oh. Well. I kind of need one now, to put my hair up.”

  “You’re not going to wash it?”

  “Um . . . maybe not.” Colleen washed her hair only every few days; it was part of a regimen recommended by her colorist to preserve her color, rinsing only with cool water and using sulfate-free products.

  “Well, here, then, you can have mine.” Shay twisted her own ponytail out of its band and handed it over. A few long curly strands were knotted to it.

  “Thank you,” Colleen said, looping it over a finger, trying not to show her distaste.

  “It’s probably going to be half an hour before our names come up. We might as well get some coffee.”

  “You mean for the shower?”

  “Yeah, lot of these guys are living in their cars. They come in here to clean up after work.”

  “After work?”

  “Yeah, night shift gets off at seven. So they get back to town and come here for a shower and a meal, then go crash.”

  “But they can’t sleep in their cars—not in weather like this!”

  Shay laughed. “I’m not saying I’d want to do it,” she said, as they neared the head of the line. “But I would have if I had to, if Brenda hadn’t come through. I talked to this one guy, he wasn’t hardly older than Taylor. He’s been in his car all week, got a job his first day up here but there was a delay on his room in the camp. Says he turns the car on three times a night and runs the heater to warm up and goes back to sleep. ’Course if it was me, I’d be having to pee every time I woke up. I’d probably pee in a Big Gulp cup rather than open the car door and let all that cold air in. Yeah, two showers,” she added, to the harried-looking clerk.

  “I’ll get those,” Colleen said primly, laying the flip-flops on the counter along with her credit card.

  “You don’t have to,” Shay said, a slight edge to her voice. “I have money.”

  “Oh, I didn’t—I mean, I’m happy to,” Colleen stuttered, as the clerk waited. She gave the credit card a little push, willing the clerk to pick it up. After a painful moment, she did. “We can settle up later,” Colleen said quietly.

  Shay muttered something unintelligible, turning away. Colleen signed the slip quickly and followed her to the restaurant, where a waitress thrust laminated menus at them.

  “Anywhere you can find, dolls,” she said as she moved down the counter, refilling coffee cups. “I’ll send Petey out to bus soon’s I get a minute.”

  Every table in the place was occupied, but two men were in the process of leaving. Colleen inhaled deeply: coffee, bacon, a not-unpleasant note of burned potatoes. And aftershave—a masculine smell she associated with her father. Paul took after Andy, the pair of them insisting she buy only unscented soap and deodorant and shaving cream, and the shock of the forgotten scent kept her rooted to the spot for a moment, her father’s memory startlingly present.

  Martin Hockemeyer would have been at home here, a thought that made Colleen wistful. She had never been particularly close to her father, and he had died when Paul was in grade school after their visits had diminished to once-yearly trips to Florida. Even in old age, Martin had been a man’s man, puttering around their trailer park wearing a tool belt and fixing things for the widows while her mother gardened in her sunhat, beaming with thin and flinty pride.

  “Move,” Shay said, digging into the small of Colleen’s back with a knuckle. “Else we’ll lose that table.”

  But the waiting customers stepped respectfully aside. “Ma’am,” one said as they passed, touching his cap in such a perfect imitation of Martin that Colleen briefly wondered if she’d conjured him from her imagination.

  The men who were leaving wore bulky earth-colored coats over jeans and enormous boots. One of them pulled on the kind of hat that some of the kids used to wear at Paul’s high school, what Colleen thought of as a Berenstain Bear hat, corduroy with a plush lining and ear flaps. At home they were a style statement, if a clumsy one. Here, she suspected they were strictly utilitarian.

  “We left a mess for you girls,” the man in the hat said in a rueful drawl. He pulled a wad of napkins from the dispenser and wiped at the toast crumbs and syrup smears on the table.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Shay said, tossing her hair over her shoulders before plopping down in the chair and unzipping her coat. Colleen had noticed that Shay became unconsciously flirtatious around men, her voice throatier and a sashay in her walk. “Drive safe.”

  Colleen slipped off her own coat and draped it over her chair. She hung her purse over the coat and, after a brief hesitation, set her laundry bag on the floor, since there was nowhere else to put it. She avoided looking at the plates stacked at the edge of the table; a brief glance at the bright yellow smear of yolk, the rinds of a pancake stack, had made her faintly nauseous.

  A busboy came by with a tub and cleared everything away in a clanking flurry, followed by a sweet-faced waitress with a red ponytail and at least half a dozen earrings in each ear. She wiped the table with a rag that smelled of bleach and Windex, lifting the salt and pepper shakers to clean underneath. She pocketed the tips—one of the men had left a ten, the other a fan of ones—and dug her pad from her pocket.

  “What are you having?”

  “We just got on the shower list,” Shay said. “Think we have time to eat before we come up?”

  The waitress looked over at the kitchen and squinted at the row of orders clipped to the warming lights. “Yeah, should be fine. They got it under con
trol back there.”

  “Okay. I’ll have a western omelet, biscuit, potatoes fried well. Can you do that?”

  “Sure thing. You, hon?” She looked at Colleen expectantly.

  “Um—toast?”

  “White, wheat, rye?”

  “Wheat, please.”

  “Give her a couple of scrambled eggs too,” Shay said. “You sure you don’t want a biscuit? No? And potatoes, cook them like mine. You got any decent melon today?”

  “Sure, got the honeydew.”

  “We’ll have some of that too.”

  The waitress left with their order. Shay dug in her purse—really, it was more like a tote bag, a large rectangular brown canvas affair with an appliqué of pink birds—and took out a plain gray notebook. More digging produced a cheap mechanical pencil. Shay opened the notebook to a clean page and pressed it flat on the table.

  A different waitress came by and turned their cups right side up, pouring steaming black coffee without asking. “I’ll get your creamer in a second, or you can just fetch it,” she said, already moving on to another table.

  Shay got up and grabbed a little metal jug of cream off the counter. Colleen saw how men watched her move, their eyes both hungry and glazed. Shay was wearing the same jeans she’d had on yesterday, dark denim with a loop of sparkling topstitching on each back pocket, curving over her narrow rear. Colleen felt even more self-conscious, dressed in her wool pants and silk and mohair sweater. She took a sip of the coffee, hot enough to scald. She blew on the cup and took another, longer sip. It tasted so good she thought she might cry.

  “Just black?” Shay asked, pouring a long stream of cream into her coffee until it was pale as caramel. “Okay, let’s talk about money. I don’t mind keeping track. We can split it all down the middle, the shared stuff. You got the showers, they’re twelve dollars—I know, they jack you—and I can get breakfast, but I got to be honest, I’m getting to the bottom of my cash so if you could chip in for your half of the trailer that would be . . . let’s see, it was Tuesday to Tuesday, you got here . . .”