That pool, though, that was something else. It wasn’t big but it was pristine clean. The lounge chairs around it weren’t top of the line but they were okay, in great repair and obviously taken care of.
I looked from the pool to reception. It wasn’t so much reception as a tiny house. I tiny well-kept house with a little upstairs. It also had big half barrels full of newly planted flowers out front. It wasn’t quite summer but it was the end of spring so the flowers hadn’t come close to filling out.
Carnal was in the Rocky Mountains, a small valley surrounded by hills which were surrounded by mountains. It was closing on May, there was a nip in the air and I wondered if those flowers were hopeful.
If they were, whoever planted them had the capacity for a lot of hope. There were more flowers in window boxes in the front windows of the reception-slash-house. There were also more flowers in half barrels intermittently placed by the poles on the walk in front of the hotel rooms with more window boxes on the railing of the balcony in front of the rooms upstairs. And lastly there were more half barrels dotted around the pool area.
The parking lot was tidy and well-kept and the hotel and reception-slash-house both had a good paint job.
All of this indicated that Carnal Hotel might be below average but the people who owned it cared about it.
I had checked in with a nice lady at the front desk who said anything I needed, change for the vending machines or laundry room, Wi-Fi access, menus for restaurants and takeout in town, “just holler”.
Then I’d unpacked my car. All of it. I unpacked it for the first time in four and a half months. Then I cleaned it out. All the junk food wrappers, discarded pop cans, fallen mints, lost pieces of candy, bits of paper. The flotsam and jetsam of a killer road trip. I lugged my suitcases (there were five) and boxes (there were two) into the hotel room and took a plastic bag I’d found and filled full of trash to the big outdoor bin tucked close to the side of the hotel not facing any streets.
Then I unpacked my clothes.
Over the past four and a half months, I’d been in tons of hotel rooms but I’d never unpacked. I’d never stayed beyond three days. I’d only stayed long enough to do laundry, take a breather and decide where I’d head next in my search, zigzagging across so many states I’d lost count in my search for Nowheresville.
After I unpacked, I’d walked into town which amounted to me walking by room number fourteen and turning the corner. Carnal Hotel was on the edge of town right before the road opened up to nothing again. I’d found a deli, bought a pastrami on rye and ate it on the sidewalk, chasing it with a diet pop. Then I’d walked the town up one side and down the other.
Bubba’s was in the middle, five blocks from the hotel and it was definitely a biker bar because Carnal was a biker town. There were two bike shops and one bike mechanic at the opposite end from Carnal Hotel and it had a sign that said “We take cars too”. There were also three motorcycle paraphernalia shops that I could see looking in the windows sold a lot of leather bike accessories and more leather biker clothing.
There was also the deli, a diner, an Italian restaurant, a pizza delivery place and a coffee house which was strangely called “La-La Land Coffee”. Again looking in the windows of La-La Land, I saw it was not run by bikers but hippies that were so hippie they wore tie-dyed shirts with peace signs on front and had long hair. One of the two behind the counter had on round, blue-tinted sunglasses even though he was inside and the other had a thin braided headband wrapped around her forehead. They looked in danger of dropping cross-legged on the floor and singing Kumbayah.
This all was intermingled with a discount tobacco store that sold all types of smoker delights for all types of things you could smoke; two discount liquor stores; a drug store; a tailor who seemed to specialize in stitching biker patches into leather (or at least that was what the sign in the window said); two convenience stores, one opposite the hotel, one at the other end of town opposite the mechanic; a busy grocery store about a quarter the size of the mega-grocery stores that every other town in the nation seemed to have and it looked like it’d been there since 1967; a bakery; a hardware store; a flower shop; a gas station and a variety of other Nowheresville places to fill a Nowheresville town.
There were people on the street and I knew they were friendly because most of them smiled at me.
After I checked out the Main Street (called Main Street and it was also the only street with businesses, the rest was residential) of my new home, I went back to reception at the hotel. I bought a week’s worth of Wi-Fi from the nice lady who took that opportunity to share with me that her name was Betty. I shared my name too and decided to go ahead and pay a week in advance on my room when I got the Wi-Fi. This decision overjoyed Betty and I knew that because she told me.
“Sweetie! A week! I’m overjoyed!” she’d shouted.
She would be. Mine was the only car in the lot and she had a flower and pool habit and those weren’t exactly cheap.
Nevertheless, she was friendly and open and I decided I liked Betty.
After telling her I was glad I’d brought her joy, I went back to number thirteen and dragged out my laptop. Then I logged in. Then I ignored all my e-mail and sent a message to my parents and my baby sister that all was well, I was fine and I’d check in with more information later. I saw that they’d sent e-mails to me but I didn’t read them. I didn’t read them because I knew they would freak me out because I knew my Mom and Dad and sister Caroline were freaked out. They weren’t big on me upping stakes and roaming the country looking for nothing special. They were bigger on me moving home and sorting myself out and finding a decent man and starting over (in that order).
I shut down my computer, sat on the big, soft bed, stared at the wall and thought about the next day when I was supposed to be at Bubba’s at eleven to train to be a waitress and start my new life.
Then I smiled.
Then I watched TV until it got dark and the pool beckoned me.
Now I was standing and looking outside to see the pool looked clean and enticing and it was all lit up. In fact, the parking lot was all lit up. Seeing it, I knew four things about Reception Betty. She was friendly, she liked flowers, she was proud of her below average hotel and small but clean pool and she wanted her guests to feel safe.
That’s when I saw the car pull in. It was a convertible, an old model something. It looked like a Chrysler, not great condition but also not a junker.
It parked outside reception, the door opened and a woman folded out.