Chapter 4 — ROOM 112

I did not sleep that night and at six the next morning I did the only thing I know how to do, which is make a list.

I have been a landlord for twenty-seven years and before that I sold industrial flooring for twenty, and the one thing I have is that I know how to sit down with a legal pad and turn a mess into a list of items with a person's name beside each one.

The list said:

1. Rent — Bluebird, how much, how far behind

2. School

3. Food

4. Sarah — St. Brendan's, fourth floor

5. Lawyer?

I did item one at seven fifteen.

The Bluebird is run by a man named Anil Rana who I have known for a decade in the distant way you know another business owner in a small town.

He was not the villain either. There is a version of this where the motel man is the villain and he was not.

He said the room was three hundred and forty a week and that Sarah had paid through the ninth and that it was the twelfth.

He said, "I know about the mother. I have not said anything to anybody."

"Why not?"

He looked at me for a moment.

"Because if I say something to somebody, the county comes and those two go in a car."

He had been carrying that for three days by himself.

I paid him for four weeks and I told him I would settle up longer once I understood the situation, and he took the money and wrote a receipt and then he said one more thing that I wrote down in the car afterward.

"The boy comes to the office every morning at seven and asks if there is any mail."

"Is there ever?"

"No," Anil said. "But he asks."

Item two I could not do, because I did not know what school and I did not know if they were enrolled and I had no standing to ask anybody anything, and that was the first time that morning I ran into the wall that the next eleven months were mostly made of.

I am nobody.

I am a man who owns a building.

I had no more legal relationship to those two children than the man at the gas station.

I could pay a motel bill. I could buy food. I could not enrol a child, consent to a doctor, sign a permission slip, or pick anybody up from anywhere.

At ten past nine I drove to St. Brendan's and parked in the visitor lot and did not go in.

I sat in that lot for fifty minutes.

I am going to be honest about what was in my head, because I think if I clean it up the rest of this is worth less.

It was not fear that she would refuse to see me, although that was in there.

It was that for twenty years I had been the man who was wronged.

That is a comfortable thing to be. I had built a fairly solid life on it. My wife died in 2005 and my daughter left me eleven weeks later and I had been carrying that around Ellery, New York like a coat I never took off, and everybody in this town knew that Walt Harrison's girl walked out on him and nobody knew why, and I had liked that.

I had liked it.

And I understood, sitting in that parking lot, that if I walked through those doors I was going to find out why, and that there was a decent chance the why was going to be about me.

So I drove home.

I drove home and I got the ladder out and I cleaned the gutters on a house I live in alone.

I went back the next day.