The popcorn ceiling came into focus slowly and it was the color of rancid butter. Maggie drove her dry tongue over her lips but it got stuck on chapped skin. She felt around the nightstand for the smokes. Wrappers, something gooey, cold glass, ah, there, the pack. It was empty. She crushed it and dropped it on the carpet. Only now did she realize her chest felt heavier than normal. An arm was resting on her breasts. She lifted it with both hands and lowered it by her side. There was no need to wake the arm up. She didn’t feel like talking. Not to the arm’s owner nor to anyone else.
She pried her body off the bed and shuffled to the window. The curtains were wide open. She stood there for a minute, naked, squinting into the sepia view. Privacy wasn’t an issue. Not here. The room was on the second story, with no balcony, and the only onlookers were the ghost of the motel parking lot. But it was already daytime, and all the ghosts had returned to their pickup caskets and driven away. The only vehicle left was hers.
She cooled her forehead on the pane. It felt nice for a moment. Her eyes zeroed in on her Dodge. The tires were low. The rims were almost touching the ground. How long had it been, she thought. An inch of air per month, perhaps. Torn palm leaves had curled up in the bed of the pickup, brown as the rusted paint job. The sun was low and it cast a hard shadow on the dent in the driver’s door. The dent was from the wheel of a motorcycle. Poor, stupid kid. At least he had a helmet on. She was glad he’d made it. The accident hadn’t been her fault, and she’d gotten some money out of the whole deal. It turned out to be her ticket out of Vegas. It hadn’t taken her far, only far enough to pretend things were a bit different.
What she really needed now was a smoke. The other side of the bed had its own nightstand, and the man’s pack was there. There was one cigarette left in it. She took it, despite the rule of never taking anyone’s last smoke.
But she didn’t light the cigarette right away. Maggie felt every smoke needed a proper reason, so she found one in her purse. It was an envelope with two yellow forwarding stickers on top of each other. A letter from her daughter had arrived yesterday at the motel’s office. She has read it three times already, maybe one time too many.
The first reading, yesterday, had been enough to make her cry for five minutes. That was even before she had made it back to her room. She wept on the concrete stairway, leaning over the chipped banister. For a moment there, she imagined her tears filling up the swimming pool below. There was no pool, but at least the idea had made her stop weeping. It even produced a smirk which carried her back to the room.
After a long shower, the second reading of the letter had made her happy because of Joyce’s handwriting. The content felt suddenly irrelevant. What mattered was that she was holding the paper her daughter had written on. She smelled it. She looked at the ink that came out of Joyce’s pen. She looked at her words without letting them mean anything. She studied the empty spaces between them. She could see the very moment when Joyce had realized one page was not enough, but two pages would be too generous. The moment when the spacing suddenly tightened, when thoughts came faster and angrier, with the last two lines overlapping, and the final words nearly falling off the page, their letters contracted by grief.
But then, after an hour or so, Maggie had read the letter for the third time. She couldn’t resist. The content hit her anew. Enough to make her go out across the highway to Saddle Up Saloon, then come back ten minutes later to the room with a human companion and two friendly bottles of bourbon.
*
Maggie clicked the lighter three times, but it was empty. She fumbled for a matchbook on the table and found one. She bent a match over the striker, closed the flap, and snapped it upward with her thumb. The guy’s cigarette tasted different. It felt smooth. Healthier.
She took out the letter from the envelope for the fourth time. This time, she re-read only the last three words: your derelict ways. The puny, indecisive way her daughter extended the tail on the “y” was the same as Maggie’s. Derelict sure sounded richer than, say, shitty, she chuckled. Sounded smart. Sending Joyce to that college and paying her tuition had been a good call, after all. No matter the price. Back then, she was still working clubs at prime spots in town.
All through college, Joyce hadn’t visited, not even once. Neither did Maggie. They communicated only through letters. The graduation, the first job, the next one, moving in with some guy, then with another. All told in dry facts, dispatches, really, avoiding any words that would point to emotion. And that was okay with Maggie. It was preferred. She didn’t expect any confessions. And certainly not gratitude. Joyce didn’t owe her anything. Maggie knew that. It was the other way around. Probably. Or maybe Maggie was just grateful that Joyce had refrained from judgment. After all, the target was too damn easy. She was now close to sixty and the only jobs she could get were out by the edge of the desert. And they both knew why. But those safe, impartial letters had stopped coming a long time ago.
The new one was different. It informed Maggie that she had become a grandmother. Joyce had given birth to a daughter, but didn’t mention the girl’s name. Nor the father’s. There were going to be no more letters from now on, Joyce stated bluntly. After that, the facts were no longer dry. They were lubricated by smart words of bitterness towards Maggie. And they kept pouring out. The judgement had finally come. For her derelict ways.
Maggie poured herself a double into a glass which still had some bourbon left from last night. She drank it in three gulps, savoring the last one. It felt good and her headache was almost gone. She felt even better after finishing the smoke.
It was all clear and murky at the same time. Murky, because she could not remember how it all started, but clear how it was going to end. She couldn’t dance anymore, but she could do other things. She could still wing it another year. Maybe two. As long as there was some air left in the tires.
Maggie dropped the butt into the bourbon bottle. There was a short hiss, and a trail of smoke swirled at the mouth. She put the letter back in her purse, hoping that her no-name granddaughter would learn to tail her own “y’s” in a less feeble way.
* * *
The double forwarding stickers. You can just smell this motel room. Great writing, and title too.
Oh man, she’s not good, is she?
But the writing definitely is.