He stayed four nights a week

The plant over in Ashburn was putting in a second line, and their contractor booked twelve of my rooms at fifty-nine a night, Monday through Thursday, and they wanted it locked for eight months.

Fifty-nine is bad money. It drags your average rate down to where the franchise people can see it on a screen in Phoenix, and then somebody calls me about my rate. But Monday and Tuesday out here are dead and those rooms sit dark while I'm still heating them, so I signed it and quit worrying about the screen in Phoenix.

I put crews on the second floor at the far end because the ice machine's up there. It cycles all night and it sounds like a drawer of silverware going over. Regular guests call down about it at one in the morning. Nobody on a crew ever has. That's where Dale Whitmire was, 214.

He was forty-one and he had an Alabama tag on a white Silverado with a magnet sign on the door that he'd peel off in the parking lot. More of a grey, really, but it read white under the lot lights. First Monday he came into the office at ten of five, because the breakfast room doesn't unlock till six. I had a pot going for myself. I poured him one and he said he'd pay for it and I said the coffee's in the rate. Then he went and sat in his truck with it.

He did that every morning until April.

My parents live in the unit behind the office. It was 101 and 102 before my dad took the wall out. My mother's window looks onto the stairs at the north end.

My uncle has the property up in Cordele and he calls Sunday afternoons to tell me what his occupancy was. He has never once asked me mine. Nirali calls after that, around six our time. We got engaged last March and the wedding's in Ahmedabad in November, and I've been consulted twice, once for my shirt measurements and once to approve a hall I've seen in pictures. Her cousin does the rest of it. Forty-one people have bought tickets already and my kaki put every confirmation number in a group chat.

Friday and Saturday I'm full of people driving down to Florida who'll pay a hundred and nineteen and never look at the room. Monday and Tuesday there's nobody out here. The contract was for the other half of the week. In February a woman asked me for fifteen dollars off because the pool was closed. It was forty-two degrees out. And there's a man who takes a weekly in 130 every winter and runs an extension cord out the window to a deep freezer in the bed of his truck, and when I finally asked him about it he said it was bait.

They got rained out one Tuesday in January at about ten in the morning. Twelve men in my breakfast room until the waffle batter was gone, and my mother came around with a pot of chai because she can't help herself. One of them asked her what was in it and she said cardamom and he said he'd had that in a candle.

Sometime in the fall Dale told me the condenser fan on the ice machine was going out, you could hear it change pitch. I told my dad. My dad said that machine is from 2009 and it owes us nothing.

The breakfast room door is a hair under six two and I'm six four. I've been ducking it since I was nineteen and I've hit it twice. The second time was a Wednesday with him sitting right there with his cup, and he waited until I said I was fine and then he laughed for about a minute.

He has a daughter at Wallace State and a truck payment.

The line went down the week of Thanksgiving and the rest of the crew went home Tuesday. He stayed because Cullman is five and a half hours and he'd have to turn around and drive it back on Sunday for nothing. Wednesday night the building was empty except for a trucker in 118 and a couple in 107 who'd hit a deer coming down 75.

He came into the office around ten and we watched most of a game on the little TV behind the desk. The phone doesn't ring after nine anyway.

Then we went up. Afterwards he put his boots on and went out for ice, because the machine is about eleven feet from that door.

In the morning he was down at ten of five and I poured him one. I ran the audit at six like always.

It happened other times over the winter. Not every week. I couldn't give you a pattern. I keep a spreadsheet of when that ice machine's been serviced.

Neither of us ever said anything about it. He'd ask me for a towel count because his guys were carrying them out to the site. I'd tell him the plant was late paying again.

One night in February my dad came across to the office at about a quarter to twelve. The man in 130 couldn't get his room phone to dial out and had called the house instead. I wasn't at the desk. I came down the north stairs maybe ten minutes after and my dad was standing behind the counter with the handset in his hand, and he asked me where I'd been. I said upstairs. He wrote the room number on the pad and went back over.

He started leaving the light on over the desk after that. I'd been shutting that one off at night since high school.

My mother asked me once why I don't put the long-stay men downstairs so they're not on the stairs at four in the morning. I said the ice machine. She said okay.

There was a woman in 108 around then who wanted to fight about the pet fee, because the dog was in a bag and a bag isn't a room. She had a whole thing about it, she'd been to the one in Valdosta and they don't charge her. I don't remember what I ended up putting on her folio.

The contract closed out the second week of April. They had a punch list and then they were done. He checked out on a Friday same as every Friday, except the folio printed the whole block on one run and came out four pages, and he stood there while the printer did it. Then he asked me to email him the receipt. I told him it goes to his email on its own. He said send it again.

He shook my hand across the desk. He's got four inches to look up at on me and in eight months he never made one joke about it, which on a jobsite is unusual.

He's outside Decatur now on a cold storage building. Every few weeks he sends me a picture of whatever breakfast they've got him on. A waffle iron with the batter cups locked in a cabinet so you have to go ask somebody. Eggs out of a bag going grey under the lamp. I send back what I figure that's costing them per occupied room, and he doesn't answer that part.

I still make a pot in the office at ten of five. Most mornings I pour it out.

214 is blocked out for June. There's a crew coming to do the tower at the co-op and they'll want the second floor.