He's been in the back room since March

People say the bypass killed this stretch. The bypass went in before I bought the place so I never saw the before. What I've got is Fort Leonard Wood. A basic training graduation lands on a Thursday and I'm full at eighty-nine a night with cars turning around in the lot. This February I ran forty-one percent.

Twenty-two rooms out at exit 184. You can see my sign from the westbound lanes once the leaves are off. My mother's got the back unit behind the office with her own door, since my dad passed. She calls her sister in Anand at nine, nine on the dot, because it's morning over there and her sister's just getting up.

Krupa does the books on Sundays. She's at Phelps by seven so she's asleep by ten, and that's been true eleven years, it isn't some new thing.

Jaimin's her younger brother. He's twenty-nine. He was down in Springfield, there was some car thing, and a girl, her name was on the lease with his, and I'm not going to sit here and go through all of it because it's his to tell. Krupa's mom called Krupa. Krupa called me at the desk on a Sunday. I said put him in 118 and we'll figure it out later.

118's the last one on the end, around the back by the dumpster. It's the hardest room I've got to rent. The unit in that wall runs loud, so it's where I'd put a smoker, and I've had a quote sitting in the drawer on the compressor since last year. Three forty, and the guy has to come out from Waynesville.

The loan on this place is in Krupa's dad's name. The down payment came from her family.

He started at the Casey's on overnights, ten to six, stocking the cooler. That was March and most of April. Then in May the manager there, Dale, had a girl quit on him with no notice and he moved Jaimin onto the two-to-ten so he'd have a body on afternoons. Two to ten means he's back here by twenty after with nothing to do until the next afternoon.

I keep Willow on the Dish package, it's fifteen with the tax. The ones out of Sri Lanka start ten thirty at night our time. So he comes in the door smelling like the roller grill right about when they're doing the toss.

The couch in the office, the thing about the couch is, when I took the place over from the Pattels they'd done a lobby remodel in ninety-eight and most of what's in there is still from then. The desk is from then. Anyway.

We keep the sound low because of my mother's wall. She hears everything through it. She leaves a plate for him in the office fridge with plastic wrap over it and she has never once left one for me, and Krupa thinks that's the funniest thing that's ever happened.

That couch. It's, hang on. The office is nine by twelve. That's the actual room. I've got the desk in there and the little fridge under it.

He talks the whole match. He'll tell you a guy's average going back four years and what he did against the same bowler in Galle. I mostly just say yeah.

June seventeenth, and I know because it was a Tuesday and Tuesdays I do linens. It was late in the second session and he'd gone quiet maybe ten minutes and then his head came over onto my shoulder. He's always been able to go out in about a second, Krupa says he did it as a kid in the car.

I could have woke him. My arm went dead around ten minutes in and I let it. Forty minutes, more or less. I know because the break was at two twenty and they were back out and I was still sitting there.

Then he came up and said something about the light and went on down to 118. I went out and hosed the pool deck. It was already clean. Then I sat in my chair at the shallow end, the one I use, because the rest of them have got that flex in them and I'm not doing that in front of a guest. I was two ten at the wedding.

Krupa asked at breakfast why I looked like that and I told her it's the tourist season, the Route 66 people come through in June. She said you hate the Route 66 people. I said I know. I don't run the light in the shower anymore either. That's been a couple years now.

About the couch, though — in July I carried one of the pool chairs in from the shallow end because my back's been at me. The good chair, the one that doesn't do that flex. Jaimin asked about it twice and I told him about the back.

Krupa's dad came up the second weekend of September the way he does. He walks all twenty-two with a little notebook and writes down the mattress dates. He stopped outside 118 and asked me what the story was, with graduation weekend coming. I said the compressor. He said fix the compressor. The quote's still in the drawer where it was.

Last week Jaimin found a studio over the bike shop on Pine, four seventy-five with utilities in it. I sat him down at the desk and showed him what electric baseboard heat does to you in January out here. Took me about a minute to have the numbers in front of him.

He said okay. He hasn't called the guy back that I'm aware of.

The couch is eighty-four inches. That's off the tag underneath, I went and looked. Two grown men can sit on an eighty-four inch couch with a foot still between them. There's a foot there and we don't use it. Never have.

It's twenty to two. Sri Lanka's got them four down. His light's on down at the end, I can see it on the concrete. There's a load of towels been in the dryer since eleven and I keep telling myself I'll go get them.