Room eleven had a bad lock

People take the remotes. That's the one I've never worked out.

Towels I understand. Everybody takes a towel, we buy them by the case, it's already in the number. Pillows are worse, because a pillow doesn't go in a bag, so somebody walked across that lot at six in the morning holding a pillow where anybody could see him. But a remote for a 2014 Element TV we bought off a liquidation lot in Tifton. It doesn't work on your television at home. It doesn't work on anybody's. We lose nine or ten a year, the replacements off Amazon are six bucks and do about half of what the real one does, so then it's eleven at night and I'm standing on a bedspread in my socks in 30 with my arm over my head and my shirt coming up off my back while a man from Michigan tells me the captions won't come off.

Forty-two rooms. Sounds bigger than it is. We're off 75 at exit 84 and the exit is the whole business. There's us and a Love's. The Huddle House has closed twice and come back once. Nobody's coming for the town. They're coming because they left Cincinnati at seven in the morning and they're done and they know they're not making Valdosta.

Here's the part nobody believes. A guy books through Booking for eighty-nine dollars and I don't get eighty-nine dollars. Booking takes fifteen percent. Sixteen now, maybe, they moved it in the spring and I never wrote down what it went to. So on a ninety dollar room I'm looking at seventy-five before the laundry, before the power, and the power in August on a building with forty-two through-the-wall units is a number I don't enjoy saying out loud. Which is why my dad asks every single person at that desk, every time, in his voice, did you book this on the internet. Like he's going to shame them out of it. And sometimes it works, that's the crazy part. Sometimes a guy goes oh, and cancels it on his phone standing right there, and books direct, and my dad doesn't say thank you. He writes it in the book and goes back to the tablet.

He had the stent put in last February in Albany. He's in the office all day now with the tablet propped against the card reader watching cricket at whatever hour it's on over there, and he doesn't do rooms anymore, and he still runs the place, which he does, I'm not being smart about it. I live in the two rooms behind the office. I don't pay rent on them and that's most of what I get paid.

The bathrooms in the back block were 1988. Somebody wrote on Booking that the water came out brown in 14, which was rust, and it cleared in about forty seconds, and it doesn't matter because it's in writing forever and my mom read it out loud at dinner twice. So we did 11 through 20. Tubs and tile and new vanities and the fans in the ceilings. The tile dust gets into everything and it doesn't stop, and months after they finished I was still finding it in a sock drawer in a room I don't even go in.

Dale did the work. He's out of Valdosta. Divorced, and he kept the truck out of it. Bad back, so he'd sit down on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees for a minute between things and then get back up. He had a cooler in the bed of the truck with Mountain Dew in it and nothing else in there but ice. He'd go out for one about every hour and a half and he never offered me one, for five weeks, and then one day he did. In August he worked with his shirt off. I've never been in that pool out there, not once in twenty-six years.

Eleven was already out of service. A supply line let go behind the vanity back in the fall and took the carpet and some of the wall, and it was getting redone with the rest of the block anyway, so it just sat there with the mattress stood up against the window. And the door on eleven never shut properly. Somebody kicked it in years ago, before my time, and the strike plate got chewed out and the frame went soft, so you can push it closed and it looks closed from the walkway and it isn't. It's been on the list since I was in high school. We keep a list on the side of the fridge in the office and it's long.

There's about an hour in the afternoon where nothing happens and it's the worst part of the day. Checkout's eleven and check-in's three. One of the girls has a boy to get from school so she's out by one thirty and the rooms are done before that.

So the second week he was there I ended up in eleven with him, and then I kept ending up in eleven with him.

It was a Tuesday in January. The toilet in 7 wouldn't quit running and my dad decided he was going to be useful about it, which he is specifically not supposed to be, and the shutoff for that whole back run is in eleven under the vanity. So he came out of the office and along the walk past the ice machine and he opened the door, because you don't knock on a room that's out of service. Nobody knocks on eleven. Nobody's knocked on eleven since 2019.

He stood there about two seconds. Then he went and got the valve key out of the shed and did 7 himself, and when I came into the office an hour later he had the cricket on and he said they needed forty off thirty, and I said that's not happening, and he said no.

He's not supposed to get worked up, that's an actual sentence from an actual cardiologist. So I spent that first night waiting for the other part, and it didn't come, and then I spent about a month waiting, and it didn't come. He still sends me to the back block. He still asks the guests about the internet. In March he started knocking on the door between the office and my rooms.

First Sunday of the month we drive to Marietta for the temple. Three hours if 75 behaves, which it doesn't, and my mom's cousin Bina rides up with us out of Macon and talks the entire way. There's a girl in Dayton. Hetal. She's a pharmacy tech and she's been on my phone since November because Bina sends the same four photos on a rotation like I've forgotten what she looks like. In July my mom asked me my jacket size. They're driving down the Saturday after Thanksgiving, Hetal and both her parents, and my mom's already decided which room they're getting and it's 12.

Dale finished the block in March and said call him when we're ready to do the front twenty-two, and my dad said we'd call him, and we haven't called him. The front twenty-two still have the 1988 tubs in them. My mom brings it up maybe every six weeks and my dad says the money's not there. His number's still in my phone under Dale tile.

Sometime around April the door on eleven started catching. New strike plate on it. Nobody told me it got done and I didn't ask. The screws are brass and the plate's silver. Whatever was in the drawer.