The Room

Fifty dollars, cash only, no photos, buys you two hours in Room 7 of the Sunset Motor Lodge. The Kleenex is free. Your nose will bleed before your time is up.

On a Sunday morning in September 2016, before any of that, Jim Keeler slides the master key into the lock to flip the mattress and finds the walls full.

The lines start at the carpet and stop where the ceiling stops them. Inside the closet. Behind the toilet tank. Along the grout between the bathroom tiles. Black Bic pen. Red Sharpie. A brown ink that flakes at the touch and leaves rust-colored dust on his fingertips. The handwriting starts neat in the northwest corner. The script is Palmer Method, the loops and bridges of Catholic school penmanship, and every letter leans right at the one angle the nuns allowed. It runs the north wall, turns at the door, crosses under the window, and comes back along the south wall. On the back wall it loses its mind. The strokes jag and spike like an EKG losing its patient, and the last line runs into the corner where the first one starts.

The guest paid cash for one night. He signed the card "J. Smith" with a pen that left no impression on the carbon copy, and his key was in the drop slot when Jim unlocked the office in the dark. Jim checked him in himself and cannot pick him out of a lineup of one. On the nightstand he left a circle of burnt matches with the heads pointing inward.

A motel sells one thing, and that is a room that has forgotten the last guest. Checkout is at eleven. By noon Rosa has taken a honeymoon, a hot-plate fire, or a man from Yuma who died on the toilet in Room 19, and made the room forget it. Rosa has Sundays for Mass, so Sundays Jim turns the rooms himself.

Jim runs the twenty-three rooms of the Sunset Motor Lodge on Highway 77 north of Tucson. The neighbors are a boarded-up Stuckey's and a cell tower disguised as a saguaro. He is sixty-three and smokes two packs of Salem Lights a day. His wife, Ellen, died of ovarian cancer in 2009. She left him the motel, the card taped to the front desk that says "Key deposit 60¢" in her handwriting, and a closet full of quilts she sewed for grandchildren who never came. Ellen was left-handed. The nuns never broke her of it, and her Palmer falls over backward.

She folded the quilts onto the top shelf of the closet in Room 1, her sewing room, and laid cedar chips between the layers. He checks the cedar on the first of every month and replaces what has gone grey. Every June 14th she hid an anniversary card in his toolbox. The cards are in the nightstand drawer with the grease still on them.

Jim lives in the two rooms behind the office, and her bifocals live on her pillow. The frames are wire, and the left temple is bent from the night she fell asleep pricing the church rummage sale and rolled onto them. Every morning Jim picks them up, breathes on the lenses, polishes them with the hem of his undershirt, and sets them back on her pillow. Held up to the window, they bend the parking lot in the middle. He has never put them on.

The writing won't come off. Jim tries Goof Off. He tries Kilz. He rolls on three coats of Zinsser with his cap pulled low and his eyes on the roller, and the words come up through every coat by supper. His nephew Daryl hauls a belt sander over from a job site, and the motor seizes the second the belt touches the wall. Skree-unk. Smoke curls out of the housing, and the room stinks of burnt copper.

Daryl crosses himself in the doorway. He hasn't been to Mass in eleven years. Then he takes a picture with his phone.

Within the week a woman drives down from Flagstaff, puts a fifty on the front desk, and asks to stand in the room. She stands in it until her nose bleeds down the front of a white blouse. She comes out and thanks him.

Jim drives to Walmart and buys a lockbox, a folding chair, and a box of Kleenex.

The card on the door of Room 7 is in his block capitals. "$50. CASH ONLY. NO PHOTOS." He sets the chair outside the door and waits with a Salem and a Louis L'Amour while the paying public reads.