Harry,” mumbled the lady in the motel office. She didn’t look up. She was bent over her desk with a bottle of glue. A red pipe cleaner, clenched like a rose between her teeth, explained her muzzled voice. She wore bib overalls and a pink sleeveless shirt with an upturned collar. Her naked arms were thickly freckled and were on that border between looking strong and looking heavy. The fan in her office was turned off. The thing she was working on was laid out on a cooking sheet, tiny white shells and colored mostly turquoise fishbowl stones and colored mostly fuchsia strings, all of which she was arranging Hawaii-like inside a picture frame.
“Got a couple of uraniumaires for you,” Harry said.
“Do you now.” The lady looked up and Beth could see the surprise on her face to be locking eyes with a little girl—a little girl of her talent and good looks, she might add, which would further the surprise. Right away Beth guessed this lady was the kind of person who liked protecting her deeper feelings. The lady suddenly aimed a big smile directly at Beth as if she had read Beth’s thoughts and was protecting her reaction with amusement. She plucked the pipe cleaner from her mouth and put it on the cooking sheet with the rest of the stuff and told Harry to turn on the fan. She let the fan rotate around the room, dodging with the cooking sheet the fan’s shifting aim until she found a spot where the wind wouldn’t disturb the pattern of colored stones and shells. “Are these your friends?” she asked. Her hair was long and extra thick and she grabbed it up in a ponytail to let the fan’s air hit her bared neck.
“They’re staying up near Swing Line Wash.”
“Good Lord,” the lady started to say before lifting her hand to alert them. That sad but happy song on the radio was nearing its end and it leaped into full static and the lady leaped with it: “Now I shouted from the highest hills! Even told the golden daffodils.” The radio’s crunching took over and she switched it off. She sighed with disgust. “If that radio was a Geiger counter, I’d be rich. And I’d have a better radio.” She looked at Beth’s mother. “You going to stay the night, honey?”
“Yes, Mom,” Beth said.
“I guess so,” her mother said. “You didn’t tell me this part,” she added to Harry.
“I’ll pay,” Harry said.
“No. It’s not the money. It’s the work we have to do.”
“Oh,” Harry said.
“What work is that?” the lady asked.
“All the preparations Harry was so kind to explain to me.”
“That’s Harry,” the lady said. “Honey, I do have weekly rates. You’re just as likely to find uranium under one of my beds as in those hills. And it’s a good ways more pleasant.”
“Exactly what I was trying to explain. You’re more succinct,” Harry said.
“Of course I am, Harry.”
“I think one night will do fine.” Her mother shifted and her foot landed on the tail of a tabby cat. Both her mom and the cat jumped.
“Out, skedaddle,” the lady ordered. “Don’t mind him. He’s been run over twice.”
“Is he your kitty?” Beth asked.
“That one? No, darling. Wild as they come. Except the two cars have knocked it out of him a bit.”
“How does he eat?”
“I have some guests who take care of that.”
“And these folks are all the way from Ohio,” Harry said.
“Lordy,” the lady said, shivering her body.
“Can we go swimming?” Beth asked.
“Absolutely,” the lady said. “That’s the first thing I meant to say.”
Beth saw her mother hesitate.
“I have bathing suits they can borrow,” the lady said. “I keep a pile going. Some are pretty nice. Got one that would fit you, too.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“I like kids.” She stopped for a moment and then she gave Charlie a big smile, probably because he had been silent and ignored all this time. She seemed like someone who wanted to make sure everyone was having a good time. “Mine are seventeen and eighteen.” She snapped her fingers, said, “Like that,” and shook her head. “And I can wash their clothes while they’re swimming.”
“I’ll be happy to do the washing if you show me where.”
“Your choice,” the lady said. But in the end she took all their clothes and gave them a good wash in her own personal machine. Beth put on the borrowed swimwear and jumped in the pool. Charlie quickly joined her. He was not one to give up the water. He did a racing dive in the deep end and stayed under and didn’t come up until he was in the shallow end, where three old ladies sat around a table in seashell metal chairs painted yellow, green, and blue. They had set aside a card game and were having their drinks. Snatches of their conversation came to Beth, Died of a stroke at what age? Here it’s Saturday and I thought it was Thursday. The tabby had returned and was hanging around the old ladies’ feet. Beth looked over at her mom, lounging nearby in a borrowed bathrobe, and she looked pretty content. Oh that reminds me of Betty. Someone should let him know.
The lady manager in the bib overalls came out with a net attached to a long pole and fished out the dead insects from the pool. “There,” she said with satisfaction. “So you kids can get a proper swim.” She returned with a tall drink for Beth’s mom, and popsicles for Beth and Charlie.
Beth stayed in the water until Harry came back from stocking up his truck with supplies. He asked if they wanted to go out to eat supper in a restaurant. “Let’s go out,” he said. “Do you want to go out?”
“Have you eaten at all today, Harry?” her mother asked. Her voice took on a concerned warning, but Beth knew she was avoiding an answer. Out here with no one she knew and no one to contradict her, her mother was building this new life and pretending to live it. Harry insisted about the dinner and her mother finally said they were all too tired, which Beth knew meant Charlie, but of course she wasn’t going to correct her and say, But I’m full of energy! Her mother had told her these things were private.
Harry said he would get something and bring it back. He got in an old DeSoto, brown with a cream-colored top. The lady manager was driving; she stuck her head out the window and yelled, “Last call for stragglers!” and Beth said, “Please Mom, can I?” and her mom said, “Go ahead.” Beth jumped in and waved from the backseat. They went to the Atomic Café, and Harry and the lady talked a lot to the man who owned the place. His name was Dewey Durnford. Beth still didn’t know what the lady’s name was. Dewey Durnford complained about not getting reception for the TV. He talked about missing the Rocky Marciano fight. He talked about one of the guys who’d gotten uranium rich going up above the clouds in his private plane so he could get the fight’s reception on his TV. Dewey Durnford said, “I’ve given that guy so many free meals in his sourdough days he could have invited me along to see it.” Beth ate french fries. No one seemed to care she wore a sweater over a bathing suit. Dewey had dewy hair, that kind that chicks had, and his small teeth razored inward, the opposite of buck. Toward the end of her
