How much time, Arlene thought as she stared out at the empty parking lot, had he actually been gone?
Those men had spent the entire afternoon like that, the sun coming down and the men still talking, the cigarettes glowing in the dusk. There had been a lot of ground to cover. There had been a lot of ways to say how unfair her brother had had it.
Come along, her mother had said, her hand on Arlene’s head. It’s getting late. Night had come. The ashes in the pit had died down, the food long ago eaten. All the men stayed, dark shadows with dark orange glows.
Arlene had heard them as she lay on the floor in the living room, her eyes once again looking out past the open front door of their old farmhouse, past the porch, and fixing on the dark road outside. The men’s faint talking filled her with a vague comfort, knowing that the dark was not so lonely.
When she had opened her eyes, it was dawn. The front yard was quiet. Her mother was not yet awake. Arlene rose and walked to the kitchen, the open back door. A light dew on the grass, beer bottles strewn everywhere, and the men long gone home. She had never even heard them leave.
Down the hallway, the door to her brother’s room was wide open. Arlene stood in the quiet of the house, looking down the hallway, a chill that she found soothing in the morning air, how it had seeped inside, the doors open for the cross breeze. She stood long enough to listen to the house settle, a creak in the wood somewhere in the roof. She stood and looked down the hallway at the open door to her brother’s bedroom, wondering if he was actually in there or if he’d gone off with the men for more drinking. The answer was right there, just a quiet tiptoe down the hall, the door already open. But instead, Arlene kept standing there, taking in the unfamiliar and delicious chill to the morning air. She was understanding that it did not matter if her brother was in that room right then. Her mother loved him. All that mattered was that he had returned and that life was going to change in their house.
Things change. Everything’s gotta change, Arlene thought, rubbing her arms, and she stepped back into the house.
But how some things stayed. That feeling, standing in the hallway. She could remember it even now.
It was early yet and Arlene was tempted to turn the TV set back on. She was in no mood, though, for another unhappy teleplay, and instead she prepared for bed, turning off the lights in the house one by one and taking one last look out at the parking lot. With some guilt and some defeat, she turned off the motel’s road sign, a little angry that Dan wasn’t around to man the office in the evening hours like he had agreed. But no one was coming. She lay in bed and tried to get her mind to stop racing, to stop thinking of the motel’s demise, and in her frustration she put her hand out to the empty side of the bed.
Sleep came in a strange wave of images: Cal at the counter turning the pages of the newspaper; Vernon drinking from his coffee cup; the young waitresses wiggling their bottoms for the farmers. Sleep brought the Actress, too, enough to wake Arlene a bit to near alertness, wondering what had become of her, Cal never having seen anything in the newspaper headlines announcing a film shoot. She floated back into sleep, her mind flitting from image to image and refusing the clean slate of dreams, a sound thumping and thumping until Arlene opened her eyes, groggy, and realized the sound was real. She sat up, alert, and listened carefully as the faint thump came again, from Dan’s room, and she recoiled for a moment at the possibility that Dan would dare bring that girl into the house when the motel rooms sat empty and secretive.
She listened for voices but heard nothing except Dan’s footsteps and drawers being opened and shut. Her nightstand clock glowed a surprising five minutes past eleven.
“Dan?” she called from her open room. A light shone from underneath the door to his room. “Danny?”
The noise in his room stopped for a moment, and Arlene stood at the threshold of her bedroom, waiting to hear an answer, wondering why Dan was taking so long to respond when he had clearly heard her voice.
“Dan?”
He opened the door and stuck his head out, the same brown hair as Frederick’s, the same hard line of a nose. The same long jut of clavicle and the coarse ring of hair around the nipple. She caught a glimpse of his white underwear. She remembered Frederick’s coarse laughter when she had told him about her brother, about having no idea where her brother had gone during his first night home.
“What’s going on?”
“Sorry, Mama,” he said nervously, his body half-hidden behind the door. “Go on back to sleep.”
“If you have a girl in there …” Arlene teetered between stepping forward and stepping back. She braced herself for the embarrassment of confronting a naked girl sitting on the edge of Dan’s bed. She steeled herself as she had when Frederick shushed her, Dan’s little-boy footsteps in the hallway, tiny and fearful.
Through the sliver of open door, her view partially blocked by Dan’s body, she saw the edge of the bed. It was bare.
“What’s going on?” she asked again.
“Mama …,” he protested, but the absence of the girl allowed her to approach the door insistently. It was her house. Then she saw the suitcase.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going, Dan?” She put her hand on his door and he pushed back. She was surprised at her strength, but knowing she couldn’t hold her ground, she slid her hand on the jamb, fingers in full view, daring Dan to close the door and bruise her.
“Mama!” he yelled. “Leave me alone!”
“You better not be running off!” she yelled back. “The two of you are too young to be doing that!”
She pushed harder against the door — hard enough to surprise him, a peek of his face coming through the sliver of doorframe — and she gasped at the similarity of his face to Frederick’s. But then she spotted the cuts.
“What’s that on your cheek?” she demanded. “Dan, answer me!” She put her hand on the jamb, fingers laid out as fragile as eggs. She felt him stop pushing on the door, a silent truce.
“Mama,” Dan said quietly, “give me a minute to put on some clothes. Okay?” His voice was jittery, now that she heard him speak a complete sentence. “Okay?”
“All right,” she agreed, but she kept her fingers on the jamb. She heard the rough slip of Dan getting into a pair of dungarees, the slide of a drawer as he searched for a shirt. Then he slowly opened the door.
Dan’s suitcase sat open on the bed, a story she didn’t yet know. Next to it was the black bank deposit bag from their front office. He stood with his hand on the doorknob.
“What’s that on your cheek?” she asked, but now she didn’t want to know the answer. A black eye or a crust of blood under the nostril or a swollen lip would have made it easy to imagine too many beers at the Bluebird, the inability of men to keep their mouths shut against bravado. Dan’s cheek was something more dreadful in its simplicity: four little half-moons, caked in purple. A small hand doing that to his face.