Pearl had twenty-five units and it was beginning to look like it really could be a full house. That meant she’d be cleaning a hell of a lot of rooms on Christmas Day because Rosa, the lady who’d helped her Aunt Pearlita for the past twenty years, decided to retire when Pearlita passed away in the fall.
While Mrs. Bride whispered love words in Mr. Bridegroom’s ear, Pearl looked out over the impatient crowd. Santa good-naturedly waited his turn, but the lady behind him with six teenagers in tow looked like she could chew up railroad spikes and spit out ten penny nails.
Maybe Pearl needed to sit on Santa’s lap and ask if he’d send his elves to help clean the rooms the next day. Cleaning hadn’t been a problem because renting five or six units a night was the norm up until that moment. The east side of the motel had ten units along with Pearl’s apartment. The bottom of the U had five units and a laundry room, and the west side had ten units. There was parking for one vehicle per room with extra parking for big trucks behind the laundry room. Part of her last online assignment was designing charts to make a few more spots in the wide middle. Even if she implemented the idea, it couldn’t happen until spring. Winter, even in Texas, wasn’t the right season to pour concrete.
The motel area had been carved out of a stand of mesquite trees fifty-plus years before, and every few years Pearlita had ordered a couple of truckloads of new gravel for the center lot and the drive around the outside edge. She’d declared that concrete was hot and that it made the place too modern, but Pearl figured she couldn’t afford the concrete. When she saw the savings account her aunt left in her name, she changed her mind. Aunt Pearlita was just plain tight.
The bridegroom didn’t care that the crowd behind him was getting impatient. He’d write a letter or two and then kiss his new little wife. Pearl tapped her foot and wished he’d take it on to his room and out of her lobby. After eternity plus three days, he finally finished filling out the motel card. She picked an old-fashioned key from the pegboard behind her. It was a real honest-to-god key on a chain with a big 2 engraved into the plastic fob. The back was printed with a message that read, If found please place in any mailbox and had the address for the Longhorn Inn. Pearl wondered how many times Aunt Pearlita had been called to the post office to pay for the postage on a key. What the place needed was those new modern card keys that all the motels were using.
Pearl could almost hear her aunt getting on the soapbox: Keys have opened doors for thousands of years, so why use those newfangled idiot credit card looking keys? No telling what a locksmith would charge to come fix one of those if a kid dripped his ice cream in it. Besides, why fix something that ain’t broken? Now stop your bellyachin’ and think about how much money you’re rakin’ in tonight. Besides, a plastic credit card lookin’ key doesn’t say quaint and romantic to me.
Pearl set the card aside and laid another one on the counter for the next customer. “That’s room two, second room from here. Parking is in front of the room. Next?”
Number one was next to her apartment with only two layers of sheetrock and very little insulation between the motel room and her bedroom. If she was going to clean rooms from dawn to dark the next day then she sure didn’t want to be kept awake by noisy newlyweds all night.
Mrs. Claus deferred to the older lady with six kids. “You go on, deary. Me and Santa Claus can wait until you get those kids in a room.”
She stepped up to the counter. “I need three rooms, connected if possible.”
Pearl shook her head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I can put you in three side-by-side rooms, but none of them have inside connecting doors.”
She laid a Visa card on the counter. “That will be fine if that’s the best you can do. Each room has two beds, right?”
Pearl nodded and handed her a card to fill out. When the transaction was finished she handed the woman keys to rooms three, four, and five and looked up at the next customer.
Santa Claus stepped up to the counter. “Thank God you’ve got electricity. I wasn’t looking forward to driving all the way back to Dallas tonight. Whole town is black. Hospital is working on generators, and I guess a few people have them in their homes from the dim lights we saw when we left the motel on the other end of town. I just need one room for two adults. No pets. Me and Momma were at a senior citizens’ party when the electricity went out. I was Santa Claus and giving out presents. Do you take AARP?”
“Yes, I do. Ten percent discount,” Pearl answered.
An hour later twenty-four rooms were filled, the parking lot was full, and the lobby empty. The north wind still howled across the flat land with nothing but a barbed wire fence to slow it down between Henrietta and Houston. Delilah, Pearl’s yellow cat, peeked out around the door from the office into the living room of the apartment.