Page 17 of The Newcomer
Here it comes,Letty thought. Time to tell truth. For five days now, she’d dodged the child’s questions about her mother’s whereabouts.
She lifted Maya onto her lap and smiled sadly. “Mommy’s gone to heaven, ladybug.”
Maya frowned. “You take me to see Mommy in heaven, Letty.”
“I can’t,” Letty said, kissing her niece’s forehead, already sun-browned despite the layers of sunblock Letty slathered all over both of them. Unlike Letty, whose fair skin freckled and burned after onlyfifteen minutes at the beach, Maya tanned easily and beautifully, like her mother.
“I want you to,” Maya said, her upper lip quivering. “I want to see Mommy in heaven.”
“Someday,” Letty said. She and Tanya had attended church and Sunday school strictly as a matter of convenience to Terri. Her own grasp of theology was sketchy at best, so she felt totally inadequate to the task of explaining death and mortality and the hereafter. How was she supposed to explain the hereafter to a four-year-old when she wasn’t sure she understood it herself?
Instead, she fell back on the only coping mechanism she’d ever learned from her mother. Denial, with a strong helping of distraction.
“Come on,” Letty said, standing up. “I’m hungry. Let’s go get some lunch.”
Lettyhad taken to opening the windows in the mornings in an effort to air out the room.
After lunch she sat in a chair by the door, watching, as Maya drifted off to sleep. She wished she had a television, or a book, or something to keep her mind off the avalanche of anxiety that seemed to be her constant companion.
Instead, she picked up her phone and scrolled through the Craigslist ads for help wanted, which was yet another depressing, anxiety-inducing time suck.
It wasn’t that the pickings were lean. This was Florida and tourist season seemed to be a year-round state of mind. Restaurants needed servers and experienced cooks. Hotels needed housekeepers. Stores needed cashiers. She’d found a few listings for real estate management, but these all seemed to be full-time jobs. And right now, her full-time job was softly snoring from inside a pillow fort.
A wisp of acrid smoke drifted into the room. She jerked the door open and stepped outside.
An elderly man lounged in a folding lawn chair directly in front of her window. His bald head gleamed in the sunlight. He was bare-chested, exposing a narrow expanse of wrinkled, sun-bronzed skin and a hairy, beach ball–size belly. Spindly legs poked out from baggy shorts that reached to his knees. His eyes were half closed and a cigarette hung limply between pale lips.
“Mr. Jensen!” she said sharply.
“What?” He didn’t even open his eyes or bother to look at her.
She flapped her hands, trying to dispel the cloud of smoke. “I’ve asked you more than once. Could you please not do that? Your smoke is pouring into my room. I don’t want my niece or myself exposed to that.”
He inhaled and exhaled a thin stream of smoke through his nose. “So? Close your windows. That’s why God invented air-conditioning.”
“There’s a no-smoking sign right there,” Letty said, pointing at the sign affixed to the concrete column.
He shrugged. “I’m not smoking there. I’m smoking here. It’s a free country, you know.”
“Couldn’t you go over there?” Letty pointed to the plastic chairs grouped in a semicircle beneath a palm tree. The smokers’ lounge, the regulars called it.
Every night, around six o’clock, after the early-bird dinner hour, a few of the Murmuring Surf guests wandered out to the palm tree and took up positions in what seemed to be a rigorously enforced seating chart. The two men, one a Hispanic man who puffed on cigars, the other a short, pudgy man she’d never seen dressed in anything except a short terry-cloth bathrobe, always sat together. There were three elderly, birdlike women, who shared a single bottle of wine and a large clamshell they used as an ashtray. Letty surmised, from the overheard tone of their conversation, that they, too, were retirees and longtime regulars at the motel. Once, Letty had seen Billie, the shorter, nicer of the Feldmans, slink out to the palm tree. She’d borrowed a cigarette from one of the bird ladies, leaned against the tree, and smoked exactly the one cigarette, keeping her eyes trainedon the door of their unit, probably worried that Ruth might catch her sneaking a smoke.
“Too hot out there,” Mr. Jensen said lazily. “I like it right here in the shade.”
“Oscar!”
They both looked up to see Ava bearing down on them, trundling a plastic cart loaded down with cleaning supplies.
“How many times do I have to tell you? Put that thing out and get the hell out of my breezeway.”
Ava’s usually placid face was pink and perspiring.
“Okay, already,” Jensen said. He pinched the end of the cigarette between his fingers and dropped it to the concrete floor.
“Oh no you don’t,” Ava said, pointing at him with a dustpan. “I’m not your mother, and I’m not cleaning up after you. Pick that up and put it in the trash. The next time I find one of your disgusting cigarette butts laying around out here, you’ll forfeit your security deposit.”
“I’m not the only one here who smokes,” he protested.
