Page 29 of The Newcomer
“Have you got a mop and bucket handy?” Letty asked. “We should get that water up before it has a chance to sit.”
“You’re amazing,” Arlene said, as Letty prepared to leave. “An honest-to-God lifesaver. Wait, I have something for you.” She disappeared for a moment, and when she came back, she pressed some bills into Letty’s hand.
It was two ten-dollar bills. “Oh no,” Letty said. It was her turn to be embarrassed. “That’s not necessary, not at all.”
“Sure it is,” Arlene said, waving away Letty’s objections. “My security deposit is five hundred bucks. And I’m pretty sure Ava didn’t hire you to do plumbing work.”
“I’m here to do whatever needs doing,” Letty said, trying to hand the money back. “Please, I can’t take this.”
“Maya,” Arlene addressed the little girl. “Hold out your hand.”
“Okay.” The girl grinned as Arlene closed her chubby fingers over the cash. “You two run along now. And thanks a million.”
Lettyhad devised a system for completing the flyer mailing. She folded each flyer in three, inserted the rate card, affixed a preprinted mailing label to the front, then handed it off to Maya, whose sole responsibility was stapling the flyers together. The little girlchortled gleefully each time she mashed the glossy paper beneath the stapler.
Letty was so absorbed in her task she lost track of time until the door chimed again and Joe walked in, carrying a large cardboard carton. He glanced around the room. “Where’s my mom?”
“She had a dentist’s appointment and a coffee date. She said she’ll be back before lunch,” Letty said.
He walked around and joined them behind the counter, setting the box on a console table and ripping it open with a box cutter. He lifted out a bulky package wrapped in a plastic foam cube.
“I picked up her new printer,” he said, cutting away the foam. “I’m just gonna go ahead and set it up now, because otherwise I’ll have to come back and do it after I get off work tonight.”
“You’re on duty?” Letty asked. “Isn’t that against the rules or something?”
“We’re a small department. My sergeant knows where I am and he knows how to find me,” Joe said. He cleared a stack of file folders from the console top, set the printer up, and began plugging cables into the back of the printer, and then into the wall socket.
He tapped some buttons on the printer’s control panel and nodded in satisfaction when it lit up. “There’s paper on the shelf in the supply room,” he told Letty. “Grab a stack and let’s see how it works.”
She found the paper and inserted it into the printing tray. Joe sat at the computer monitor and typed, and a moment later the printer whirred to life.
“Good,” he said, nodding. He looked down at Maya, who was trying out the stapler on the discarded blocks of foam. “Hey, I recognize that table and chair.”
“Ava said they used to be your sister’s.”
“But they were mine first,” Joe said. “She used to sit me there while she worked. I watched a lot of television sitting at that table. Ate a lot of baloney sandwiches there too.”
“How nice,” Letty said. She picked up a stack of flyers and began folding them, hoping he’d get the signal that she was very, very busy.
“Where’d you grow up?” he asked. “I swear, just now when you said ‘How nice’ I detected a Southern accent.”
“We moved around a lot when I was a kid. Tennessee and West Virginia, places like that,” Letty said, being deliberately vague. “Could you hand me those rate cards over there?”
She wished he’d go.
“Were your parents from the South?”
“She was, but he wasn’t. They split up when I was little.”
“My old man took off when I was seven,” Joe volunteered.
Despite herself, Letty found herself curious about this cop’s background. Maybe if she asked the questions he’d be so distracted he’d forget to interview her.
“Your mom told me your folks bought this place when you were a baby. What was that like? Growing up, living in a motel?”
“Until I went to high school, I thought everybody lived like this,” Joe said, gesturing around the small office. “Especially after my old man left, there was always a lot to do around here. I started off emptying garbage cans, cleaning the pool, sweeping the breezeways. When I got a little taller, Ava had me mowing the grass, painting, washing windows.”
“Had your family always been in the motel business?”
