You okay in there? she asked, tapping the window again. Rick? I unlocked the door and got out of the car. It was now evening. Tell me, she said, her hands on my shoulders, her feet balancing on tippy-toes. I leaned in and put my arms around her little body. It was a good cake, Mom was all I could think to say. They would have loved it.
Rebecca
Some days she doesn’t come out. Some days you never see so much as a flicker of light behind the curtains. We’ve gotten used to her and it’s convenient that she pays cash for the room. She leaves a forty-dollar tip each week for Cissy, too, which has to be a record here at the Moonstone. Cissy, like us, is in her early fifties, maybe a bit older. She walks to work from her house down the road, brings our mystery guest a thermos most days and occasionally cookies, and spends nearly an hour cleaning her room when she barely spends twenty minutes in the others. She also, I have seen recently, takes away a small bag of laundry each week from Room 6 and returns it the next day, presumably washed and folded.
Why this woman would want to stay here as long as she has is not our business, but of course I wonder. When she checked in, she had no ID. She’d lost her driver’s license, she explained, and then asked if she could pay cash, a month in advance. I called Kelly, who is a better judge of character than I am, to come over from the house before agreeing. She asked the woman how long she planned to stay, and she answered that she didn’t know but she would pay each month up front in cash and wouldn’t expect a refund if she left early. Kelly asked her where she was from, and even though she answered vaguely, Back East, Kelly still turned to me, gave me a wink and a squeeze on my arm, and said to the woman, Stay here as long as you like. If she were some rough type or strung-out junkie, there’s no way we’d go along with it, but this woman could be anyone’s mom or wife and seemed, and still seems, only sad, not dangerous. The night she checked in, I asked her what we should call her, and she said Jane, which of course can’t be her real name. But even saying that one word, that fake name, seemed like an effort, and I immediately regretted asking. I walked her out to Room 6—the one closest to and facing the ocean — because she’d asked for it specifically. She must have known someone who’d stayed at the Moonstone once or been here before we owned it. Room 6 also has the best mattress, which we had to buy last year after an older man who’d come down from Seattle for the weekend fell asleep with a lit cigarette in his hand and caught the bed on fire. Burned a hole right through to the other side in the short time it took for him to wake up from the smoke, thank God, and come running to our door in his bare feet and boxer shorts. Which is all to say, since she’s staying for as long as she is, I’m glad she’s at least sleeping on a decent mattress.
When I showed her to the room, I offered to give her a little tour, but she politely declined. She simply unlocked the door with the key, went in without another word, and stayed inside for nearly a week. It was Cissy who got her out of there the first time. Ma’am, MA’AM! she yelled as she knocked. Out you go, ma’am. Out. I only need a few minutes but you gotta get out. Kelly and I stood a few doors down to see what would happen. Few people stand up to Cissy. She is tall and thin and strong with one long braid, once black and now silver, thick as rope, down her back. Her hands are bigger than most men’s and her chest is as flat as a board. She looks like a Native American, but when I asked her once, she didn’t answer. Her husband was from a long line of fishermen in Aberdeen, just down at the mouth of Grays Harbor, but he died of lung cancer fifteen years ago and since then she’s been living with her sisters, who I think mostly all lost their husbands one way or another and ended up back in the house they grew up in. Cissy has lived here in Moclips all her life and has worked at the Moonstone since her husband died. According to her sister Pam, Cissy’s husband left her the house they’d lived in together, which she sold, so I don’t think it’s the money Cissy is after so much as something to do and somewhere to go each day. Pam is the only real estate agent in Moclips and the one who sold us the Moonstone from an old couple who’d had it since the sixties. That was four years ago. The first morning in our little house next to the Moonstone, Cissy showed up with a blue tin of orange drop cookies and told us what she charged, what time of the day she worked, and the week in July she took off every year. I don’t remember us offering her the job so much as agreeing to her terms. We didn’t find out she was Pam’s sister for months.
Cissy isn’t much for hanging around and gabbing. At first we thought it was because she felt uncomfortable with us because of the gay thing, but when gay marriage was legalized in Washington State this year, she came into the office the morning after the election and said, It’s none of my business, but if you two decide to get legal, I happen to be an ordained minister thanks to the good old Internet and I’d be happy to do the honors. Kelly is hardly ever at a loss for words, but it did take her a few beats to say thank you and let her know we weren’t sure whether we would or wouldn’t, and if we did, we’d likely call on her services. Funny how you think people are one way or the other and most of the time you end up completely wrong. We’re still not sure about getting married. We’ve talked about it, of course, and we cheered the night of the election when we saw on television that voters passed the referendum. But beyond Kelly’s brothers and nephews, who we see once or twice a year, neither of us have much by way of family anymore. And we’ve been together for so long now — twenty years, twenty-one, it’s hard to remember — it seems like something to let the young ones get excited about. But you never know.
Cissy has never once mentioned her husband, whose name we know was Ben only because Pam told us one night when we cooked her supper. She’d had a few glasses of wine and had been loud and laughing until the subject turned to Cissy, when she quieted to a whisper as if Cissy could hear from their house down the road. They met at a bar in Aberdeen one night when they were both teenagers. Ben was the only man tall enough for Cissy is what most people thought at the time — and even though you’d never hear them say much to each other, there was a spark between them, always, a kind of animal energy. Cissy used to say I have my sisters for talking and Ben for everything else. They never had kids. Neither of them ever went to a doctor to find out why. They just accepted it and went about their lives. They lived in the house three doors down from ours for almost twenty years, and Cissy asked me to find a buyer the day Ben died, which was also the day she moved back in with us. I found a buyer a little while later, a couple from Portland who came with their kids to teach at the elementary school. They moved away after the last one went off to college. I think Pam regretted spilling so many beans about Cissy that night because she’s turned down the few invitations we’ve made since. She’s perfectly friendly when we run into her at the grocery store or gas station in Aberdeen, but she keeps her distance.