The Territory A Novel - By Tricia Fields Page 0,73
Manny’s for the night before returning home in the morning. She walked down the block and around the courthouse to the motel. Through the plate glass window, she saw Manny sitting in his recliner under the yellow glow of his reading lamp. Cigarette smoke filtered up through the light, and his attention was riveted on the book in his lap. He looked over his glasses at her when she stepped inside the door, and he stood and approached the counter. The wringing of his hands and his worry lines reminded her of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. She half expected him to break out into song.
“How are you getting along? I’ve listened to the radio all day long for updates. Have you caught the bastards?”
Josie glanced at the radio sitting on the counter and heard the soft classical music from the local public radio station.
“I’m doing okay. We have three new guests at the Arroyo County Jail. The feds have taken over now. They’ll hopefully be moved quickly.”
He reached across the counter and clasped her hand. “You need a room tonight?”
She nodded.
“You stay in room six. Right next to my apartment. You need anything tonight, you knock on the wall and I’m at your door in two seconds.” He opened the key box on the counter and passed her a gold key on a smiley face key chain. “Anything else I can do?” he asked.
She paused, embarrassed, and looked down at her uniform. “I don’t want to go home tonight. I can’t face that house right now.”
“You need clothes? You go to your room and I’ll run to the store.”
She closed her eyes for a moment to fight back her humiliation. She finally sighed and looked at Manny. “I can’t go to the liquor store in uniform. Do you have any bourbon stocked away somewhere?”
He smiled at her warmly. “Sleep. That’s what you need.” He left her for a moment and returned from the back room with a fifth of bourbon, still sealed. “I get this question occasionally. On the house. The room, too, of course.”
* * *
Josie turned on the lamp on the bedside table and set the air-conditioning on high. The unit hummed to life and blew musty, damp air into the hot room. The paneled walls were painted a buttery yellow, and an ancient wedding ring–pattern quilt was on the bed. Hand-embroidered pillows were piled up against a wicker headboard, and a rocking chair with a lace-covered cushion sat in the corner facing a TV. It was a cozy room that reminded her of country farmhouses back in Indiana. Josie used Manny’s complimentary toothbrush and ate the cheese crackers she had brought with her from her stash at the department. She laid her uniform out across the rocker and propped herself against the pillows in bed in her underwear. She put the remote control beside her and cracked the seal on the bourbon, filling the drinking glass on the bedside table half-full. She stared into the amber liquid in the glass as if some measure of clarity might bubble up into her thoughts after the burn dissipated.
Josie wondered what her mother had done, propped up in a bed just like hers—if she had drunk her own glass of bourbon or taken pills to fall asleep. Josie had tried desperately to keep her mother’s real intentions behind the mental wall she constructed, and she thought she had succeeded. She wondered now if she had been too harsh, if she should have given her mother a chance to explain things. But what good was an explanation in the end? She had been a lousy mother. The question Josie was wrestling with now was, did that give her a free pass to be a lousy daughter? And what about a girlfriend? Did her job give her a free pass to shut out a man who obviously loved her?
Josie drank, eventually straight from the bottle, until the room tilted. She closed her eyes and imagined a chalkboard with a list of solutions. She felt sure there were answers inside her and wondered: Did she want to be a good cop, a good person, a good daughter, a good wife? It was obvious she couldn’t be all those to everyone, so she had to choose. She slipped down the pillows, set the bottle on the table, and fell asleep with the lights on. She dreamt about monsoons filling up the desert, the water closing in around her neck.