Hearts by Hilma Wolitzer

Author:Hilma Wolitzer [Wolitzer, Hilma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-80688-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

22 They laid out the few things they would need for the night. The room at Applegate Arms was small, but clean, and with the kind of shabbiness Linda found appealing. The discreet white patches on the white bedspreads, for instance, and the dark streaks in the bureau mirror where the silver had worn away.

The bathroom was halfway down the hall, and there was evidence of other guests: a yellow, chewed toothbrush tilted in a cloudy glass, a flowered shower cap, still shedding water, and footprints in a trail of dusting powder.

Linda looked through the tiny window while Robin spit blue toothpaste into the basin. There was a funeral home next door with floodlights directed at its sign. John J. Keneally and Sons. This proximity of mortuaries to inns and smaller hotels was not unusual, nor did Linda believe it was an ironic statement on the nature of human rest. The zoning laws probably lumped them together. And there were many large houses fallen to small or disintegrating families. Funeral homes needed the space; it was simply a matter of supply and demand. She did not feel morbid about the people she could see visiting in their dark cars as she brushed her hair. That place was as much a part of things as this one. But she was grateful for the bed she would soon climb into, for the kind of sleep she was about to enter, its temporary darkness. “Isn’t this nice?” Linda said. “And we’re paying less than half what we did at the Marriott.”

She had been worried about staying in a rooming house, afraid that once inside she would feel as if she were back at Mrs. Piner’s, trapped again in her own childhood. There were definite similarities. This, too, was an older, rambling house with a circular porch. A front-yard pin oak cut off the late-afternoon sun, and a dog barked eagerly when they rang the bell.

But the woman who came to the door was young and energetic. And a few small children in pajamas peered at Linda and Robin shyly from the doorway of the kitchen.

Upstairs, Robin soon grew restless. She kept opening the bureau drawers and the closet door and closing them again. She peeked into a shallow curtained alcove in the corner, where she found a tall electric floor fan and a sealed carton marked Lucy’s Snowsuit, Carriage Blankets, Quilts. “What’s this?” Robin asked.

“That looks like hand-me-downs from the last baby.”

Robin sat on the carton and pushed the fan back and forth with her feet. Its wheels screeched.

“They’re probably saving them for the next one,” Linda said. “Don’t do that, Robin, please.”

“Well, why are they keeping this stuff here?”

“Because they have no other place for it, probably. And it doesn’t really matter; we’re only going to be here one night. It’s not in our way.”

“There’s no air conditioner,” Robin said.

“No, thank God. We’ll be able to hear ourselves think for once. And it’s actually pretty cool in here, because of that big tree out there.

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