A Small Hotel: A Novel by Robert Olen Butler

Author:Robert Olen Butler
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Perseus Books Group
Published: 2011-08-05T20:00:00+00:00

Michael listens to Kelly’s cell phone ringing, trying to run some choices through his head of where she might be. With her mother. With her sister. With a man. Alone in a jazz bar on Bourbon Street with a key to Room 303 in her purse is as far from the list as the dark side of the moon. As the phone rings, he prepares—just in case—to keep his voice calm, to put on the tone he would take with a crucial, frightened, reluctant witness. It is now that Kelly turns off her phone in the bar on Bourbon Street, but Michael, of course, simply hears the phone ringing yet again and again, and then her answering-service message begins. Kelly’s voice. “I’m not available …” And he’s still not ready to say anything to her this way. Not on this day. Tomorrow maybe, if he hasn’t gotten through to her. He hangs up. He holsters his phone.

He turns his face toward the plantation house. Only a perky garble of voices floats this way: the musicians seem to be on a break. He appreciates the relative quiet. He wishes he could be talking this out with Kelly now. And he thinks to call Sam. Perhaps she knows something. Sam. He turns his back on the house and walks further away from the voices and the light. Seeking a still better place to call his daughter, he slips into another undercurrent of the past. He stands at the back railing of the deck of his house, looking across his lawn at the dark water of the bayou. The deck is new, smelling powerfully of teak. The house is done at last. He and Kelly are at last in the place where they expect to grow old together. He hears the soft rustle of her behind him.

“Sam’s asleep?” he says.

“She was full of chat,” Kelly says, beside him now.

“The rigors of first grade,” he says.

“More pleasures than rigors tonight.”

“Good.” He turns and, without a word, steps away from her, crosses the deck to a Grundig boombox and starts the cassette he put in late last night. Stephane Grappelli’s sweet, slow, improvised jazz violin version of “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

He turns back to Kelly, who has followed him part way and is now settling into a deck chair. “I’m tired,” she says. “I almost finished the last of the boxes today.”

He moves to the deck chair beside her, but before he can sit, Kelly says, “You should play the Ella version.”

“No lyrics tonight,” he says.

She hums an assent, turning the hum into a following of the tune for a few bars.

“The harpsichord is the genius touch,” Michael says.

“Dance with me,” Kelly says.

“I thought you were tired.”

“Not too tired to dance,” she says.

Michael offers his hand. She takes it and rises and they hold each other close and they move a little, slow dancing for a time with small, improvised steps. The harpsichord begins to riff with the bridge and Kelly puts her lips to Michael’s ear and says, “Thank you for all this.

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