Alice Munros Best

she should not have dismissed it so readily. It was covered with sheets of tin stamped to look like bricks and painted a light blue. There was the one word HOTEL , in neon tubing, no longer lit, over the doorway.
    “I am a dunce,” she said, and offered the man a dollar for the ride.
    He laughed. “Hang on to your money. You never know when you’ll need it.”
    Quite a decent-looking car, a Plymouth, was parked outside this hotel. It was very dirty, but how could you help that, with these roads?
    There were signs on the door advertising a brand of cigarettes, and of beer. She waited till the truck had turned before she knocked – knocked because it didn’t look as if the place could in any way be open for business. Then she tried the door to see if it was open, and walked into a little dusty room with a staircase, and then into a large dark room in which there was a billiard table and a bad smell of beer and an unswept floor. Off in a side room she could see the glimmer of a mirror, empty shelves, a counter. These rooms had the blinds pulled tightly down. The only light she saw was coming through two small round windows, which turned out to be set in double swinging doors. She went on through these into a kitchen. It was lighter, because of a row of high – and dirty – windows, uncovered, in the opposite wall. And here were the first signs of life – somebody had been eating at the table and had left a plate smeared with dried ketchup and a cup half full of cold black coffee.
    One of the doors off the kitchen led outside – this one was locked – and one to a pantry in which there were several cans of food, one to a broom closet, and one to an enclosed stairway. She climbed the steps, bumping her suitcase along in front of her because the space was narrow. Straight ahead of her on the second floor she saw a toilet with the seat up.
    The door of the bedroom at the end of the hall was open, and in there she found Ken Boudreau.
    She saw his clothes before she saw him. His jacket hanging up on a corner of the door and his trousers on the doorknob, so that they trailed on the floor. She thought at once that this was no way to treat good clothes, so she went boldly into the room – leaving her suitcase in the hall – with the idea of hanging them up properly.
    He was in bed, with only a sheet over him. The blanket and his shirt were lying on the floor. He was breathing restlessly as if about to wake up, so she said, “Good morning. Afternoon.”
    The bright sunlight was coming in the window, hitting him almost in the face. The window was closed and the air horribly stale – smelling, for one thing, of the full ashtray on the chair he used as a bed table.
    He had bad habits – he smoked in bed.
    He did not wake up at her voice – or he woke only part way. He began to cough.
    She recognized this as a serious cough, a sick man’s cough. He struggled to lift himself up, still with his eyes closed, and she went over to the bed and hoisted him. She looked for a handkerchief or a box of tissues, but she saw nothing so she reached for his shirt on the floor, which she could wash later. She wanted to get a good look at what he spat up.
    When he had hacked up enough, he muttered and sank down into the bed, gasping, the charming cocky-looking face she remembered crumpled up in disgust. She knew from the feel of him that he had a fever.
    The stuff that he had coughed out was greenish-yellow – no rusty streaks. She carried the shirt to the toilet sink, where rather to her surprise she found a bar of soap, and washed it out and hung it on the door hook, then thoroughly washed her hands. She had to dry them on the skirt of her new brown dress. She had put that on in another little toilet – the
Ladies
on the train – not more than a couple of hours ago. She had been wondering then if she should have got some makeup.
    In a hall closet she found a roll of toilet paper and took it into his room for the next time he had to cough. She picked up the blanket and covered him well, pulled the blind down to the sill and raised the stiff window an inch or two, propping it open with the ashtray she had emptied. Then she changed, out in the hall, from the brown dress into old clothes from her suitcase. A lot of use a nice dress or any makeup in the world would be now.
    She was not sure how sick he was, but she had nursed Mrs. Willets – also a heavy smoker – through several bouts of bronchitis, and she thought she could