Edward Adrift

don’t need to get paid. I’m fucking loaded.”
    “Don’t curse around me. I would like your help, yes.”
    I excuse myself so I can go tell Kyle what I’m doing, and I tell Sheila Renfro that I will meet her in room number eight in a few minutes. She offers me another handshake. I happily accept, and this time, her hand doesn’t feel weird at all.
    As I’m walking down the hallway to the room I share with Kyle, room number four, I feel a little light-headed and funny in my stomach, like birds are flying around in it, which is of course impossible.

TECHNICALLY FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 2011
    I cannot stop thinking about Sheila Renfro. At 9:47 p.m., Kyle and I left her cottage, which is attached to this motel, and came back to our room. We watched the 10:00 p.m. news out of Denver, although I must concede that I wasn’t really paying attention because I kept thinking about Sheila Renfro. At 10:32, I shut off the light and listened as Kyle quickly fell asleep. That was three hours and nine minutes ago—it’s 1:41 a.m. now—and I haven’t closed my eyes even once, except when I blink. Kyle is snoring in the bed next to mine. He’s lucky.
    I’ve been lying here and thinking about Sheila Renfro. What an interesting lady. And a very no-nonsense woman, too.
    The drywall work went well. As I told Sheila Renfro, I’m very handy with drywall. She needed help replacing a seven-foot-by-nine-foot section of the south wall in room number eight. By the time I got involved, she already had the old wall torn out, so I didn’t get to see the original damage. Sheila Renfro said it was pretty bad, that the room had been “lived in hard” over the years. The final indignation occurred a week ago, when a young manand his girlfriend were staying in the room and got into a serious fight.
    “I had a funny feeling about them when they checked in, but it was late and it was cold, so I ignored that feeling. An hour later, it’s an awful racket in there. Yelling and hitting and the sound of things crashing. I called the cops. It was too late. I had a funny feeling about them when they checked in. I shouldn’t have let them have the room.”
    Sheila Renfro was clearly holding onto regret about what happened, so I tried to be helpful as I nailed a section of drywall into place.
    “Yes,” I said, “but feelings are hard to quantify. What if they had been a nice couple and you had denied them a room based on a feeling? That wouldn’t have been fair.”
    “They weren’t a nice couple. They destroyed my room.”
    “I know. I’m just saying what if. You can’t trust a feeling.”
    “I trust
my
feelings. I know what’s what.”
    Sheila Renfro seemed to be getting annoyed with me, so I stopped talking about it. This is something I learned from Dr. Buckley, that it’s not important to win every argument. The first time she told me that, I thought she was kidding, but she was serious. It took me a long time to see the wisdom in her contention, but as usual, she turned out to be correct. Her general principle is to fight hard for the things worth fighting for, like your family or your inalienable (I love the word “inalienable”) rights. With a difference of opinion, why do damage to your relationship with someone by continuing to argue when there’s no possibility of a resolution? I’m not saying that I always get this right. For example, I got it quite wrong when I was arguing with Kyle about Tim Tebow. But Dr. Buckley’s words are never far from my mind, and in this case, with Sheila Renfro, I stopped the argument beforeit did damage. (I still don’t know how anyone can trust feelings above facts, though.)
    “How old is your son?” Sheila Renfro asked me.
    I thought it was funny—interesting funny, not ha-ha funny—that she thought Kyle was my son, although I suppose I’m old enough to be his father.
    “He’s my nephew,” I said, which was a fabrication and one I didn’t feel good about. On the other hand, I could see where being too truthful about this might lead to more questions and suspicion, and I didn’t need that. “We’re on an adventure.”
    “In Cheyenne Wells?”
    “Well, like I told you, I’ve been here before.”
    “Shouldn’t he be in school?”
    “He’s home-schooled.” Fabricating is getting easier for me.
    “Do you have any children?” I ask her.
    “Have you seen any around here?”
    “No.”
    “Well, there you go. No children for me, at least not yet. I’m still young enough,