Edward Adrift

though.”
    “Yes.” It seems right to agree with her, although at thirty-six years old, her biological clock is ticking. That, too, is a figure of speech. There is no clock inside us. That’s absurd.
    “You’re too old, though,” she says to me. “Not biologically, but practically.”
    “No, I’m not.”
    “You have to be at least fifty-five years old, right?”
    I am aghast. “I’m forty-two.”
    Sheila Renfro smiles at me. A real smile. “Gotcha,” she says.
    Sheila Renfro is pretty funny sometimes.

    After we got the drywall in place, we had only the painting left. I told Sheila Renfro that I would help her do that tomorrow—technically today, now—and that Kyle and I would drag the old drywall and other detritus out to the garbage. That turned out to be harder than I figured. The snow continued to come down in big, heavy, wet flakes, and drifts had begun to form on the outside wall of the motel. It took us five trips into blowing wind and sideways snow and walking through the drifts, but we got the garbage out. Kyle was a good helper.
    When we got back inside and shook the snow off our shoes and jackets, Sheila Renfro asked us to join her for dinner.

    Sheila Renfro and I are a lot alike.
    She has lived her whole life in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, where she was born. I have lived my whole life in Billings, Montana, where I was born. She likes routines and things she can rely on. I like the same. She’s very smart—in one evening with her, I learned that she knows almost as much about professional football as I do, including offensive formations and defensive alignments. I even tested her by asking what a dime package is.
    She said, “Don’t be silly. It’s when there are six defensive backs.”
    She was right.
    She is even a Dallas Cowboys fan, just like I am. I asked her why she liked Dallas better than Denver, since Denver is much closer to Cheyenne Wells than Dallas is, and she said, “The Cowboys are America’s Team.”
    That kind of logic is impressive.
    She received good grades in high school, and I did, too. She said she never felt like she fit in with her classmates, and I know exactly what that is like. I never fit in with my classmates at Billings West High School, either. Despite our good grades, neither of us felt prepared for college, so we didn’t go. I asked her if she has regrets about not going to college—we agreed that regrets are not fun.
    She said, “Heck no. I got to stay here and work for my daddy.”
    That’s where Sheila Renfro’s story turns sad. When she was twenty-two years old, on August 7, 1997, her parents were killed in a car crash just seven miles out of town as they were coming home from Denver. That left Sheila Renfro all alone.
    “They’re in the ground now,” she told me. She took me around her living room and she showed me pictures of her parents. I vaguely remembered both of them from my time in Cheyenne Wells, but that was a long time ago and memories are faulty. In the pictures that were taken toward the end of their lives, when they were much older than when I met them, they look content. Contentedness is a hard thing to quantify—impossible, in fact—but the looks on their faces in the pictures tell a lot. The smiles are genuine and loving. I don’t think you can fake something like that.
    “Do you miss them?” I asked Sheila Renfro. I knew this was a silly question. Of course she misses them. It was all I could think of to say.
    “Yes,” she said, “but I can’t do anything about it. They’re in the ground now.”
    Sheila Renfro told me that she promised herself when her parents died that she would stay in Cheyenne Wells and make sure the motel they built together kept running. She said it has been hard sometimes, that her fortunes ebb and flow with oilactivity and agriculture in southeastern Colorado. I knew what she meant. My father’s mood often correlated (I love the word “correlated”) with the price of oil, even long after he left the oil business and went into politics. Most people complain when the price of oil is high, because they know it will cost them more to fill their gas tanks. My father never saw that as a problem. Sheila Renfro doesn’t, either.
    “It’s a great motel,” I told her. “You’ve run it well.”
    “I’m glad I had the help today,” she said. “I could use it on a full-time basis.”
    I told her that maybe things would pick up and she could hire someone. She sort of smiled at that. Then