Edward Adrift

desk, Edward. I’ll be back.”

    Sheila Renfro’s motel is jumping today. Again while she’s gone, another lodger shows up. This time, it’s just a single man, and he says he needs one night.
    “Gotta be in Denver in the morning,” he says.
    I put him in room number seven, across the hall from our other guests. He pays with a credit card. He writes down his name as “Ed Piewicz,” which matches the card. I tell him about breakfast,and he says he knows. I can’t imagine that Sheila Renfro will have a problem with him. She should be thrilled. She needs the money.

    Sheila Renfro returns and I fill her in on the new guest. She knows him.
    “Oh, sure, Ed,” she says. “He drives a run between Salina and Denver. Must have had a delivery in Oakley. He stays here a few times a year.”
    “Where did you go?”
    “Sheriff.”
    “Why?”
    “Told him about our mystery guests.”
    “You think Steve and Sandy Smith are criminals?”
    “No, Edward, I don’t. At least, I hope they’re not. But I’ve had trouble here before and I know what trouble looks like. I can’t be too careful. If they’re trouble, the law will know what to do.”
    “What did the sheriff say?”
    “He thanked me for the information and told me to run the place like I normally would. So that’s what I’m going to do. Do you want to help me replace the hand soap in the rooms?”
    This is a silly question. Of course I do.

    Perhaps I should not have been so eager to help Sheila Renfro with her chores around the motel. When we made it upstairs to replace the soap in those rooms, I was so out of breath that I had to sit down on the bed in room number fifteen and wait for myheartbeat to slow. Dr. Ira Banning warned me about this, that my freshly repaired lung would need some time to work itself back to capacity. The way to do that, he said, is through exercise, which is what I just did.
    “You can wait for me downstairs,” Sheila Renfro says.
    “I’m OK.”
    “After I’m done here, we can take a break. I’ll make some hot tea.”
    “That sounds nice.”
    “I’m glad you’re here, Edward.”
    “So am I.”

    Sheila Renfro asks me a question that causes me to spit my tea back into my cup.
    “Edward, have you ever kissed a girl?”
    I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “Last night.”
    “What—”
    “Remember, I kissed you right before you went to bed. You were there.”
    Sheila Renfro smiles and grips her teacup with both hands.
    “That was more me kissing you than you kissing me. Have you ever kissed a girl besides me?”
    “No, not with my mouth. Donna Middleton—she’s now Donna Hays—has kissed me on the cheek, but I’ve never kissed her back. This girl in high school let me kiss her, but it was just so she could embarrass me in front of her friends.”
    “I hate that girl.”
    “She was pretty mean.”
    “Tell me about Donna Middleton.”
    “Donna Hays.”
    “Yes. Tell me about her.”
    This is one of my favorite subjects. I tell Sheila Renfro about how Donna didn’t trust me initially because men had been mean to her, but that Kyle and I were friends first, and then Donna and I became friends. I tell her about how we threw snowballs at each other and had pizza, and how bad things kept happening but we hung in there together and remained friends. I tell her about Donna marrying Victor and moving away. I also tell her what happened with Kyle.
    “She sounds like a wonderful friend,” Sheila Renfro says, and she is correct about that. “I wish I had a friend like that here.”
    “Donna Middleton has been very good to me. I mean, Donna Hays. I always forget to use her married name.”
    “I don’t think she liked me.”
    I was hurt when I was in the hospital, so I don’t remember all of Sheila Renfro’s interactions with Donna.
    “It was a tense situation,” I say, and Sheila Renfro nods.
    “Did you ever want to kiss Donna?” she asks.
    I consider this for a moment. It’s true that I developed strong feelings for Donna as we were becoming friends, but I don’t think those feelings were romantic. At the time, I was much more interested in Joy Annette, my blind date, and that turned out to be a disaster.
    “No,” I say. “She was just my friend.”
    “Would you like to kiss me?” Sheila Renfro asks.
    I look down at my cup. I don’t like making eye contact with people when I’m uncomfortable, or at all.
    “I don’t know,” I say.
    “That’s not how you talk