Where I'm Calling From

a place to move around in and be able to talk. So we’d locked up the motel office that morning and gone upstairs to a suite.
    She goes, “Duane, this is killing me.”
    We are drinking Teacher’s with ice and water. We’d slept awhile between morning and afternoon. Then she was out of bed and threatening to climb out the window in her undergarments. I had to get her in a hold. We were only two floors up. But even so.
    “I’ve had it,” she goes. “I can’t take it anymore.”
    She puts her hand to her cheek and closes her eyes. She turns her head back and forth and makes this humming noise.
    I could die seeing her like this.
    “Take what?” I go, though of course I know.
    “I don’t have to spell it out for you again,” she goes. “I’ve lost control. I’ve lost pride. I used to be a proud woman.”
    She’s an attractive woman just past thirty. She is tall and has long black hair and green eyes, the only green-eyed woman I’ve ever known. In the old days I used to say things about her green eyes, and she’d tell me it was because of them she knew she was meant for something special.
    And didn’t I know it!
    I feel so awful from one thing and the other.
    I can hear the telephone ringing downstairs in the office. It has been ringing off and on all day. Even when I was dozing I could hear it. I’d open my eyes and look at the ceiling and listen to it ring and wonder at what was happening to us.
    But maybe I should be looking at the floor.
    “My heart is broken,” she goes. “It’s turned to a piece of stone. I’m no good. That’s what’s as bad as anything, that I’m no good anymore.”
    “Holly,” I go.
    When we’d first moved down here and taken over as managers, we thought we were out of the woods. Free rent and free utilities plus three hundred a month. You couldn’t beat it with a stick.
    Holly took care of the books. She was good with figures, and she did most of the renting of the units.
    She liked people, and people liked her back. I saw to the grounds, mowed the grass and cut weeds, kept the swimming pool clean, did the small repairs.
    Everything was fine for the first year. I was holding down another job nights, and we were getting ahead. We had plans. Then one morning, I don’t know. I’d just laid some bathroom tile in one of the units when this little Mexican maid comes in to clean. It was Holly had hired her. I can’t really say I’d noticed the little thing before, though we spoke when we saw each other. She called me, I remember, Mister.
    Anyway, one thing and the other.
    So after that morning I started paying attention. She was a neat little thing with fine white teeth. I used to watch her mouth.
    She started calling me by my name.
    One morning I was doing a washer for one of the bathroom faucets, and she comes in and turns on the TV as maids are like to do. While they clean, that is. I stopped what I was doing and stepped outside the bathroom. She was surprised to see me. She smiles and says my name.
    It was right after she said it that we got down on the bed.
    “Holly, you’re still a proud woman,”
    I go. “You’re still number one. Come on, Holly.”
    She shakes her head.”Something’s died in me,” she goes. “It took a long time for it to do it, but it’s dead.
    You’ve killed something, just like you’d taken an axe to it. Everything is dirt now.”
    She finishes her drink. Then she begins to cry. I make to hug her. But it’s no good.
    I freshen our drinks and look out the window.
    Two cars with out-of-state plates are parked in front of the office, and the drivers are standing at the door, talking. One of them finishes saying something to the other, and looks around at the units and pulls his chin. There’s a woman there too, and she has her face up to the glass, hand shielding her eyes, peering inside. She tries the door.
    The phone downstairs begins to ring.
    “Even a while ago when we were doing it, you were thinking of her,” Holly goes. “Duane, this is hurtful.”
    She takes the drink I give her.
    “Holly,” I go.
    “It’s true, Duane,” she goes. “Just don’t argue with me,” she goes. She walks up and down the room in her underpants and her brassiere, her drink in her hand.
    Holly goes, “You’ve gone outside the marriage. It’s trust that you killed.”
    I get down on my knees and I start to beg. But I am thinking of Juanita. This is awful. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or to anyone else in the