Where I'm Calling From

world.
    I go, “Holly, honey, I love you.”
    In the lot someone leans on a horn, stops, and then leans again.
    Holly wipes her eyes. She goes, “Fix me a drink. This one’s too watery. Let them blow their stinking horns. I don’t care. I’m moving to Nevada.”
    “Don’t move to Nevada,” I go. “You’re talking crazy,” I go.
    “I’m not talking crazy,” she goes. “Nothing’s crazy about Nevada. You can stay here with your cleaning woman. I’m moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.”
    “Holly!” I go.
    “Holly nothing!” she goes.
    She sits on the sofa and draws her knees up to under her chin.
    “Fix me another pop, you son of a bitch,” she goes. She goes, “Fuck those horn-blowers. Let them do their dirt in the Travelodge. Is that
    where your cleaning woman cleans now? Fix me another, you son of a bitch!”
    She sets her lips and gives me this look.
    Drinking’s funny. When I look back on it, all of our important decisions have been figured out when we were drinking. Even when we talked about having to cut back on our drinking, we’d be sitting at the kitchen table or out at the picnic table with a six-pack or whiskey. When we made up our minds to move down here and take this job as managers, we sat up a couple of nights drinking while we weighed the pros and the cons.
    I pour the last of the Teacher’s into our glasses and add cubes and a spill of water.
    Holly gets off the sofa and stretches on out across the bed.
    She goes, “Did you do it to her in this bed?”
    I don’t have anything to say. I feel all out of words inside. I give her the glass and sit down in the chair. I drink my drink and think it’s not ever going to be the same.
    “Duane?” she goes.
    “Holly?”
    My heart has slowed. I wait.
    Holly was my own true love.
    The thing with Juanita was five days a week between the hours of ten and eleven. It was in whatever unit she was in when she was making her cleaning rounds. I’d just walk in where she was working and shut the door behind me.
    But mostly it was in 11. It was 11 that was our lucky room.
    We were sweet with each other, but swift. It was fine.
    I think Holly could maybe have weathered it out. I think the thing she had to do was really give it a try.
    Me, I held on to the night job. A monkey could do that work. But things here were going downhill fast.
    We just didn’t have the heart for it anymore.
    I stopped cleaning the pool. It filled up with green gick so that the guests wouldn’t use it anymore. I didn’t fix any more faucets or lay any more tile or do any of the touch-up painting. Well, the truth is we were both hitting it pretty hard. Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you’re going to do a good job with it.
    Holly wasn’t registering the guests right, either. She was charging too much or else not collecting what she should. Sometimes she’d put three people to a room with only one bed in it, or else she’d put a single in where the bed was a king-size. I tell you, there were complaints, and sometimes there were words.
    Folks would load up and go somewhere else.
    The next thing, there’s a letter from the management people. Then there’s another, certified.
    There’s telephone calls. There’s someone coming down from the city.
    But we had stopped caring, and that’s a fact. We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled our lives and we were getting ready for a shakeup.
    Holly’s a smart woman. She knew it first.
    Then that Saturday morning we woke up after a night of rehashing the situation. We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We’d reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.
    We got up and got dressed, had coffee, and decided on this talk. Without nothing interrupting. No calls.
    No guests.
    That’s when I got the Teacher’s. We locked up and came upstairs here with ice, glasses, bottles. First off, we watched the color TV and frolicked some and let the phone ring away downstairs. For food, we went out and got cheese crisps from the machine.
    There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
    When we were just kids before we married?” Holly goes. “When we had big plans and hopes? You remember?” She was sitting on the bed, holding her knees and her drink.
    “I remember, Holly.”
    “You weren’t my first, you know. My first was Wyatt. Imagine. Wyatt. And your name’s Duane.