age. When they had stopped for lunch today, Colin nibbled at one piece
of chicken, ate some cole slaw, a dish of sherbet, drank a Coke-then
proclaimed himself “stuffed.”
“Well,” Doyle said, “we’re not so grubby they’ll refuse to let us in the
restaurant. But I want to get our rooms first.” He opened his door and
let the chill but muggy night air into the car. “You wait here for me.”
“Sure,” Colin said. “If I can get out of this seatbelt now.”
Alex smiled, unfastened his own belt. “I really scared you, did I?”
Colin gave him a lopsided smile. “If you want to look at it that way.”
“Okay, okay,” Doyle said. “Take off your seatbelt, Colin me boy.”
When he got out of the car and stretched his legs, he saw that the Lazy
Time Motel was just what the tour-guide book said it was: clean,
pleasant, but inexpensive. It was built as a large L, with the
neon-framed office at the junction of the two wings. Forty or fifty
doors, all alike and spaced as evenly as the slats in a fence, were set
into undistinguished red-brick walls. A concrete promenade fronted both
wings and was covered by a corrugated aluminum awning supported by black
wrought-iron posts every ten feet. A soda machine stood just outside
the office door, humming and clinking to itself.
The office was small, but the walls were bright yellow, the tile floor
clean and polished. Doyle crossed to the counter and struck the bell
for service.
“Just a minute!” a woman called from behind a bamboo-curtained doorway
at the end of the work area on the business side of the counter.
Beside the counter was a rack of magazines and paperback books. A sign
above the rack read: TONIGHT, WHY NOT READ YOURSELF TO SLEEP?
While Doyle waited for the clerk, he looked at the books, though he
would not need anything to make him sleepy after all day on the road.
“Sorry to make you wait,” she said, shouldering through the bamboo
curtain. “I was-” Halfway from the curtain to the counter, she got a
look at Doyle, and she stopped talking. She stared at him the same way
Chet, at the service station, had stared. “Yes?” Her voice was
decidedly cool.
“You’ve got reservations for Doyle,” Alex said. Now he was doubly glad
he had made reservations. He was fairly sure she would have turned him
away, even if he could see there was not a car in front of every room
and even if the neon vacancy sign was lighted.
“Doyle?” she asked.
“Doyle.”
She came the rest of the way to the counter, brightened as she reached
for the file cards by the registry book. “Oh, the father and son from
Philadelphia!”
“That’s right,” Doyle said, trying to smile.
She was in her middle fifties, an attractive woman despite the extra
twenty pounds she carried. She wore her hair in a 1950’s bouffant, her
broad forehead revealed, spit curls at her ears. Her knit dress clung
to a full if matronly bosom. The lines of a girdle showed at hips and
waist.
“That was one of our seventeen-dollar rooms,” she said.
“Yes.” She took the file card from the green metal box, looked closely
at it, then flipped open the registration book. She carefully completed
a third-of-a-page form, then turned the book around and held out the
pen. “If you’ll sign here . . . Oh,” she said as he reached for the
pen, “maybe your father should sign. The room is reserved in his name.”
Doyle looked at her uncomprehendingly until he realized she had more
in common with Chet than he had first thought.
“I am the father. I’m Alex Doyle.”
She frowned. When she tilted her head, the bouffant seemed about to
slide right down over her face in one well-sprayed piece. “But it says
here-”
“My boy’s eleven.” He took the pen and scribbled his signature on the
form.
she looked at the freshly inked name as if it were an ugly spot on her
new slipcovers. Any minute now she would run for the solvent and scrub
the nasty thing away.
“Which room have we got?” Alex asked, prodding her along against her