We had been at Grays Harbor Hospital for more than an hour, and after the ten hour drive to Aberdeen, I just wasn’t feeling up to making another ten hour drive back to Anderson. Our only other option was to find a decently priced hotel and spend the night, waking up bright and early to make the trip home.
I parked the hearse as far from the Peninsula Inn as I could, hoping not to be questioned by the motel manager and praying that the exterior design of the building didn’t speak volumes for what we would find inside. As the three of us entered the lobby, my fears were confirmed, the first thing I noticed being the 1950s throwback décor. Whether it had been on purpose or not, the blonde wood, sunburst wall clock, and kitsch pattern furniture screamed “time-warp” and made me more than a little uncomfortable.
August, however, lazily threw himself into one of the three off-white Copenhagen chairs that lined the far wall, picking up an Aberdeen, Washington brochure that read “Come as you are!” on the front flap in bold, blue letters. He began to leaf through it as Mom spoke with the manager.
“We need two rooms for the night, please,” she said somewhat sheepishly to the bearded manager whose nametag read Marion. She was a tired, petite woman who looked extremely out of place, especially next to the hulking, bearded frame of Marion the manager.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said in a gruff tone. His voice fit him perfectly, but his level of manners was surprising, if not stereotypically, uncharacteristic of someone who smelled of cigars and bear and who worked the late shift at a somewhat dumpy rural Washington motel.
I sat down in the chair next to August’s and waited for Mom to finish the transaction. She paid Marion for the rooms, and he handed her two keys, smiling broadly to reveal jagged teeth that were in dire need of brushing. August stifled a laugh, successfully turning it into a cough, and held up his brochure for me to read the title again. I shook my head at him, hoping that neither Marion nor our mother would catch on to what he was implying. While August was funny at times, I felt he was hardly in the position to joke around.
Mom turned towards us and handed me our room key as I stood from my chair. “You’re in room 48,” she said. “I’ve got room 50. We’ll be right across the hall from each other, so if you need anything—“ she began, most likely realizing I was a grown man before she could finish her thought. Sometimes it was hard for her to accept that fact I had grown and could take care of myself.
The three of us entered the main hallway of the hotel and mounted the stairs that would lead us to our adjacent rooms, August and I hanging back as Mom seemed on a mission to reach her destination at record speeds. Once she reached the door marked 50, she inserted her key, opened the door, and turned to face us.
“I’ll be resting. Knock if you need anything,” she instructed. As she stared at me, waiting for a response, I noticed the dark circles under her eyes and wondered if they had developed over the course of our very long day or if they had developed slowly over time, starting even before August had decided Anderson, California was not the place he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
“We should grab something for dinner soon. I saw an Italian restaurant down the street,” I said, knowing well that she needed to eat something more solid than the burger and fries she had picked at on our way to Aberdeen.
She hesitated for a moment as if taking in my words and carefully dissecting them before forming a response. “I’m not feeling hungry. You should go without me, but don’t stay out too late. I want to get an early start tomorrow and get home as soon as we can.”
At least we agreed on something.
I nodded, noticing she seemed more worn out than only moments before. Seconds later, she turned away from both August and I, retreating into her room and slowly closing the door in my face. So as to not be rude, she left it open only a fraction of an inch in order to let me know I could follow her in if I really wanted to.
Respecting her privacy and knowing she needed rest, I grabbed the door handle and pulled it closed, hearing the lock latch seconds later.
As I turned to unlock our room, I saw August standing next to the door, not really focusing on anything and possibly transforming back into his introverted self, more and more by the second.
I ruffled his hair gently and placed my hand on his shoulder, turning him towards the now open room door. “I know she hasn’t really spoken to you yet, but I think you’re just going to have to give her some time and space,” I said, hoping he would understand.
“I’m not too worried about that,” he stated quietly.
“I have a feeling you are, but I just don’t want you to think too much of it. She’s been an emotional wreck the whole day. She’s been through a lot—we all have, but especially her. She barely even said a word to me the whole drive here.”
August glanced up at me as if the fact that Mom had barely spoken to me was more jarring than she not speaking to him. “You should fix things with her,” he said.
“You should fix things with her,” I responded.
We walked into our room, which was as eccentrically decorated as the rest of the motel, and I flung myself onto one of the turquoise beds and rubbed my face against my palms. I was exhausted. I noticed a jabbing pain in my hip and quickly pulled the hearse keys out of my pocket and tossed them onto the kidney-shaped table that sat between the two beds. Another sunburst wall clock told me it was only ten minutes past eight.
August stood, peering through the window from behind the dusty curtains.
“Was it all worth it?” I asked.
“Do you want the truth or what I’m supposed to tell you?” he asked in the more confident voice I hadn’t yet gotten used to.
“The truth.”
“I told you I was happy here, and I was,” he began. “But there was always some little part of me that was worried about everyone back home. I knew Mom and Dad didn’t want me around, but I still worried some, you know?”
His words were heavy, and I had never heard August speak in such a mature way. I wasn’t sure whether to be proud of the fact he was growing up or sad that he had seemingly grown up so fast. Spending two months roaming the west coast would do that to you, I suppose.
“They didn’t not want you around,” I argued, trying to play devil’s advocate in some form. For all I knew, that very well could have been the case, but what I knew for sure was that when August had fled, they sure wanted him back. Maybe they just couldn’t handle being abandoned by both their sons.
He scoffed at me. “You didn’t hear some of the things they said. I remember the fight the three of you had when you moved out, and this was exponentially worse. It was atomic. It put Hiroshima and Nagasaki to shame.”
“Do you want to talk about the fight?” I asked. Mom and Dad had refused to tell me anything about it other than the fact that it had been pretty bad. I was hoping my little brother would open up a little and give me at least some insight into why all of this had happened.
“Not yet,” he said, still peering through the window into the parking lot. “What it all boils down to is that wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are. I couldn’t be someone I’m not for them.”
I knew the kind of person August was, and I knew he had never meant any harm by fleeing town, but at the same time, how could he not have expected the repercussions? In his emotionally beaten eyes, he was doing everyone a favor by leaving, not making our lives exponentially more complicated than they had been before. I wondered if he realized this now.
“What are you looking at?” I asked as he pulled the curtain back and leaned against the wall, never taking his eyes off the parking lot below.
“It’s Mom,” he said. “She’s walking towards the hearse.”
I stood behind August and peered through the window with him, watching our mother. Below, we saw her exiting the motel lobby and making her way back to the hearse to retrieve her overnight bag. She moved slowly and seemed to stagger, almost as if drunk or in a fugue state of some kind. I watched her a
s she walked through the nearly empty lot, only able to compare her to a zombie, the living dead wandering aimlessly through a deserted world.
“You think she’ll be okay?” August asked, the weight of his actions seemingly pressing on his shoulders as he stepped away from the window and sat on the edge of his bed, which was the same dirty turquoise color as mine.
I didn’t have an answer for him.
Chapter 5