The Way Inn Read Online Free PDF Page A

grown-up frequencies I could detect but not yet decode. My mother did not smile back.
    A waiter had appeared, without a sound. My father turned back to me, his smile once more plain and genial, eager to please his boy. “What would you like to drink?”
    â€œWhat is there?”
    â€œAnything you like.”
    â€œCoca Cola?” I said, unable to fully believe that such a cornucopia could exist, that I could order any drink at all and it would be delivered to me.
    Mother straightened like a gate clanging shut. “We mustn’t go off our heads with treats. How much will this cost?” The question went to the waiter but her eyes were on me and my father, warning.
    â€œDarling, the company will pay.”
    â€œWill they? Do they know it’s for him? Is that allowed?”
    â€œThey won’t know, and if they did, they wouldn’t mind. It’s just expenses.”
    Expenses—another word freighted with adult mystery. Expenses, I knew, meant something for nothing, treats without consequences, the realm of my father; a sharp contrast to the world of home, which was all consequences. And expenses meant conflict, but not this time.
    My father sold car parts, but he never called them car parts—they were always auto parts. Later, I learned specifics: he worked for a wholesaler and oversaw the supply of parts to distributors. This meant continual travel, touring retailers around the country. He was away from home three out of four nights, and at times for whole weeks. I yearned for the days he was home. We would go to the park, or go swimming—nothing I did not do with my mother, but the experience was transformed. He brought an anarchic air of possibility to the slightest excursion. A gleam in his eye was enough to fill me with mad joy. It was life as it could be lived, not as it was lived.
    This was, in my father’s words, “a proper hotel”—plush and slightly stuffy; English, not American; not part of a chain. It was in a seaside resort town, far enough from home for the company to pay for a room, but close enough for me and my mother to join him for a brief holiday, a desperate experiment in combining his peripatetic career with home and child-rearing. A fun and, much more important, normal time would be enjoyed by all—such was my mother’s anxiety on these points that she successfully robbed herself of any enjoyment. The hotel was quiet because it was off-season. Winter coats were needed for walks along the gray beach; the paint was bright on the signs above the metal shutters, though the neon stayed unlit. The town was asleep, and we were intruders. In the hotel, we dined quietly among empty tables, an armory of cutlery glinting unused, table linen like snow undisturbed by footsteps. I roamed the corridors. The ballroom was deserted and smelled of floor polish. The banqueting hall was a forest of upturned chairs on tables. Everything was waiting for others to arrive, but who, and when? What happened here was of great importance and considerable splendor, but it happened at other times, and to unknown persons. Not to me.
    Maybe my father moved in that world, where things were actually happening. There was a provisional air to him, as if he was conserving himself for other purposes. Even when he was physically present, he conducted himself in absences. He smoked in the garden and made and received telephone calls, speaking low. I would listen, taking care that he did not see me, trying to learn about the other world from what he said when he thought no one was listening. But he spoke in code: magneto, camshaft, exhaust manifold, powertrain, clutch . And rarer, another code: yes, special, away, not until, weekend, she, her, she, she .
    I was missing something.
    The other lift passengers and I debarked into a lobby that had filled with people: sitting on the couches, standing in groups, talking on or poking at phones. Normally these communal places—the