Page 77 of Happy After All

“You’re ignoring my texts, you didn’t come to the dive-in movie—”

“I didn’t come to the movie because I didn’t want to.”

He didn’t say he wanted to ignore me, though.

“Yes, I know. Because you’re antisocial.”

He snorted. “Yes, we covered that ground.”

“Are you okay?” I ask.

He looks stunned for a moment. There is something in his eyes that looks like fear. As soon as I see it, it vanishes. “No,” he says.

He does not elaborate, but this is honest, at least.

“Can I come in?”

Again, he looks afraid, like a drowning man who wants to reach his hand out but is scared to stop paddling. Terrified that it will sink him.

So I do something I would never normally do if he were just a guest. I push past him and into the room.

He’s not just a guest. Whatever he might say.

“This is somewhat beyond full service,” he says, and this time the words are slurred, and I am left in little doubt of how drunk he is. If I had doubts, they are erased by the near-empty bottle sitting on his desk.

“This isn’t why we call it the Hemingway Suite,” I say. “Anyway, we’re beyondfull service, aren’t we?”

I’ve never been in his room during a stay here. He gets limited cleaning, and I’m never the one to do it. So I have never seen the evidence of him living in my motel. He does have a computer on the desk. Along with a notepad. Stacks and stacks of folders, papers. The wastebasket is full of crumpled lined papers with writing on them.

The bed is a mess.

Heis a mess.

He’s such a writer, honestly. Maybe that’s the beginning and end of his mercurial nature. Maybe this is all muse bullshit.

We are a difficult bunch, I am well aware. Not just because of my own self, my own propensity for getting lost in my mind, in a story, and disconnecting from the people around me, but because of everyone I have ever socialized with who has the same profession.

Writers’ rooms and the publishing industry writ large attract narcissists. People with delusions of grandeur. They attract weirdos who want fame and yet fear it in equal measure. They attract people who like the fictional world better than reality.

It is a melting pot of incompatible neuroses and psychoses and dysregulated emotional trauma.

Also alcoholism.

So really, this could be his whole story.

I still don’t think it is, though.

“You should eat some cake,” I say, shoving a plate into his hands. They are unsteady, but he takes hold of it. “Get something into your stomach.”

“I ate,” he says.

“How long ago?”

“I haven’t managed to kill myself yet,” he says. “Tonight isn’t going to be the night.”

“Sure. But I’m not just the motel manager anymore, and you aren’t just a guest. I would like a little more assurance than you won’tdie.”

“Why?”

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