A week after Shim Reeves delivered his daughter to her freshman year at James Madison University, his wife announced that she would be leaving as soon as papers could be drawn up legalizing the separation. She assured him there would be no reconciliation, and none came. Anyone else could have seen -- in fact, everyone who knew them had seen--that Doris had stuck around this long only out of a maternal obligation that ended once their daughter Annie was off to college. Doris took half the furniture, the better car, and her clothes. Shim was left the motel, his ham equipment, his half of the furniture, and the mounds of nic-nacs and momentos they had accumulated together during twenty-two years of marriage.
      The separation was both as polite and as brutal as most: she was resolved to live alone, renewed by this and able to behave cheerfully when contact was necessary; he was confused, tractable, and morose. The divorce was declared with a subdued but irrefutable finality by a district judge one morning six months after it was filed. Shim neither attended nor contested the proceedings.
      Together they had run a small motel-- the We-Owna Motel; though for the last year of their marriage, they had let small things go until the place looked nearly abandoned.
      However, once Doris was gone, Shim began to work again around the motel, repairing doorknobs that had long rattled, re-caulking windows that had leaked too much money into the night. He washed and painted and replaced until the motel took on a new feel: Where before it had been pitiful, it was now a quaint throwback to the more fruitful times before the interstates had been built and the Holiday Inns had taken over.
      When he wasn't fixing things, he either labored in his garden or fiddled with his ham radios, as he had done most of his life. The hobbies had cost him his marriage years ago. In fact, the week they had bought the motel, his first official act was to set aside an entire end unit as his station. Against a cold November wind, he mounted his first antenna on the roof where now a tangled grove of antennas rose above the motel. He stacked racks of equipment along the walls and on top of the dressers until the room, with its ancient, pitted double beds, reminded Doris of a stake out pad in an old cop movie.
      During the second week after they had bought the place, Shim roto-tilled a square the size of two yards in the field behind the motel, readying a plot for next spring. He burned leaves and brush in a great pile at the center of the new ground, raking the ashes out and into the red-brown dirt until it turned a dingy grey-black, all while Doris tended to the first customers and learned a trade she had no desire to learn.
      And now he had the place to himself. In the afternoons he could ham when before he could not, and if he chose to work the garden all morning and make repairs into the middle of the night, he could do so. He had few customers-- a dozen or so during the week, a half dozen overnighters on the weekends, and three or four regular couples-- short-timers he called them because they stayed only an hour or two. The short-timers would come in uncomfortable and excited late at night, and then would return a few times a week for as long as their affair lasted. He felt almost a partner in their intrigues -- like Friar Lawrence tending his garden, while inside the clean rooms couples exhausted that which had brought them together.
      And then, just as they became a part of his life, they would stop coming and he would never see them again. He knew how long each affair would last and could predict the last visit by the way the man would ask for the room. He considered himself an expert on the temporal nature of this sort of love.

***

      One Friday morning, a young woman showed up in the office. He greeted her with his usual, "What can I do for you?" and tagged her as an overnighter right off, probably on her way to visit a distant relative. But when she asked for a room for two nights, he wasn't quite sure how to classify her.
      "Somewhere quiet. It doesn't matter." Her name was Mollie Boggs.
      He leaned forward to look out of the window as though to be sure another wing had not cropped up while he was inside. The motel was simply a long, low stretch of ten rooms, five on either side of the office. No room was any quieter than another, but he placed her in the unit on the end opposite his ham station.
      She was a thin, chaulky black woman. Her Afro, long out of style, was dented in the back where she had leaned against the headrest. She wore a navy bell-bottom pants suit with a white blouse and a red scarf tied neatly around her throat. She was mildly attractive and her voice had a soft lilt, free of any accent. Had he spoken to her on the phone, she would have been a lovely white woman.
      A while after she checked in, he went down to number 4 to repair the broken ball on the toilet. A young couple had used the room the night before, and the husband had toyed with the mechanism until he had bent the ball arm. Sometimes they did this, trying to repair what was not theirs to repair, taking up residence in the place as though for a night they owned the room. This annoyed Shim; he would have preferred that they wake him and have him make the repairs or switch them to another room. He was elbows deep in water when Mollie stepped into the open room and called for him.
      "Sir?" she said. "Excuse me, sir?" The way she said this made him feel old.
      "I'm in here. Back in the bathroom."
      He heard her foot steps and then she was behind him. He concentrated on tightening a bolt near the base of the arm.
      "I'm sorry to disturb you, but my television's out of whack and I'd like to hear the weather."
      He pulled his arms free and turned to look at her. She had changed into a loose flowered dress; the color of her lips was now red. He could not tell how old she was.
      "Clear and warm."
      "Excuse me?"
      "That's the weather," he said. "Nice night. Clear and warm." At five each evening he tuned to the FAA forecast out of Dulles. When Doris was still with him, he would come back into the office after the report and announce the weather as though she had sent him for it, though she would not raise her head to listen.
      "I read about an outdoor concert tonight in Russellton. I thought I might go if it was going to be nice out." she said.
      "They start about eight."
      "Have you been before?"
      He sat down cross-legs on the tile to check under the tank. Bunched up between the toilet and the sink, he looked like a large child.
      "I went by there once. It's on the courthouse lawn and people bring blankets and food. Nice crowd of people."
      "It seems like something I'd enjoy."
      "Good music, you can bet, and after that take a walk around the town. Lots of history there. I've got a tour book in the office if you'd like one." He unravelled himself from sitting and put the tools on the top of the water tank.
      "I didn't mean to take you from your work."
      He slid past her and started out. "No, no. Any excuse to get away from that."
      When they reached the office, he found that he was out of tour books, so he gave her a pamphlet about Colonial furniture in northern Virginia.
      "Would you like to come?" she said.
      Travelling salesmen, looking for someone to drink an evening away with, occasionally asked him along, and occasionally he went. But this invitation was unexpected and he was slightly embarrassed.
      "No. I've got too much to get done this evening, and besides, someone's got to watch the shop."
      "Of course," she said. She did not seem disappointed. "Well. Then I better get ready. Thanks so much for the information." And she was out the door, and all was suddenly quiet again. He stood behind the desk and thought how energetic she was. He thought of the word "spritely," though he was not sure if this were really a word or not. Either way, by its sound it seemed to describe her. She was likeable, and he felt a bit out of focus for a moment. He enjoyed the feeling of dis-orientation, but then just as abruptly was free of it and back to his work, though he wished he had taken her up on the offer.

      At about eleven, the phone rang. He had keyed the phone to his station and was hovering over his ham set. He almost called out his code as he answered.
      'Hello."
      "Is this the gentleman at the We-Owna-Motel?"
      The voice was familiar.
      "Yes," he said.
      "I'm so glad I got you. I hope I didn't wake you up."
      "No, you didn't. Who is this?"
      "Oh, I'm sorry. This is Mollie Boggs, in Room 1."
      "Yes, of course. I didn't see you drive in. What can I do for you?"
      "I'm not in my room. I'm down the road in Watson. My car died and I didn't know who else to call."
      "Did you try a service station?"
      "I'm at a Mobil, but they're closed."
      "Yes, of course." He slipped on his shoes and stood up. "You'll need a ride."
      "If you can. I don't know what else to do."

      She was standing near the phone booth at the Mobil. She looked very pretty from a distance, but as he pulled in, he could tell she was cold. The temperature had fallen some and she had not brought a sweater.
      "Cars," she said as he got out.
      He checked under the hood, though he did not now what he might be looking for. The engine would not turn over at all, so she steered and he pushed the car into a parking spot at the side of the station.
      "We'll call them in the morning and see if they can't look at it for you."
      "I hate cars." she said.
      On the short ride back she told him all about the concert. Her voice was like a child's now. She seemed to want to speak quickly so she could finish what she wanted to say before being sent to bed. In the darkness he smiled when she described the way the children danced and played in one big group as their parents sat on the lawn. "It was wonderful," she said, and her voice truly made it seem wonderful. He regretted not having gone with her.
      He drove slowly and when they finally pulled into the motel, he realized he was lonely and wanted the ride to continue.
      "I hated to pull you out like this." she said.
      "I'm just sorry your car broke down."
      "It's typical, you know. I go on a little vacation and 'boom,' my car dies."
      "We'll get it fixed. If they can't do it, I know another place in town who will."
      "I just hope it won't cost too much."
      He wanted to hear more of her voice, and decided there was no reason for the evening to end now.
      "Would you like a drink?" He had not asked anyone out for a drink in nearly thirty years. This was not as hard for him as he had imagined it would be. For a short while after the divorce he had dwelled on how to approach women, but then, once he decided the entire worry was juvenile-- things would take care of themselves; what would happen, would happen -- he relaxed about dating and then soon after realized he was happier alone than he had been for years.

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