Once a year I return to Holedo, Massachusetts, on a bus from far away. I watch out the window as we pull off Route 67 and make our way along Hanover Street toward the station. Holedo is nothing like the desolate, middle-of-nowhere place it was when I lived here. There’s a McDonald’s now, a 7-Eleven, a golf course, and a mammoth grocery store called the Big Bag, where skinny mothers shop in bulk, stocking their refrigerators like fallout shelters. Only one of the old town bars still stands. Renamed the Pewter Pub, Maloney’s looks even more dismal than it did when I was fifteen, the year I tangled myself up with Edie Kramer and changed my life for good.
Even though my father stopped hanging out in bars ages ago, I find myself trying to catch a glimpse inside as we pass, but all I see is the bus’s gray reflection shining back in the white light of a hot summer day. A moment later we’re off Hanover. The bus rounds the corner, and we drive by the Holedo Motel, owned and operated by my father since he bought it in a foreclosure sale. With the kidney-shaped pool out front, blue siding, and hedges trimmed in the shape of animals—a pig, a mouse, a puppy—the motel holds no trace of the dump it used to be. I glance up at room 5B, vacant since a winter day almost thirty years ago. Something in me pulls the way it always does when I first catch sight of that door. A sign the rest of the trip will turn out the same. After I settle in, my father and I will spend an entire weekend together, walking around the property, sitting at the table in the back of the office.
Together, but not really together at all.
When he yawns and goes to bed for the night, this is what I do: lift the master key from its hook and climb the stairs to the vacant room, now used only to store mops and brooms, cleaning rags and linens. Inside, the air smells of an old woman’s suitcase, a cheap vacation. I sit on the naked, lumpy mattress and touch my hand to the disconnected phone, spinning the rotary once or twice just to hear that forgotten sound.
How many minutes pass? Ten? Forty?
Time is the one thing that changes, but eventually I lift the throw rug by the bed and stare down at the stain on the carpet beneath, still there after all these years. The shape is a rounded triangle, a giant pear, a teardrop as big as a baby. Thoughts I spend all year pushing away tumble forward, and I have to hold my breath to shut out the stale air, the memories, the regrets.
If only I hadn’t kissed Edie that first night.
If only I hadn’t been so curious about Truman.
If only I could have stopped the most important person in my life from dying in this room alone.