Right before I walked into the office of the Good Night, Sleep Tight, I saw a crow sitting on the roof, looking down at me.

His feathers were very black.

“Hello,” I said to the crow. He cocked his head. The sun was lighting up his wings.

Granny blew the horn at me.

“Well,” I said to the crow, “as you can see, I am not in charge here, so I guess I will have to move along.”

The crow cocked his head again, and then he flapped his wings and flew away.

I still had hold of Carol Anne’s Christmas cookie tin. The last thing Carol Anne had said to me was, “Sweetheart, you keep those cookies. You keep the whole tin.”

As I said before, there is goodness in many hearts.

In most hearts.

Granny blew the horn again. I raised the tin up higher so that it was in front of my heart like a shield. I opened the door and went into the Good Night, Sleep Tight to use my charm and secure us a room.

What choice did I have?

The good news is that there was a vending machine in the vestibule of the motel office, and it was stocked with the most amazing array of things. There were toothbrushes with little tubes of toothpaste attached to them, and candy bars with caramel and nuts, and also bags of peanuts, and rain bonnets that were folded up into neat little squares, and packages of crackers with orange cheese in the middle of them.

The vending machine was such a miracle that as I stood and contemplated it, I almost wondered if I was dreaming, but then Granny blew the horn again and I knew that it was not a dream.

None of it was a dream.

I opened the second set of doors and went all the way inside the Good Night, Sleep Tight office. There were black and red squares of shag carpet on the floor.

And also, there was an alligator.

He was dead, of course.

But he was dead in a ferocious pose. His mouth was open, and all his teeth were displayed.

“May I help you?” said the woman behind the counter.

Her hair was in curlers.

“Hello,” I said. I smiled, using all of my teeth. “My granny is recovering from some recent tooth surgery and we need a room.”

“You pay up front,” said the woman. She pointed at a sign up on the wall that listed the prices for rooms in red ink. It was a very emphatic sign.

“Well, my goodness,” I said after I studied the sign with pretend interest. “Would you like a chocolate-chip cookie with walnuts in it?”

“Are you selling them?”

“No,” I said. “I’m sharing them.”

I opened the tin and held it out to her. She took two cookies.

“This is a nice motel,” I said. “I admire your vending machine and your alligator.”

The woman shrugged. She said, “It’s all mine and whoop-de-do and who cares? I never wanted it in the first place, especially the alligator. But that’s how it goes around here. Divorce settlement. You end up with all kinds of things you don’t want.”

“You do?” I said.

The woman took a bite out of one of her cookies. She studied me. “Don’t ask me for anything,” she said.

“What would I ask you for?”

“Assistance. Mercy. I don’t know. It’s clear that you have a hard-luck story, and I don’t want to hear it.”

“Well, as I said, my granny is in the car and she is recovering from tooth surgery. I will go and tell her that we have to pay up front. She is the one with the money.”

“Tooth surgery,” said the woman.

“Tooth surgery,” I said. “And other tragic things have occurred, but it’s probably best if I don’t speak of them right now.”

“Yes. Don’t.”

I stared at the lady, and she stared back at me.

Granny has always said that long silences make people uncomfortable and that sometimes they will say or do things that they would not normally say or do in order to fill up the silence.

However, this was not the case with the lady in curlers. I was the one who ended the silence. I said, “Do you have a phone I could use?”

“Obviously I have a phone. But you’re not going to use it.”

“There are probably some people who are wondering where I am,” I said.

“I’m not getting involved in any of that,” said the woman. She brushed cookie crumbs from her hands.

“Okay,” I said. “My name is Louisiana. What’s yours?”

The woman narrowed her eyes. “What difference does it make what my name is? You’re still not going to use the phone. And you still have to pay up front for the room.”

I smiled at her.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said. “My name is Bernice.”

I kept smiling. I said, “Bernice, do those curlers really make your hair come out curlier?”

“Why would I waste my time with them if they didn’t? Go and get your granny. Nothing happens for free in this world, and I am not in the charity business, as you have surely ascertained by now.”

Bernice was right.

I had ascertained exactly that.

I went out to the car to retrieve Granny.

The Good Night, Sleep Tight was a very clean motel.

I know because I looked under the bed, which is the first thing that I do whenever I go into a motel room. Before Granny and I settled into the house in Florida, we stayed in many, many motel rooms, and I kept a collection of all the things I found lurking under the beds: a spool of thread (green); a ballpoint pen imprinted with the words SCHWARTZ EXCAVATING (the ink in the pen was dried up, but I liked the word excavating very much); bobby pins (there is almost always at least one bobby pin under a motel bed; I do not know why this is so, but it is); paper clips; someone’s letter to their uncle Al.

The letter started “Dear Uncle Al.” I can’t remember what it went on to say, but I was glad that somewhere in the world there was an Uncle Al. I pretended that he belonged to me and that he was the kind of uncle who pulled quarters out of your ear and offered to buy you big bags of salted peanuts and cotton candy on a stick when you went to the ball game together.

One time, in Lucas, Alabama, I looked under a motel bed and found the skeleton of a mouse. I saved that, too. I am not afraid of mice. Or their skeletons.

But when we moved into the house in Florida and Beverly and Raymie became my friends, I threw away my collection of all the things I had found under motel beds because I thought that part of my life was over.

Well, I guess I was wrong.

In any case, the point I am making here is that there was nothing at all under the Good Night, Sleep Tight bed, not even a bobby pin.

The bathroom mirror was spotless, and the toilet had a SANITIZED FOR YOUR PROTECTION strip on it.

The water glasses were wrapped in paper.

The Good Night, Sleep Tight was very clean, and there were even two luggage racks — one for Granny’s suitcase and one for mine.

Also, there was a phone in the room, but it had a tiny lock on its rotary dial so that you could not use it without a key.

Granny saw me looking at the phone and said, “Place no calls, Louisiana!”

As if I could.

And then Granny got into bed, pulled the covers up over her head, and became, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

I turned away from her and stared at the curtains, which were pushed to one side and were printed all over with little palm trees.

A crow flew by. It was the same crow that had been sitting on the roof of the motel office. I recognized him by his shiny feathers.

“Hello,” I called out to the crow.

“Close those curtains immediately,” said Granny. Her head was all the way under the covers and all of her teeth were gone, but she still knew exactly what everybody was doing and could tell them how to do it differently.

It did not seem to me that her powers were diminished at all.

It was very frustrating.

I closed the palm-tree curtains. There is something sad about palm trees cavorting all over curtains when you are not in Florida but are instead in Georgia. Why weren’t the curtains printed with peaches? That is what I wanted to know.

Curtains should be state-appropriate.

Lots of things, in fact, should be different from how they are.