Molly’s afraid they’ll be gone by the time she gets back,but they’re still waiting. Reasonably enough, for the Flamingo is the onlyaccommodations they’ve probably seen in who-knows-how-long, and they won’t seeanother. The woman is leaning on a suitcase and flipping through a magazine,the man studying the painting hanging on the wall.
“You like that painting?” Molly says, screwing her handsinto fists, trying to get up the determination to tell the couple that theycan’t stay.
“The colors are masterful,” the man says distractedly. “Ifeel I’m looking into the very heart of darkness. Don’t you think so, Janine?”
“Hmm,” the woman replies. “Got the key, Scott?“
“This nice lady’s going to get it for us,” the man says.“That enough to buy us a week, Miss, or do you need more? Didn’t see the costposted.”
“A week?” Molly says, startled. No one stays at the Flamingomore than a night, besides the couple of long-term tenants that have barricadedtheir rooms like bomb shelters, slinking out only for continental breakfastsand early suppers; these ageless, seemingly nameless occupants do not pay, isthe understanding, because they protect the Flamingo from things worse thanthem. This was the deal that Mother struck, and that Molly upholds by tendingthe Flamingo’s restaurant. The other guests are one-night-stay guests; they donot stick around long enough to eat anything. This couple, Molly feels with astrong insistent wariness, would do well not to stay that long. But when sheopens her mouth to say that they should go, she feels crushed by the idea thatthey might disappear back into the marshes and never look into her face withtheir own mirror-like faces again. She hands them the key to 7A, the roomacross from her own. “Please,” she says, gathering up the wrinkled paper money,“stay as long as you’d like.”
◊
Once, when Molly was small, she looked out into the marshesfrom Mother’s window and squinted until the whole landscape blurred, trying tosee where the marshes ended and something else began. “Where’s the marshes endand the outside start?” she said to Mother, who had a plastic champagne flutefilled with bone marrow in her left hand.
“Nowhere,” Mother said, sloshing her drink around so itlapped the sides. “What do you see that makes you think there is outside?”
Molly can’t remember, now, why she thought the wildernessdid end, besides maybe that they were getting guests then that they didn’t getnow, pleasant-looking people on their way somewhere. She can remember none ofthem in particular, only as a group: the faint scent of suntan lotion and thewild sounds they made in the middle of the night before she had to go and scrubdown their rooms. She didn’t tend the desk then; it was someone else. Shethinks his name might have been Samir. She sensed she and Samir were the samein a way that Mother was not, but she didn’t have the words then to say whatshe can think—but not say—easily now: this world is Mother’s world, not hers,not Samir’s. There must be some other world that belongs to them, where Motherwould be a stranger. In the romance novels, everyone is wide-eyed and shiveringdeliciously, sensitive as you cannot be at the Flamingo. Molly studies herselfin the full-length mirror in her room sometimes, practices the poses on thecovers: mouth dropped open, breasts pushed out. She hears Mother, who is notthere, saying: “What do you think you are, the old world come back to life?That’s dead, girly, and if you hadn’t had such a good goddamn stroke of luck,you’d be dead too. You wanna live? Well, you live here now.”
Molly put curtains on her window so she wouldn’t have to seethe here of the marsh spilling out across the horizon like half-driedpaint, streaking and globbing messily on a canvas of silty, foul-smelling darkwater. Tonight she pushes the curtain aside and watches the candlelight flickerin the windows of 7A, imagining the little intimate movements that the man andwoman must make as they get ready for bed together. She still stocks the roomswith wash basins and towels even though so many of the guests don’t use them.She bets these people will, scrubbing the dirt of the day from their faces andhands before getting into clean, lightweight bedclothes and getting between thesheets of the king bed. When the candle goes out, Molly slides down onto herown bed, folding, crumpling, into anguish and jealousy.
◊
The couple startles Molly by coming into the restaurant longpast sunup, when the regulars are lapping up the dregs of their breakfasts. Theregulars’ heads swivel at their entrance. Molly hears a low growl from one ofthem, she doesn’t know which. Feeling protective of the new guests, Molly herdsthem back into the lobby. “Are you hungry?” she says. “What can I get ya? Wegot eggs, alligator and pheasant. Wild blackberry preserves and bread. Notfresh, bagged, but it’s not bad with the fresh jam on it.”
She’s talking too fast, she senses, but she doesn’t want thecouple thinking that what the regulars eat is what she eats too, what they’dhave to eat if they stayed here a while.
“Whatever you recommend,” says the woman sunnily.
“Seat us by that big fellow, eh?” says the man. “I’d like toget to know him some.”
“Maybe not,” Molly says. “He’s, um. Not real friendly.”
“Oh, but this is what we’re here for,” the woman says.“Getting to know the locals. Learning how y’all live here.”
Molly’s stomach twists. “I wouldn’t be too curious, if I wasyou,” she says. “We’re pretty boring, I can promise ya that.”
“I can’t imagine that,” the woman says. She leans closer toMolly, that dry chemical smell seeping out from her slick cone of hair andmaking Molly feel lightheaded. The chalkier, floral smell of perfume is theretoo, and the light salty odor of sweat. This last smell is one they share withMolly, like a branch connecting their disparate family trees; she is them andnot Mother, deep down. “Sometime you’ll have to tell us how you ended up
