The Residue

On a Monday morning in October, when the temperature feels falsely warm, a woman pauses by a mail box across from a train station. It is a few minutes before the last commuter train you can catch and not be embarrassingly late for work. In her early 40s, she wears a hard corporate suit and frosted blonde hair cut in a sensible way. On one shoulder a small black handbag and a large canvas briefcase. Reaching into the bag with a left hand notably devoid of jewelry, she pulls out a set of motel keys. Actual keys from an actual motel – not the credit-card like things the big hotel chains use. In addition to the room number, the fob bears a promise to pay the postage if dropped into a mail box. She avoids thinking of the weekend past and instead remembers when she was unfamiliar with motels, when they were exciting and strange. As a little girl on family vacations, she loved the little separate cabins her father called “bungalows,” a word she would bounce out of her mouth as she and her sister jumped up and down on beds they didn’t have to make, in rooms they never had to clean. The moment passes and she scowls at the keys, more in resignation than anger, drops them into the mail box and, hearing the train in the distance, begins to run.