Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

988 Laid So Low

Laid So Low

Someone banging on the door very hard woke me up. I wondered if the motel was on fire. Someone was calling my name, too. I was groggy and wondered what time it was.

I sat up and then I could hear two voices. The fainter one was Claire. The other one was a man's voice. They sounded quite urgent. I hurried to open it, not even pausing to put on pants.

They looked quite relieved to see me. The man was one of the regular daytime managers, one of those guys who looks young (mid-twenties, probably) but acts and sounds old. Probably was already married with two kids. His tie always looked too tight. "There you are, ma'am," he said to Claire.

"So sorry to bother you," she simpered.

"I'm just glad everything's all right," he said, with a look back and forth between her and me like he wasn't really sure what he said was true. "You let me know if you need anything else. Oh, and Mr. Marks, there's a package for you at the front desk. Come down and pick it up when you get a pants. Chance! When you get a chance." He turned beet red, cleared his throat, and then hurried back in the direction of the lobby.

Claire flapped her mouth like she was trying to say goodbye or thank you or something to him but nothing came out. When he was gone, she turned to me. "My goodness. What a fright you've given me."

"Why? What's... oh, because I wasn't answering the phone?" The previous night started to filter back into my memory.

"Your beau called, frantic that you weren't answering." She shooed me back into my own room, shut the door behind her, and then cranked up the heater.

"You mean Ziggy, right?"

"Yes. Apparently you paged him saying you were having an emergency of some kind?" She sat on the edge of the bed, back very straight, hands primly folded on her lap.

"Oh. Yeah. That. Um." I went to see if the phone was really disconnected. It was. The wall jack was inaccessible, but it was the kind where you could take the cord out of the body of the phone by pressing on the little plastic tab. I clicked it back together and the message light began blinking.

I wasn't about to tell her that I was doing it to hide from Ricky flirting with me or propositioning me or whatever that was. "When I couldn't get to sleep, I took a Benadryl and I guess I was trying to make sure I didn't get woken up."

"And yet you messaged Ziggy asking him to call you urgently?"

"He had been ignoring my previous messages."

"So you cried wolf."

"No, I–"

Her lecture voice was staccato as well as sing-song. "You deliberately worked him into a froth. So that when he tried to call you back? You'd be unavailable."

"No, that's not it at all." I was suddenly thirteen again and trying to justify to her why I'd done whatever thing I'd done that she couldn't comprehend. Didn't matter what. "I-"

"Well, that is what he thinks you did. After specifically telling you!—how vexing it would be not to be able to reach you."

Oh, shit. He did tell me that. "Look. I really didn't do it on purpose. I was having a bit of a panic attack," which was a little white lie, since I'd had a real panic attack in the past and this wasn't on that level, "and I wasn't thinking clearly." I wondered how fast the lie would come back to bite me.

She tilted her head and made a pouty face. "I know you weren't. You're just not that kind of vindictive soul, dear."

Whoa, what? Was she being sympathetic?