Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

993 Ricky

Ricky

When I got back, Claire didn't answer a soft knock on her door and I assumed she'd gone to sleep. I left all of her things in the car and went to my own room to call Ziggy and pack.

I called his apartment first, but there was no answer. They were probably still out on the town. I paged him instead. Then I thought about calling Sarah's and decided that was a bad idea. Stalking him all over was just going to wind us both up and that was not going to end well.

I left a voice mail for Carynne, though. "Hey, update, I've got a new number where you can reach me starting tomorrow. You'd be so proud of me. I found a rental to move to all on my own! You didn't have to come to Tennessee to do it for me! Haha. I'm moving Claire and myself there tomorrow so we can start paying a tenth of what we've been paying in hotel bills and start eating less in restaurants. Which will probably be healthy for her. And me. Anyway, your machine's going to cut me off so here's the number."

Then I tried to concentrate on packing. I was used to packing. When you stay in a different hotel every night you get really efficient because you get into habits about where you put things, both in how you spread it out and how you get it all back together. If you don't, you lose stuff.

What I wasn't used to was having been in the same hotel room for weeks at a time. My stuff was everywhere. There was something in every nook and cranny of the place and you wouldn't have thought it would take that long to collect it all but two hours later I still had not actually packed anything. I had made three large piles on the bed: one of clean clothes, one of dirty clothes, and one of stuff that was not-clothes including the toiletries and books and knickknacks and gifts and miscellaneous stuff I had accrued while I was there. Deciding what should go into what bag and how seemed more complicated than my brain was prepared to handle.

I decided my life would be simpler if I washed all my clothes and packed everything clean. Also, the bungalow didn't have a washer/dryer, and the motel did, down by the "gym" which was actually what I was pretty sure was once a store room and now was a store room with a couple of mirrors on one wall, an exercise bike, and an incomplete rack of rusty-looking dumbbells. Logic dictated I should wash my clothes now while it was convenient and then I wouldn't have to worry about keeping the clean stuff separate from the dirty stuff.

I heaped all the dirty stuff into the duffel and hauled it, top unzipped, down to the machine, along with all the loose change I could gather.

I was not picky about separating my clothes into "like colors." My red flannel shirts and black T-shirts and blue jeans (and black jeans, for that matter) all went into the same load together. This meant any once-white underwear I had was actually gray. But who sees my underwear other than people who should love me no matter what it looked like?

It took three quarters to get a packet of detergent, and four quarters to run the washer. The dryer would give you ten minutes for every quarter you put in. After I got the load going in the washing machine, I picked through the remaining coins I had and it appeared I would get 20 minutes of dry time. It had been a while since I had done coin-op laundry but my recollection was that wouldn't be enough.

Shit. You know who would have change for the machine? The front desk clerk. Who I was avoiding.

I decided to see how dry or not-dry the things were after the 20 minutes were up before doing anything drastic. Maybe in the intervening time I'd find another quarter in my pockets or on the floor or something. Right? That wasn't optimism that was making me search everywhere like that. That was anxiety. I ended up pacing back and forth in the tiny laundry room, listening to the machine run, for almost the full run of the cycle. It wasn't the kind with a glass door where you could watch it go around and around. It was a top loader with a metal slider to push the coins in.