KAT MEADS

X Marks the (Landing) Spot

It wasn’t as if Grimsley’s childhood or teenage ambition had been to be a chambermaid, toiling in a badly painted turquoise motel that flooded even before hurricane season. Being a chambermaid was supposed to have been a stopgap. But then somehow the gap kept widening. She’d been hired in the summer, when every shitty motel in town was booked to the max and every chambermaid had to hustle to finish up while the guests were getting tanned or gobbling hotdogs or roller skating or buying shark kites. But now it was almost winter and here she still was, cleaning rooms that not even a Chambermaid Supreme could actually get clean and feeling, well, feeling pretty much all-around doomed. Music helped — or had, until the motel manager dropped by with a load of towels and saw Grimsley, ears sealed by earbuds, dancing while stuffing a pillow into a pillowcase and accused her of “slacking off.” As if someone couldn’t dance and stuff a pillowcase at the same time! In a desperate bid for entertainment of some sort, she’d been singing to herself the day she found the ring. The ring must have gotten knocked off the nightstand. Covered with dust bunnies, it had obviously been where it landed, on the floor between the nightstand and the bed, longer than the last guest’s departure. Weird, really, that she’d noticed it at all, since she was by no means a Chambermaid Supreme. Wiped clean, it didn’t look like an expensive ring, but it looked well loved. If Grimsley handed it over to Lost and Found, the motel manager, far from flush herself, would probably pocket it, so there was that outcome to consider. Grimsley held the ring up to the window’s overcast light, weighed it in her palm, and pondered. She needed to be thinking about the ring, what to do with it, not reliving the yucky part of sliding on her knees in grit and gunk, bum in the air, stretch, stretch, stretching to put her hand on who knew what. But that’s what kept derailing her: what she’d done just to pick up something shiny.

Postscript: A mostly honest person—and who, who, who is totally honest?—Grimsley kept the purloined ring but never wore it. She (twice) came close to pawning it in need of quick cash, but heeded the soap opera-esque shriek inside her head that warned: do and be found out, for sure. Now and again she wondered if, say, she got cancer or hit by a bus, whether a ring etched “Sonya” among her possessions would blacken her name but soon reached the solid conclusion that worrying over what might happen after she’d croaked was just plain dumb. And so she instantly stopped.