Have you driven long?

No. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying attention to the time. Mostly I was trying to get miles on the day. As many of them as I could pile on. And when I got tired, I stopped.

It’s good that you’re thinking about safety.

It’s all I’ve thought about for weeks now. Safety is a funny thing. When you have it, you hardly even notice. And the moment it’s gone, it’s all you can think about. But we don’t need to go into all that. This seems like a nice place.

We take a certain pride.

I can see, I can see. And these portraits. Who are they?

Some are old family. So old that I do not know their names. Others are not family. This way, please.

Sure. I’ll tell you. I hadn’t traveled for years. “We need to take a vacation one of these days.” That’s what Sharon kept saying. Before she. Before. She was always talking about a vacation. And now here I suppose I’m on a vacation, of a kind. And I’m all by myself.

Please watch your step. The rug curls up here.

Thanks. I would have tripped for sure. I’m very— Ah! Well, see? You warned me, I was looking at it, and somehow, I tripped anyway. That’s me in a nutshell. Sharon always said, “Someday you’ll die falling down the stairs and they’ll blame me.” Just like that guy, what was his name? Do you know who I mean?

I know who you mean.

Exactly. Just like that guy. Only I don’t suppose they’d believe it, a woman murdering her husband, quite as readily as they’d believe the other way around. Not how the story usually goes. I think it was counting on that.

I’m sorry?

I’m just rambling. Please don’t listen to me. I was driving longer than I thought. My brain feels like soup. And all I can think about is Sharon when I’m not with her. We’ve been together for twenty years last week, can you believe it? Twenty good years. Or, not always good. But solid. Stable. A well-built bridge over a cold and deep river. That’s any good relationship in this terrible world.

We met— Do you mind if I tell you about Sharon? Sometimes it helps to say it out loud. When I talk about her, it’s like she’s here.

Talk away. Your room is a bit of a hike from here, I’m afraid, so we have the time.

This place is bigger than it looks, huh? I’ve already lost track of the turns we’ve taken. I hope I’ll be able to find my way out again. Ha ha!

Sharon and I met on our last day of college. I don’t know how we had never seen each other before that day. We went to small liberal arts college in Ohio. Nothing but farms and bored townies nearby, so students mostly socialized on campus. Dorm room parties, that kind of thing. Everyone on campus knew everyone. We were all in each other’s business. The worst kind of small town, you understand?

But here it is, graduation, and I see this beautiful girl who I do not recognize at all. And she sees me. And we both have the same reaction, which is “Wait, who the hell are you?” Not, I suppose, the most romantic first glance, not the kind of thing you’d tell the kids, but an honest one. We were immediately curious about each other, and that’s as good a start as any.

We get to talking, and, sure enough, we’ve both gone to that school for four years, know all the same people that everyone knows, even took some of the same classes although apparently not at the same time. And yet we completely avoided seeing each other until then. A magic trick by God.

Our conversation at the ceremony turns into a conversation at the party, and then at the bar after the party. The two of us had run out of things to say to everyone else on campus after four years of close proximity. By the end of the night, I was already feeling that strange beat your heart does when it’s preparing to fall in love. A sort of pre-love, a warning that your brain is about to be chemically turned upside down. Years later she would tell me that she wasn’t feeling the same way I had been, not yet, but sure, she was feeling horny. Still, she didn’t invite me back to her place, mostly because she shared it with at least one ex of mine, and anyway, she wanted to test the luck that had first kept us so improbably apart and then brought us together with such strange timing. She was asking fate for an encore.

“I’m not giving you my number,” she said. “But I think we’ll find each other again.” Then she leaned in and kissed me for a long time, and, even though I’d had hundreds of kisses by then, that was my first real kiss, you know? The first one that felt like it mattered. And she said, “Or at least I sure hope we do,” and then she was gone.

Strange way to act, if you don’t mind me saying.

Yes, it was strange. But it was sexy too. The risk involved, in holding that first fragile spark of love and then letting it go, find out if it will kindle on its own. I could see the appeal.

Sounds like you did find her again.

Would you believe it took two years? I thought for sure I would run into her again within a day or two, and then when that didn’t happen, I took to walking around town, trying to cover as much territory as possible, studying the faces of passersby. But it was never her. And, at the end of the month, I moved back to Nevada, and then from there to San Francisco. I still felt a little pang when I thought about her, but I understood that too much time had passed and she was just going to be one of those regrets that every person seemed to accumulate over the years.

I settled into a temporary kind of adult life. The kind you have in your early twenties, when everything is an improvisation and you’re waiting for the real thing to arrive. Before you realize that your whole life will be an improvisation. That the real thing never arrives, it’s just pieced together in retrospect from split-second decisions often made without a great deal of forethought or care.

Do you mind if we sit? It feels like we’ve been walking for hours and it’s been a long day. There’s this chair here.

Not that chair. That one’s a little . . . funny at times. But please, the chair by the fire is very comfortable.

I’m not keeping you from anything am I?

Nothing that I want to be doing. Mostly this time of night is the long hours of waiting. If I’m needed now, it’s because someone has died or something is burning down.

How often does that happen?

How often has the hotel burned down?

Or someone dies. You know. A big nighttime emergency.

Occasionally, I suppose. Get enough people together, and some of them will die once in a while. No avoiding it. And twice.

Twice?

The hotel has burned down twice.

That’s discomfiting information to receive while sitting next to a fire.

Don’t worry. The last time was twenty-five years ago. Fire code has improved since. Don’t put a match to the curtains and there should be no issues. But you were talking about how life is an improvisation?

Sure. It’s all a juggling act and we don’t know how many balls are going to be tossed at us until they’re flying through the air. I worked in a hotel for a while, actually. Never burned down that place. No one died either, not that I knew of. Biggest emergency I had was flooding when someone left the tub running. Then I did paperwork at a cosmetic dentist’s office. Then bookkeeping for a bookstore that went out of business six months later, so maybe that was partly on me. What all the jobs had in common is how transitory they were. I still felt, in some way, like I was walking around that campus, trying to find Sharon. That drifting feeling, searching for something you know you’ll never find. After work, I would eat dinner on the couch, watching some show I didn’t even like that much, just whiling away the hours because what else was I going to do with them?

And then it all changed. Because I ran into Sharon again.