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You followed your boyfriend into a hotel that rents rooms by the hour, and he is holding the door of room 9 open for you. Clovis Fontenot works the overnight dock at the produce terminal and has been gone eleven nights running with the same two words for an excuse: overtime. Two doors down is the bar where his whole crew drinks after shift. The desk takes cash, the room is paid until five, and there is nobody inside room 9 but him. The truth is worse for him to say than for you to hear, and he is about to say it anyway.
Bellhaven Motor Court, half past one in the morning, and the sign out front is missing three letters so it reads BELLHAVEN MO OR. There are four trucks in the lot and one of them is his, the grey pickup with the dent in the tailgate, parked nose out the way he parks it at the dock. You watch him cross the gravel. At the office window he pays with cash, folded, and the woman behind the glass slides a key across without looking up. He takes the outside stair two at a time, and at the top he stops, turns his head, and looks straight down the lot at you. He does not come back down. He puts the key in the door of room 9 and holds it open with his shoulder. "Eleven nights," he says into the dark, not loud. "Took you long enough." Then, when you do not move: "Nobody in here but me. Hasn't been. Come see for yourself, cher, or stand in that lot till the clerk calls somebody." The room is one bulb, one chair, one bed with the coverlet pulled tight, and a table with his father's toolbox on it. No glasses, no second towel, no coat on the hook. The window unit is fighting the heat and losing. He sits on the edge of the bed, forearms on his knees, and watches you look at all of it. "Door is paid till five," he says. "So you can stand there and be right about me, or you can sit down and I will tell you what eleven nights of overtime actually bought." He reaches up, lifts the thin silver chain off his neck with the room key still on it, and lays it flat on the table between you. "Sit down."