Country Hotel by Anne Georg

Country Hotel by Anne Georg

Madeleine stood behind the diner counter, our last customer’s dirty plate in her hand, glaring at me holding my small valise about to dash off.

“Leave. It’s easy for you.” Madeleine shook her head and folded her arms. “I’m trapped here with six kids. I don’t drive. I work from morning to night.”

“I don’t know what I was thinking when I bought this crappy hotel in this crappy hamlet. It’s a bad business.” I hadn’t consulted Madeleine before I bought the hotel, in retrospect an impulsive, regrettable act.

She was the sensible one, cautious to a fault, which is why I didn’t tell her. I believed I’d discovered our fortune. I imagined myself as a successful hotelier, a way out of my life delivering milk door to door. Her loathing of the initial idea festered with the lived experience. One year later, her hostility transparent, her mouth set in permanent dissatisfaction.

“I’m nothing but a maid for you,” she bristled.

“Madeleine, that’s not true,” I lied—Madeleine was the front desk, waitress, cook and chambermaid—and sometimes barmaid, which she hated most of all. “I found a guy who will look after the bar. Don’t worry so much—we’re hardly overrun with customers.” “I’ll get us back to Edmonton. I just need to go there for a few days to find work. You hold the fort so we can at least earn a few pennies.” I turned away from her fury, feeling like a schmuck, which I was. I had to fix this disaster I created.

I left the restaurant, which was redolent with reheated-coffee-and fried-eggs; and walked across the green-and-white-tiled floor of the lobby onto the deserted main street. My brand new 1961 fire-engine-red Ford Falcon was angle parked under an illuminated vertical sign I’d purchased to spruce up the place. It read HOTEL in red. I was too broke to add the Ranfurly. It wouldn’t have made a difference, anyway. Not in this backwater. I exhaled.

The hotel niggled with maintenance demands—a broken washing machine, peeling wallpaper, plugged toilets, a broken window in the bar, the mouse infestation and the dull grey exterior shingles that kept peeling off. That I could handle. The worst of it? The customers.

I couldn’t converse with them. I couldn’t care less about the banalities they drawled: the weather, the farm accident, so-and-so’s wedding, what’s-his-name’s funeral. One morning I found a bloody coyote corpse draped across the hood of my car—dumped by some drunk I’d booted from the bar or one of the hamlet’s upstanding citizens I’d insulted. Whoever it was, used the unfortunate animal’s blood to scrawl ‘NAZI’ on the windshield. It was a mess. These people made my life miserable with their prejudice and ignorance. And it frightened Madeleine.

Unlike me, Madeleine was likable; she was the one who interacted with the customers in her broken English. The menu was fixed: she served the same meals to the customers as she fed the family, which simplified things.

I took up hobbies to distract myself from our predicament. I practised judo on the kids, tossing the docile lambs over my back to land them on the floor, startled faces peering up at me. Madeleine disapproved. Frieda cried when she landed too hard. The children cowered when called upon and began avoiding me. Judo was of limited amusement to them.

I tried hypnosis, swinging a pendant over those trusting faces in a darkened room, suggesting they’d quit biting their nails, learn to skate, pass an upcoming test. I knew Clara faked it, squinching her face, squeezing her eyes shut tight. Madeleine couldn’t relax. Renate, our eldest, refused, deeming me untrustworthy. The hardware store owner, my sole non-family subject, claimed I helped him quit smoking. I accepted the victory.

I was relaxing at my sister’s place in Edmonton after spending the day trying to find a job in real estate. I’d heard it was a booming business where commissions could be fat. I fancied myself as a salesman and was eager to try my hand at it.

Madeleine called. “You need to come home right now.” Our Irish Setter, Red, had been hit by a car. I couldn’t help but wonder if one of my enemies intentionally hit the dog.

In the lobby I found our six kids weepy and Madeleine wringing her hands, hair wisping from under a faded floral kerchief, forehead furrowed. “His leg’s broken. He needs to go to the vet.” She’d aged in the past year. This shitty hotel was ruining us.

I gathered the dog in my arms, took the two middle kids, Ursula, seven; and Ellie, nine; and drove to the vet in Vegreville, a small city twenty minutes away. Red emerged from the operating room doped up and casted. The girls fought about who would sit in the back seat with the dozy creature emitting the sharp tang of iodine.

“Try eenie-meenie-miny-moe,” I prompted.

Ursula won. Looking beatific, she soothed the injured creature swooning on her lap, raised her eyes occasionally to snigger at her sister. Ellie, lower lip thrust out, crossed her arms, tossed her head to jealously monitor her undeserving sister. I bought them ice cream cones at the Chatelaine Restaurant on Vegreville’s main street to diffuse their competition and watched as they licked them with great concentration, tasted each other’s flavour—strawberry for Ursula, chocolate for Ellie.

Red thumped into the lobby in a white plaster cast. Madeleine held the dog’s face in her hands and stroked her face against his, cooing; the kids fought for their turn to pet him. I was a hero for the shortest of whiles—the kids either adored me or hated me, a pendulum that swung frequently depending on my mood and shifting circumstances. When they interrupted my sleep, I yelled in anger, frightening them. When I felt worthy, productive, respected I took them to the beach or played board games to everyone’s delight. Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The kids never knew who would show up.

“Madeleine, I have to go back to the city. I need to find a way to make a living there. I think I’m close.”

Madeleine heaved her chest, moaned her despair.

“I’m doing this for us, Madeleine. We’re going deeper in the hole every day with this place. I could barely afford the vet bill.” As I said goodbye, I brushed my lips on her cheek. She barely lifted her head.

In the city I settled into my sister’s house. She lent me a few dollars so I could buy new shoes. That’s when I met Lucy, a slim brunette not much younger than me. She sold me a pair of fashionable brown leather Oxfords. It was an easy sale. Feline-like in her black patent leather heels and sheath dress, she glided about the store with shoe boxes in her arms. And when she slipped the Oxford on my foot, I couldn’t help myself.

“I feel honoured to have my foot held by a woman as attractive as you.” I flirted.

“You have a shapely foot. And I know feet.” She flirted back.

I was the last customer. I paid for the shoes and asked her if I could treat her to coffee and dessert. What could be more innocent? I suffocated scant shame, mostly about spending a few dollars.

“Did you hear about the prostitute that had a court hearing at nine o’clock in the morning?” Lucy teased, arching a well-plucked eyebrow.

“No. Tell me.”

“She saw everyone on the street and couldn’t believe how many people had to go to court that morning.” Lucy laughed, head back mouth open. I laughed too. I hadn’t heard the joke before; it wasn’t hilarious, but it was funny.

I shoved Madeleine and the kids to the back drawer of my conscience and indulged in the simplicity of my affair with Lucy. It wasn’t my habit. I had been a faithful husband. But everything was so easy with Lucy.

I yo-yoed back and forth between the hotel and its reek of defeat, pilfering a few dollars from the till each time over Madeleine’s half-hearted protest—and Edmonton, where I spent nights immersed in Lucy, feeling young, unencumbered; my days doing business, playing the wheeler-dealer, confident success was in the next handshake. Bedazzled by renewed sexual vigour and my promising prospects in sales, I delayed going back to the hotel.

Madeleine—kerchiefed and aproned—was sweeping the lobby, dust gusting about her when I arrived home after ten days. I bent to kiss her. She twisted her head away.

“Red should have gone to the vet a week ago. Where have you been? I phoned your sister. Didn’t she say anything?”

First misstep. I’d hardly seen my sister, preferring to spend nights with Lucy. I’d have to check in with my sister more often. What a cad I’d become! Sneaking around for sex. I didn’t want to be that man. Lucy was another in my heavy chain of bad decisions, which included buying the hotel. I resolved to end it with her.

“I’m sorry. I’ll take him tomorrow.” Madeleine and I were in this together. We had six kids together. I needed to be there for her, like she was for me. I wanted only to be a devoted husband who had a job in sales who could afford a good house and car, warm clothes and winter vacations. For my wife, with my wife. I felt renewed, my vision clear and the future simplified.

I took Red to the vet—Red, the sleek Irish Setter with pleading eyes and bounding lope, floppy ears rippling behind him like angel’s wings, tongue flapping to the side of his joyously panting mouth—his hind leg encased in a tattered, sour-smelling grey cast. I withered with the vet’s determination and dreaded returning him home wearing the same dirty cast.

“The vet says we left the cast on too long.” I said as Red clomped into the hotel lobby.

Madeleine jerked around, eyes spitting dismay, distrust. “What does that mean?”

“We can amputate the leg and he’ll hobble around on the other three. Or the vet can put him out of his misery.” I couldn’t bear to live with a three-legged dog, and I doubted Red would want that life—and amputation cost more. I made the unilateral decision, quashing my guilt, knowing Red would die because of my neglect.

Red lay docile while Renate petted him. “It’s your fault! You were supposed to take him to the vet. But you’re never here. Now you want to kill him.” Renate hissed at me, her eyes brittle like the cast on Red’s leg. She ran up the stairs, her wails trailing behind her; her siblings’ wailings swelling with hers in a dramatic crescendo.

I drove off with Red in the passenger seat guzzling wind from the open window. Madeleine and the children lined up at the entrance of the hotel, waved until the car turned the corner.

Lucy proved to be difficult to dislodge. Her expectations had multiplied during our six-week affair.

“I’m in love with you. And you’re in love with me. I know you don’t love your wife. I’ll kill myself if you leave me,” she whined. “How could you do this to me?”

Her histrionics, her pleadings and refusals to hear me became unbearable. Her laugh began to bray, her perfume soured like overripe apples, her constant jokes clang as banal as the chitchat about her life. She begged me to leave Madeleine. “I told you I have six kids and a wife. I can never leave them. You couldn’t have thought this was going to be permanent.” I tried to be gentle, but it only encouraged her fantasy. “No matter what you thought, it ends now,” I said. I felt her antipathy drill into my back as I walked out of the apartment.

I threw all my charm and vigour into finding work. It paid off. A guy I knew introduced me to a guy he knew who owned a small real estate company. We clicked. We shook hands.

“We’re booming, Reinhart. People are flocking to Edmonton. They need houses. And I need a man like you— a natural salesman.” He clapped me on my shoulder. “Hurry back and let’s make money!”

To celebrate, I bought a scarf for Madeleine, a gift for the kids and drove home, thoughts of a fortunate future dancing in my head.

“Daddy’s home!” The kids skittered to me like kittens, full of bounce and sparkle. “Where’s Red?” They searched behind me, their suspicious eyes, expectant voices and taut bodies confronting me like little wooden soldiers.

I scooped a black cocker spaniel puppy from a shoebox and handed it to Renate amidst a pile-on of shrieks.

“See. I’m always thinking of you kids.” A swaggering grin plastered itself on my face. I’d pleased them. I was on a roll.

Madeleine walked into the lobby, freshly bathed and coiffed, looking gorgeous.

I rushed toward her, arms open. “Say hello to your husband the real estate agent!” I shouted, exuberant. “We’re getting out of this place! Madeleine, we’re moving to the city! I have a job that’s going to make us a bunch of money!”

“That’s good.” Her tone was terse, her eyes cold.

I stopped, confused. “Why aren’t you happy? We’re leaving this place.”

“Let’s go to the restaurant,” she ordered. I followed, writing it off as another bad day. But she looked so good.

The kids, having accepted the death of Red, promising each other to always remember him, played in the lobby with their new puppy newly named Blackie. Madeleine and I sat at the counter in the empty restaurant. Madeleine, in straight brown skirt and red sleeveless blouse, looked elegant and sexy. But her eyes shone the unyielding grey of slate.

“Lucy called this afternoon.”

I stiffened, stopped loosening my tie. “Oh?” Of course, Lucy would try to sabotage me. I dangled helpless in front of Madeleine, a worm on a fishhook.

Madeleine’s fury burned metallic. “She told me everything—you’re sleeping with her and I’m here in this damned hotel! You’re so infatuated, you couldn’t even bother to save Red’s life.” Madeleine’s voice dropped, dripped sour contempt. “What kind of a man are you? Don’t answer—I will. A weak one. A lying one.”

Why had I even embarked on the damned affair with that shallow woman? I risked losing Madeleine: my wife, the mother of my children. “How can I make it up to you? You know I love you.” I heard in my own voice, the thin whine of shrivelled pride, my transparent guilt and unworthiness.

“Don’t be pathetic.” Madeleine snorted her disdain. “She wants you to leave me for her. She says that would be the best for everyone.”

“Madeleine. I won’t do that. I’ve finished with her and that’s why she called. We haven’t been together in weeks. I swear. She wants to shit in my nest for revenge.”

“You shat in your nest,” Madeleine accused. “Don’t think you have a choice about leaving or staying. We have six kids. Remember? I can’t get a job. My English isn’t good enough. And you can’t support two households. You can barely support us now. You’re not going anywhere.” She eyed me like I was a mouldering crust. “And quit snivelling. It makes me despise you more.”

My hard-working, long-suffering Madeleine had become as ferocious as a lioness. Her force plastered me to my stool, gaping, awaiting the next swat.

“Believe me. I’d leave if I could,” she snarled. “But I can’t. Not now. Not till we’re back in Edmonton.” She turned to leave, stopped, turned back. “One more thing: I won’t be sleeping with you. You’ll sleep in one of the empty rooms until we move. And then we’ll see.”

I was aroused by this new Madeleine—and compliant. “I’ll do whatever you want. But promise me I can come back to our bed.”

“Not ‘our’ bed. ‘My’ bed,” she said. “I have work to do.” She left.

I always knew I’d disappoint Madeleine. I tried to warn her. I was not a family man. But she was pregnant and resolute. We married. We had more kids, became captive to them. She took care of the kids while I earned money to support them, never enough. Madeleine and I fulfilled our traditional expectations without questioning and became riddled with resentment.

We slept apart. I couldn’t bear her cheerful indifference to me. She flattened me with her resolve. I was desperate to leave this brooding mustiness and the near breakdown of my marriage. I felt trapped in Ranfurly. I dropped the price for the hotel for a quick sale: once, twice, three times before it sold. I’d be able to make up the lost investment in no time once I made a few sales in the city.

“We’re going to be rolling in the dough,” I bragged. I could tell Madeleine liked the sound of that: a small smile spirited itself onto her solemn face, then receded as she ripped the sheets off a bed.

With the help of my new boss, we bought a house. The car and a rented truck were packed, the kids with their beloved Blackie were stuffed between boxes and bedding. The hotel horror receded in the rearview mirror.

“I feel like we’ve escaped from prison. I’m expecting someone to drag us back.” I laughed. “You can’t truly appreciate ecstasy unless you’ve known the drudgery of being a small-town hotel owner. Hey Madeleine?” I stole a sideways glance at her.

Madeleine nodded and laughed, too. Her face unclenched as she succumbed to the lightness of the moment. I’m sure I detected a flicker of her old trust in me.

I turned truck onto Highway 16 onward to our new life.

Image Source: Birk Enwald from Unsplash.com