Practical Magic - Alice Hoffman [96]
No longer balanced by logic, Sally is weightless tonight. She, who has always valued the sensible and the useful above all else, lost her way as soon as she drove down the Turnpike. She couldn’t find the Hide-A-Way Motel, though she’s passed it a thousand times before. She had to stop at a gas station and ask directions, and then she had her heart-attack thing, which forced her to search out the filthy restroom, where she washed her face with cool water. She looked at her reflection in the smudged mirror above the sink and breathed deeply for several minutes until she was steady once more.
But she soon discovered that she wasn’t as steady as she’d thought. She didn’t see the brake lights of the car ahead of her after she’d pulled back onto the Turnpike, and there was a minor fender-bender, which was completely her fault. The left headlight of her Honda is now barely attached and is in danger of falling off completely every time she steps on the brake.
By the time she finally pulls up to the Hide-A-Way, her family at home is halfway through dinner, and the parking lot of the fried-chicken franchise diagonally across the Turnpike is packed with customers. But food is the last thing Sally wants. Her stomach is jumpy and she’s nervous, she’s insanely nervous, which is probably why she brushes her hair twice before she gets out of the car and starts for the motel office. Pools of oil shimmer on the asphalt; one lonely crab apple tree, plopped down in the single plot of earth and surrounded by some red geraniums, shudders when the traffic on the Turnpike zooms by. Only four cars are parked in the lot, and three are real bombs. If she were looking for Gary’s car, the one farthest from the office would seem the most likely choice—it’s a Ford of some sort and it looks like a rental car. But more than that, it’s been left there so neatly and carefully, exactly the way Sally would imagine Gary would park his car.
Thinking about him, and his worried look, and those lines on his face, makes Sally even more nervous. Once she’s inside the motel office, she rearranges the strap of her purse over her shoulder; she runs her tongue over her lips. She feels like somebody who’s stepped outside her life into a stretch of woods she didn’t even know existed, and she doesn’t know the pathways or the trails.
The woman behind the desk is on the phone, and it seems she’s in the middle of a conversation that could go on for hours.
“Well, if you didn’t tell him, how could he know?” she’s saying in a disgusted tone of voice. She reaches for a cigarette and sees Sally.
“I’m looking for Gary Hallet.” Once Sally makes this announcement, she thinks she must really be crazy. Why would she be looking for someone whose presence spells calamity? Why would she drive over here on a night when she’s so confused? She can’t concentrate at all, that much is obvious. She can’t even remember the capital of New York State. She no longer recalls which is more caloric, butter or margarine, or whether or not monarch butterflies hibernate in winter.
“He went out,” the woman behind the desk tells Sally. “Once a moron, always a moron,” she says into the phone. “Of course you know. I know you know. The real question is, Why don’t you do something about it?” She stands, pulling the phone behind her, then lifts a key from the rack on the wall, and hands it over. “Room sixteen,” she tells Sally.
Sally steps back as if burned. “I’ll just wait here.”
She takes a seat on the blue plastic couch and reaches for a magazine, but it’s Time and the cover story is “Crimes of Passion,” which is more than Sally can bear at the moment. She tosses the magazine back on the coffee table. She wishes she had thought to change her clothes and wasn’t still wearing this old T-shirt and Kylie’s shorts. Not that it matters. Not that anyone cares what she looks like. She gets her brush out of her purse and runs it