Inside, a woman sits alone at a yellow formica table, an arrangement of plates in front of her. ‘Yup?’ she says, without looking up. She is larger than I remember from the meeting, but with the same Bass Buster cap perched high on her head. Her arms are white and blotchy as though they’ve never been exposed to a ray of sun. Purposefully, they work their way through a round of eggs and steak on a serving dish in front of her. A stack of hash browns as high as a woodpile sits in one bowl and a mountain of battered onion rings in another. Nora’s small dimpled hands cut through the steak with ruthless efficiency. She swallows and replaces the cubes of meat in her mouth with unfaltering regularity as though her tongue is a conveyor belt continually transporting food from source to destination.

‘A real semen-free zone,’ I remember somebody snickering as she’d slammed out of the hall last night.

‘You here to check the rooms?’ She swings a greasy chin in my direction.

‘No, don’t worry.’ I hover at the door. ‘I was just passing by. Didn’t mean to interrupt your breakfast.’

‘This ain’t ma breakfast.’ Nora scrapes back her chair. ‘It’s ma lunch.’ Above the door the Budweiser clock reads 10.30 a.m. She plucks a set of keys from a nail on the wall and pushes by me. ‘B’sides you’re here now, girl, so you may as well look.’

I trot dutifully behind her as she propels herself out of the bar and towards the first of the bungalows. Sticking out of her back pocket is plastic bag full of chewing tobacco. Underneath the baseball hat, Nora’s hair reaches to her shoulder blades. Dirty though it is, it strikes me as a rather beautiful colour, pale grey lightened by streaks of almost pure white.

She opens the doors of 1–4 with the same key. The bungalows have been decorated in warm, earthy tones though possibly not at any point during the last thirty years. They smell of thrift shops and are superficially tidy but I notice the trash hasn’t been emptied, and when Nora thumps on the polyester coverlet to demonstrate the quality of the mattress, so much static is let loose I worry the bed might spontaneously combust. The rooms are all identical, notwithstanding small creative differences between the works of art hanging on the walls . . . room 1 has a picture of a startled deer printed on velour; 2, in the same material, an osprey plucking a fish from the rapids of the Colorado River; while 3 features a bobcat which looks as if it’s wearing Sony headphones.