He dropped into an orange corduroy chair and stared at the television. Jim Nabors, dressed in a silver jumpsuit, was leaning sideways as if his shoes were nailed to the floor. Ruth Buzzi was attempting to push him upright, producing a squeak overlaid with canned laughter. The lights flickered and the set swallowed the picture and spit it back out again a moment later, as if the program had gone down the wrong pipe.

Maybe what was happening in the bathroom was a female thing. Maybe Karen was having her first period, and it wasn’t just her regular difficult behavior Teresa was dealing with but a whole new rigmarole. Roy wasn’t sure at what age it first happened to most girls. Thirteen? Eleven? That book Carrie was about a girl who hit puberty, went insane, and started lobbing things around the room with her mind. Where, he thought, was the handbook for that? Teresa had devoted a shoe box at the bottom of their closet to paperbacks she didn’t want sitting out, and right alongside The Erotic Man and The Erotic Woman was Understanding Children and Dr. Spock on Parenting. Roy had never been able to get through either one of the parenting manuals; what he really wanted was a book called Your Stepdaughter: What Does She Know, When Does She Know It?

“This room stinks,” Frankie said, pulling his nose away from the fishbowl.

If it had been anyone else besides Frankie, Roy would have suspected mouthiness. He said, “You’re talking about the smell?”

“Well, there are all kinds of ways to stink,” Matt said from one of the beds.

“Stow it,” Roy told him. He looked at Frankie. “What do you smell? The food in the ice chest?”

“It’s like that taste you get when you chew on tinfoil,” the boy said.

Roy had never chewed foil, but the idea of an electrical fire passed through his mind. With this storm, there could have been a surge or a spark; flames might be chewing their way through the walls toward room 28 right now. It irked him to be having one of Teresa’s worrisome thoughts, but there it was, as if she were telegraphing it his way from the bathroom.

The program inched along.

Two roll-aways.

Possible electrical fire.

“Stay here,” he told them, getting up from the chair.

It was raining sideways as he moved along the cement walk. The motel was one story and shaped like a boomerang, and he found his way to its apex and made an unintentionally dramatic entrance into the lobby: tourist pamphlets scattered from a metal rack like roused birds. As they drifted to the floor, the desk clerk appeared in the doorway of a back room, the light from a television blinking on the paneled walls behind him. “The answer to your first question,” he said, stepping up behind the front desk, “is yes: we’ve got rooms.”