She flapped her hands, trying to dispel the cloud of smoke. “I’ve asked you more than once. Could you please not do that? Your smoke is pouring into my room. I don’t want my niece or myself exposed to that.”

He inhaled and exhaled a thin stream of smoke through his nose. “So? Close your windows. That’s why God invented air-conditioning.”

“There’s a no-smoking sign right there,” Letty said, pointing at the sign affixed to the concrete column.

He shrugged. “I’m not smoking there. I’m smoking here. It’s a free country, you know.”

“Couldn’t you go over there?” Letty pointed to the plastic chairs grouped in a semicircle beneath a palm tree. The smokers’ lounge, the regulars called it.

Every night, around six o’clock, after the early-bird dinner hour, a few of the Murmuring Surf guests wandered out to the palm tree and took up positions in what seemed to be a rigorously enforced seating chart. The two men, one a Hispanic man who puffed on cigars, the other a short, pudgy man she’d never seen dressed in anything except a short terry-cloth bathrobe, always sat together. There were three elderly, birdlike women, who shared a single bottle of wine and a large clamshell they used as an ashtray. Letty surmised, from the overheard tone of their conversation, that they, too, were retirees and longtime regulars at the motel. Once, Letty had seen Billie, the shorter, nicer of the Feldmans, slink out to the palm tree. She’d borrowed a cigarette from one of the bird ladies, leaned against the tree, and smoked exactly the one cigarette, keeping her eyes trained on the door of their unit, probably worried that Ruth might catch her sneaking a smoke.

“Too hot out there,” Mr. Jensen said lazily. “I like it right here in the shade.”

“Oscar!”

They both looked up to see Ava bearing down on them, trundling a plastic cart loaded down with cleaning supplies.

“How many times do I have to tell you? Put that thing out and get the hell out of my breezeway.”

Ava’s usually placid face was pink and perspiring.

“Okay, already,” Jensen said. He pinched the end of the cigarette between his fingers and dropped it to the concrete floor.

“Oh no you don’t,” Ava said, pointing at him with a dustpan. “I’m not your mother, and I’m not cleaning up after you. Pick that up and put it in the trash. The next time I find one of your disgusting cigarette butts laying around out here, you’ll forfeit your security deposit.”

“I’m not the only one here who smokes,” he protested.

“You’re the only one who smokes outside this room, and you’re the only one who never heard of an ashtray,” Ava said.

“Okay, okay,” Jensen muttered. The chair creaked beneath him as he stood up, and he walked slowly back to his room.