“…a crowbar in one fist,” I could have finished, because that is what I saw. Brent, in his Walmart manager short sleeved shirt and khakis, was coming across the gravel at a half run with a crowbar in his hand. Behind him, Gloria white Camry swung into the lot. Ethan stood very still beside me in the doorway of Room 12. I did what I had done a thousand times in fifty one years, when some drunk guest came charging across that lot. I stepped out into the breezeway, planted my slippers, and said, “Brent Hollis, put that down.”
He stopped ten feet from me, breathing hard. “Mom, Gloria called me. She said the Phoenix people were breaking into Room 12. Whatever is in there belongs to the family. My family. My father things.” “How do you know there is anything of your father in there?” I asked. He looked at his shoes. “Because Dad Tomas told me, in the hospital in 2010,” he said, in a smaller voice. “He said there was something in Room 12 for me, and that I would know when it was time. I thought it was money.”
Gloria climbed out of the Camry in her clinic scrubs and came up beside him and laid her hand on his arm. “Brent,” she said, “put it down. Please.” He stared at the crowbar as if he had never seen it. Then he laid it on the gravel. Ethan let out a long breath. I held out my hand to the son in law who had called my home a dump for twenty six years. “Come inside,” I said. “It is your father room.”
A suitcase on a made bed since 1979, a rotary phone, and a son in law crossing the lot with something in his hand.
Brent sat down on the edge of the bed, the same bed where, according to Tomas, his father had slept for three weeks in 1979. He lifted the lid of the shoebox. It was full of letters. Dozens of them, each in a plain envelope, each addressed to Master Brent Hollis, in care of the Blue Swallow Lodge. Under the letters lay a small brown baseball glove, still stiff with oil, and a savings bond. The top letter was dated October 1979. Brent unfolded it with fingers that shook, and began to read aloud, and then he could not, and handed it to me.
I read it in Room 12, to my son in law, with the afternoon sun coming through the dusty curtains. “Dear Brent. By the time you read this you will be a man, and I am sorry for the kind of man who made you wait. I owed money to bad people in Albuquerque and I ran, and I was a coward. I left this suitcase with Tomas, who is a good man, because I wanted you to have something clean from me. I am going to California to get well. When I am a man you can look at, I will come for you. Your Dad.”
There were thirty eight more letters, one for every year, and they had all come to the motel. Tomas had kept them in the shoebox. “He wrote to your mother, too,” I said, reading the last page of the last letter. “Doris sent them back unopened, so he mailed them here instead, to the only address he knew you might someday come to.” Brent put his face in his hands. “She told me he never wrote,” he said. “She told me he never sent a dime.” “Maybe she was afraid,” Gloria said gently. “Maybe she was only protecting you.”
The final letter, dated 2008, held a telephone number and a Bakersfield address. Brent sat holding it for a long time. Then he took out his phone, and with Gloria on one side and me on the other, he dialed. It rang six times. An old man answered, in a rough, careful voice. “Hello?” Brent opened his mouth and nothing came. “Hello?” the voice said again. “Dad,” Brent said at last, in the voice of a six year old. The line went silent. Then I heard a sound through that little speaker I will never forget. A man weeping, and laughing, and weeping.
Brent Hollis Senior came to Tucumcari in November on a Greyhound bus, because he said he wanted to arrive the same way he left. He was eighty one, thin and tall, with a cane, sober for thirty seven years, a retired welder with a wife named Patricia in Bakersfield. He stood in the Blue Swallow lot with his hat in his hands, looking up at the neon swallow, and Brent walked across the gravel and held him for a very long time. I stood at the office window and wept into a dish towel.
Brent dropped his plan for the gas station that same week. He says it was never really his plan, only a way to feel in charge of a hurt. The Phoenix company asked my permission, and I gave it, to restore Room 12 exactly as it was: the brown bedspread, the rotary phone, the 1979 calendar turned to September, now in a frame. They put a small brass plaque on the door. It reads: Room 12. A father came back. The pool shaped like a kidney bean has been filled again, and the first swimmers were Brent children.
I still live in my apartment behind the front desk, and every night at dusk I still turn on the neon swallow by hand, the way I have for fifty one years. Brent comes on Sundays now, in jeans, with his father, and the two of them sit in the breezeway side by side in lawn chairs, saying very little. Last week Brent called the motel a dump. Then he looked at me, and grinned, and said, “Mom, the best dump in New Mexico.” I told him I would take that as a compliment.