She looked sweet. “I used to like to go to motels, you know,” she said. “There’s something secret about them and free—I was never paying, of course. But you felt safe from everything and free to do what you wanted because you’d made the decision to be there and paid that price, and all the rest was the good part. Fucking and everything, you know.” She smiled at me in a good-natured way.

“Isn’t that the way this is?” I was sitting on the bed, watching her, not knowing what to expect her to say next.

“I don’t guess it is, Earl,” she said and stared out the window. “I’m thirty-two and I’m going to have to give up on motels. I can’t keep that fantasy going anymore.”

“Don’t you like this place?” I said and looked around at the room. I appreciated the modern paintings and the lowboy bureau and the big TV. It seemed like a plenty nice enough place to me, considering where we’d been.

“No, I don’t,” Edna said with real conviction. “There’s no use in my getting mad at you about it. It isn’t your fault. You do the best you can for everybody. But every trip teaches you something. And I’ve learned I need to give up on motels before some bad thing happens to me. I’m sorry.”

“What does that mean?” I said, because I really didn’t know what she had in mind to do, though I should’ve guessed.

“I guess I’ll take that ticket you mentioned,” she said, and got up and faced the window. “Tomorrow’s soon enough. We haven’t got a car to take me anyhow.”

“Well, that’s a fine thing,” I said, sitting on the bed, feeling like I was in shock. I wanted to say something to her, to argue with her, but I couldn’t think what to say that seemed right. I didn’t want to be mad at her, but it made me mad.

“You’ve got a right to be mad at me, Earl,” she said, “but I don’t think you can really blame me.” She turned around and faced me and sat on the windowsill, her hands on her knees. Someone knocked on the door, and I just yelled for them to set the tray down and put it on the bill.

“I guess I do blame you,” I said, and I was angry. I thought about how I could’ve disappeared into that trailer community and hadn’t, had come back to keep things going, had tried to take control of things for everybody when they looked bad.

“Don’t. I wish you wouldn’t,” Edna said and smiled at me like she wanted me to hug her. “Anybody ought to have their choice in things if they can. Don’t you believe that, Earl? Here I am out here in the desert where I don’t know anything, in a stolen car, in a motel room under an assumed name, with no money of my own, a kid that’s not mine, and the law after me. And I have a choice to get out of all of it by getting on a bus. What would you do? I know exactly what you’d do.”

“You think you do,” I said. But I didn’t want to get into an argument about it and tell her all I could’ve done and didn’t do. Because it wouldn’t have done any good. When you get to the point of arguing, you’re past the point of changing anybody’s mind, even though it’s supposed to be the other way, and maybe for some classes of people it is, just never mine.

Edna smiled at me and came across the room and put her arms around me where I was sitting on the bed. Cheryl rolled over and looked at us and smiled, then closed her eyes, and the room was quiet.