The sound of the buzzer woke Paul out of a dream about game shows, which probably meant that it had been going off for quite a while before it managed to penetrate his consciousness enough to rouse him. He stumbled out of the small twin bed, staggering forward as the floral sheets clutched at his ankle in a way that seemed downright intentional, pressed a button from which the letters 'FRONT DOOR' had long ago been rubbed away by repeated use, and glanced quickly into the mirror to make sure he looked presentable for his customer.
A few frantic moments of smoothing his short dark hair into something a little bit less overtly emo, and rubbing blearily at the dark shadows under his muddy brown eyes until they didn't advertise quite so blatantly that he'd been sound asleep just a few moments ago, and he was satisfied he at least wouldn't send any potential customers screaming back out into the night. Not that he was exactly worried-if they were showing up at an out-of-the-way dump like this in the middle of the night, they probably didn't have anywhere else to go anyway.
Satisfied with his appearance, Paul stepped out of his bedroom behind the front desk to find a tall woman waiting patiently for him. She was dripping wet, the moisture making her russet brown skin practically glow with a lustrous sheen, and her long black hair was pasted down against her body, clinging in strands to the side of her cheeks. Despite all that, she broke into a cheerful smile on seeing him, her broad nose wrinkling as the enthusiasm of her joy spread over her entire face.
"Hullo," she said in a plummy British accent, extending a hand to him to shake. Perplexed, Paul took it. "My name's Maryam, Maryam Nawab. I'm here about the vacancy I saw outside?" It was odd-she looked utterly bedraggled, her expensive-looking suit practically plastered to her lush curvaceous frame by the rain outside and her suitcase leaking water onto the floor in a way that suggested it had long ago taken on a second job as a canteen. But at the same time, she seemed completely prepossessed with confidence, as though a walk through a thunderstorm was just a minor obstacle on her way to a wonderful future.
It absolutely sand-blasted through Paul's half-asleep brain, prompting him to respond automatically like a soldier snapping to attention. "Sure thing, ma'am," he said in the polite, cheerful, slightly over-bright tones of someone trying to sound convincingly alert. He reached back and grabbed a room key pretty much at random from the rack. "Looks like Room Four is open."
They were all open, but Paul still felt better maintaining the polite fiction that tourists still came down State Route 20 on a regular basis. Even if Maryam could see that every spot on the rack had a key resting on the hook, he could at least pretend that he got more than three customers a week. He put the key on the desk and said, "It's seventy-five dollars for the night, five hundred for the whole week." He couldn't imagine anyone staying a whole week-most of his customers were just waiting for a tow truck to come by in the morning-but he said it anyway, out of habit.
Maryam looked at the key for a moment, her expression comically non-plussed. "Oh!" she said after a slight pause, chuckling to herself. "I'm sorry, I thought you were quoting me a salary for a moment. No, no, I don't need a room. Well, I suppose I will eventually, if I'm to stay on in the position, but I'm here about the vacancy." She stressed the last word as if trying to make it clear to someone who was slightly hard of hearing, or possibly just American.
Paul rubbed his hand through his hair in confusion, undoing most of the hasty work of a few moments ago. "Vacancy, like... as in job?" he finally asked, rummaging around in his brain for every bit of Britishness he'd picked up from watching public television at night. "Um, I'm sorry, ma'am, but the sign-it's not, I mean, it's not that kind of vacancy. It just means we've got rooms available."
Left unspoken was the cold fact that Paul couldn't afford to pay a second person, and that frankly his business selling Hoosiers memorabilia on eBay was the only thing that kept the lights on and the water running. It had been a long time since running the Rest-a-While Motor Lodge had been profitable for Paul's family, even before the interstate came through. Just keeping the property taxes paid ate up more than a year's income. If the land was worth something, Paul would have sold the place a long time ago, but he'd pretty much resigned himself to a quiet life in the middle of nowhere and a second identity as 'IndianaBBMan43'.
"I should say you do," Maryam said, breaking into Paul's momentary dip into melancholy. "Don't worry, we'll soon change that. I'm assuming I am hired? Only I'd very much like to get changed-" She gestured at her soaking clothing, still clinging to her body in a way that reminded Paul about how very little companionship he got living this far out of town. "-and I don't want to step around the desk unless I'm on staff. It wouldn't be polite." She beamed at him with a polite camaraderie that didn't so much ignore his words of a moment ago as render them moot and irrelevant.
"Um, ma'am, I..." Paul tried to find the right words in his groggy brain to dent the barrier of unbounded confidence Maryam had erected. "I don't have a job for you. We, um..." He blushed, ashamed of his failure even though he knew that it was nothing to do with him and everything to do with geography. "We don't really have the kind of business that needs a second person helping out." It was the understatement of the year. There wasn't much to see on this stretch of Route 20, and too many other ways to get to the places tourists were interested in. The Rest-a-While was too far off the beaten path even to make advertising worth it.
But Paul's words didn't seem to impact Maryam's cheerful ebullience. "That's because you're not taking advantage of your opportunities," she said brightly, looking around the room as if she was taking stock of a treasure vault. "Don't forget, every obstacle contains the potential for opportunity. Take me, for instance. When my car broke down, I could have decided to give up. I could have said, 'Well, Maryam, clearly this is the final setback, just the universe's way of saying you don't deserve success.' But instead, I thought of your sign, the sign I passed just two miles earlier. A beacon in the darkness, telling me that there was always another chance out there for someone willing to reach out and take it."
Paul just stared at her in blank incredulity as she went on, her exuberance almost manic in its intensity. "I said to myself, are you just going to wait in this car for someone to come along and pick you up? Or are you going to march back down that road, present your best self to whoever owns that motel, and take charge of your life? And here I am." She reached out and took his hand again, pressing it between her warm palms. "Here we are."
Paul blinked. He felt like he might still be dreaming, the situation in front of him so bizarre that it couldn't be real. He was used to all sorts of late-night customers, from the jittery truck drivers following a detour off I-90 to the freaked-out single women who needed near-constant reassurance that they hadn't walked into the plot of an Eli Roth movie to the tired families that he had to talk into sleeping off their exhaustion before getting directions back to the freeway. But this was something else. His brain simply didn't know how to process it.
