The Cheap Room

Act I

Angela Rice found Walter King on a Thursday. She had knocked on his door at nine in the morning with a cup of tea she knew he would not drink, and when he did not answer, she used the key he had given her six months ago and said, Mr. King, it is time for your tea.

He was in bed, under the same quilt his wife had bought him in 1987, the one with the faded pattern of white roses on a blue background that he had never liked but never replaced. His face was turned toward the wall. His breathing had stopped sometime in the night, and the room had been breathing with him until it did not.

She called 911. She sat on the stairs in the hallway, eating a pop-tart from the box she kept in her purse for emergencies, and she watched the smoke from her cigarette curl toward the ceiling where a water stain had been growing for three years.

The paramedics came. They confirmed what Angela already knew. She went back to her apartment, which was across the hall from Walter's, and she sat at her kitchen table and thought about the fact that she had known this man for six years and had never once asked him why he lived the way he lived.

Act II

Brian King arrived from Cleveland on Saturday. He looked tired, which was his normal state, and he smelled like whiskey, which was also normal. He told the landlord that he barely knew his father. The landlord told him that everyone in the building knew Walter King and that they were sorry for his loss.

Angela stood in the doorway of Walter's apartment and watched Brian talk to the landlord. She wanted to tell him the truth: that his father called her every Tuesday and asked if she could watch his apartment for a few days because he was going to the hospital for treatment, and he was not going to the hospital, he was going to a bar on Grand River Avenue, and he was drinking himself into a shape that was permanently collapsing.

She said nothing. She went back inside and started cleaning, because cleaning is what you do when someone dies and you do not know what else to do.

On the kitchen table, among the stacks of unpaid bills and the take-out menus and the magazines from 2018, she found a notebook. It was a small one, the kind you buy at a drugstore for two dollars and use for a month and then keep for years because it contains too much of your life to throw away.

Walter's notebook was full of names. Written in careful block letters, the kind of handwriting you get from forty years of filling out time cards at an auto plant:

Darius Moore. 3,000. March 2018. Brian King. 500. June 2018. Darius Moore. 2,000. January 2019. Darius Moore. 4,000. May 2019.

At the bottom of the last page, in smaller letters that shook slightly: I am done. I cannot do this anymore.

Angela closed the notebook and put it back on the table. She looked at the pill bottles on the kitchen counter. Most of them matched Walter's prescriptions. One did not. She did not touch it. She called Frank O'Malley.

Act III

Frank O'Malley arrived at four in the afternoon on a Saturday, wearing a uniform that had seen better days and carrying the weary expression of a man who has been doing this job for thirty years and is three months away from retirement and knows that retirement is not the freedom he thought it would be.

He had known Walter for twenty years. Walter had been a good man, in the way that good men are good in places like this: quietly, without announcement, without credit. He had worked the auto plant for thirty-two years. He had lost his knee to a machine that the company said was safe and his wife to a cancer that the insurance said was pre-existing. He had lost his son to alcohol and his dignity to a system that took more than it gave.

He looked at the apartment the way a man looks at a room where a friend has died: not with drama, but with the careful attention of someone who knows that the details matter.

He saw the empty pill bottle. He saw the notebook. He saw the water stain on the ceiling and the faded quilt and the single photograph on the nightstand, of a woman who had died ten years ago and who, in the photograph, was smiling in a way that suggested she had known, even then, that happiness in a place like this was always temporary.

He called Darius Moore. Moore said he had lent Walter money. Walter said he owed nobody. Frank called Brian. Brian said his father owed him nothing because his father had given him everything he had, which was not much.

Frank sat in Walter's kitchen chair and thought about the pill bottle. He thought about the fact that Walter had been skipping his blood pressure medication, which Angela had told him about three weeks earlier. He thought about the fact that stress and alcohol and skipped medication, when combined, create a situation that is not quite suicide and not quite accident and not quite murder.

He thought about his own retirement, three months away, and a house in Arizona that he had seen in a magazine and imagined living in, and wondered if moving to a different desert would change anything.

The answer, he suspected, was no.

Act IV

Frank filed the report as natural causes with mitigating circumstances. The medical examiner agreed. The coroner agreed. The landlord agreed, because he agreed with anything that did not involve him spending money.

Brian returned to Cleveland. Angela stayed. She continued watching Walter's apartment, which meant she continued watching the apartments of the other elderly tenants in the building, because once you start watching one door, you notice the others.

She received a call from the health department two months later. They wanted to clean Walter's apartment and rent it to a new tenant. She said she would do it. She always did.

The new tenant was a young man named Marcus, who worked at a warehouse and played basketball on weekends and had moved from Chicago because he needed a place that was cheap and quiet. Angela showed him the apartment, which had been freshly painted and smelled of lemon cleaner and the faint, inescapable trace of whatever Walter had been smoking in this room for the last twelve years.

Is this a good building? Marcus asked.

It is a building, Angela said. That is what it is.

Frank O'Malley drove to Arizona in October, when the leaves had turned and the air was cold enough to make you feel alive without making you wish you were dead. He parked in a motel lot that looked like every other motel lot in every other town in every other state, and he sat in his car and looked at the desert and thought about Walter King and the notebook and the pill bottle and the fact that some deaths are not murders and not accidents and not suicides, but something that does not have a name because it is too common and too terrible to name.

He thought about retiring. He thought about going inside the motel room. He thought about everything and nothing.

Then he got out of the car, went inside, and turned on the television.

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Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: