The telephone next to the bed blared and she bit her tongue, frightened. Who could be calling them? She tremblingly picked up the receiver and answered hello in a faint scared voice.
"What's the matter over there—are you falling in love! You've been with those johns hours," screeched an awful voice. A woman's voice beginning like a man's and ending in a high whistling dying train-whistle screech.
"You have the wrong room, lady," Lucy said, her teeth chattering.
The telephone jangled in the next room and a girl answered right away, and hung up saying, "That was Horta, we got to get back, pay up the bonus, you bastards."
Horta—I'll never forget that voice or name. Or this night.
After a while the men snored. Mother, trembling, held her close, saying, "Go to sleep, dearest."
Lucy could not sleep. There was that bad word boys said when they thought girls weren't listening. Or words girls scratched on metal partitions of toilets at school. You'd think it was bad to go to the toilet. Mother said one word meant something bad men did to girls. Something dangerous. Lucy had to admit she had an idea it had to do with—that—but what could it have to do with love? "Are you falling in love?" that scary Horta had screeched. Those men and those girls sounded like dogs on the street. Frank's hair was almost as stiff as a fox terrier's.
When Lucy awoke, Mae was kneeling on the floor ironing dry last night's wash with a tiny flatiron heated over a Sterno.
"Get dressed quick, dear, so we can get out of here."
Mae scrubbed the bathtub, neatened the room, and reluctantly decided not to take any towels.
Blue Monday. Skyblue Monday. Denver no longer was a mist-isolated plateau. Distant peaks were near, jagged with lightning-struck black lines. On the pavements early workers rushed, heads up, in the bracing air.
"If we find a diamond ring, we'll sell it right away and go to another hotel."
Lucy scanned sidewalks and gutters to the railroad station, running back several times to take a second look at pieces of glittering trash. They breakfasted at the station lunch counter on doughnuts, coffee for Mae, milk for Lucy. Twenty cents, no tip. Mae read the
