I stopped cleaning the pool. It filled up with green gick so that the guests wouldn't use it anymore. I didn't fix any more faucets or lay any more tile or do any of the touch-up painting. Well, the truth is we were both hitting it pretty hard. Booze takes a lot of time and effort if you're going to do a good job with it.Holly wasn't registering the guests right, either. She was charging too much or else not collecting what she should. Sometimes she'd put three people to a room with only one bed in it, or else she'd put a single in where the bed was a king-size. I tell you, there were complaints, and sometimes there were words. Folks would load up and go somewhere else.The next thing, there's a letter from the management people. Then there's another, certified.There's telephone calls. There's someone coming down from the city.But we had stopped caring, and that's a fact. We knew our days were numbered. We had fouled our lives and we were getting ready for a shakeup.Holly's a smart woman. She knew it first.Then that Saturday morning we woke up after a night of rehashing the situation. We opened our eyes and turned in bed to take a good look at each other. We both knew it then. We'd reached the end of something, and the thing was to find out where new to start.We got up and got dressed, had coffee, and decided on this talk. Without nothing interrupting. No calls. No guests.That's when I got the Teacher's. We locked up and came upstairs here with ice, glasses, bottles. First off, we watched the color TV and frolicked some and let the phone ring away downstairs. For food, we went out and got cheese crisps from the machine.There was this funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had.
Raymond Carver, “Gazebo”, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
