Pancake Breakfast

Angie McCullagh

The pool is popsicle blue. A perfect rectangle, but not for laps. It’s for old men with burned-bacon skin and white hair to sit in and groan about how good the cool water feels in the Sarasota heat. It’s for birds to shit into and a married couple to fight on the edges of.

“We should have stayed at the Marriott with everyone else,” says Amanda, the young black-haired wife in the red bikini.

Her husband, who’s bald scalp is already turning pink, lowers his Android Lite tablet. “But this place has a pancake machine.”

She swirls her arms through the still water, a clump of pine needles landing nearby, though no trees hang over the pool.

The pancake machine isn’t why they came here. “We’re missing out though,” she submerges herself to her chin, baby hairs on her neck dampening, enormous cat-eye sunglasses shielding half of her face from the relentless sun.

“Missing out on listening to a bunch of blowhards brag about how many sprinklers they sold this year?”

It’s the ladies and the occasional femme husband she misses, comparing pedicures and trying the latest TikTok dance. Last year they did stay at the Marriott with its superior pool, because the husband had hotel points to burn. But this year he found an eighty-dollar-a-night deal. With free breakfast.

They’re going back tonight for a prime rib gala and the wife plans to wear the dress she got at Express—cobalt blue with spaghetti straps and a slit up the back.

*

By the time they arrive at the nicer hotel, the white of the husband’s dress shirt accentuates his florid skin. Amanda, who possesses some Indigenous DNA and the intelligence to slather on sunscreen, is deeply tanned. She likes the way her brown skin makes the blues and purples of her butterfly tattoo pop.

“Where’s the bar?” she nudges a lady she recognizes whose boyfriend works out of the Kansas City office. The lady points to the back left corner of a huge banquet room carpeted in a busy red and gold.

A train passes by on nearby tracks, causing the hotel to tremor slightly.

Pulling her husband to get drinks, Amanda says, “Only two for you. We have to drive back.”

“Hey, you can drive. This is my thing. My buddies are here.”

“That’s kind of an overstatement.” Her husband isn’t well-liked. Amanda doesn’t know what goes on behind the scenes at work, if he steals sales or makes a lot of mistakes, but in regular life he’s mouthy and kind of dopey. The burnish of their early days—when he bought her coffees, sometimes without coupons, and paid for her nursing classes (at a community college, but still)—has worn off. She sees him for what he is: a sad sack. A low-rung salesman at an irrigation supplies company. Not even in mid-management. He’s probably what she deserves. She wasn’t exactly an overachiever herself, becoming an esthetician who waxed upper lips and bikini lines and even a guy’s ass crack before going back to school.

A pot-bellied man approaches the husband, is about to slap his back, and Amanda perks up, adjusting her necklace hopefully. But the man’s eyes widen, and it’s obvious he mistook the husband for someone else. He shoves his hand into the pocket of his own brown dress slacks.

She orders a beer. Neither she nor the husband counts their drinks as they eat disappointing beef that is supposed to be top notch but is probably top butt. Amanda, who grew up on a cattle farm, realizes this with each tough bite.

She is drunk, gossiping with the wives and girlfriends about who is wearing hairpieces and snorting at the in-your-face globular breast implants stuffed into the marketing director’s chest. Amanda will never admit that she has them too, but at least hers are modest, shaped like teardrops and not straining the fabric of her dress.

Everyone stares at the woman with implants, and after another whiskey sour Amanda starts to wish that hers were larger, more obvious. What good do hers do hanging there like real, boring boobs? No one is giving her attention. She’ll talk to the husband about upgrading soon. Maybe they can take some money out of their 401k. It’d be as much for him as for her. He’s ogling the globes, after all, nudging some of the men who’ve become friendlier to him as the alcohol flows.

Of all the people who have started dancing on the foldable parquet pad, only one or two actually have rhythm. The rest wobble around like calves who’ve gushed from their mothers’ birth canals onto the hard ground. Music pounds so loudly from the speakers that the nearby trains now slip through the night undetected.

“Is he yours?” The yellow-draped woman points to the husband who jerks on the sidelines. The wife emits a long sigh, averting her gaze as if she doesn’t see him scanning the tables for her. He’s probably too wasted to pick her out of the crowd anyway.

A few sprinkler salespeople have started peeling off for the night, stumbling to their rooms, the implanted woman leading a large, bulb-nosed man who gives entitled CEO vibes to the elevators. But most will stay for the free drinks and music until the overhead lights snap on and the clean-up crew moves in.

Moments after Amanda fetches a refill from the bartender, a man appears at her elbow, eyes swimming. He tells her that her husband’s sick in the bathroom.

Amanda drops her forehead into her hands. If they were staying here at the Marriott he could stumble up to their room, and she could keep socializing, but shoving him into a rideshare while she remains behind would make her look like a bitch.

In the urinal-cake smelling bathroom, she finds her husband on the tile floor moaning. She imagines driving her heel into his ribs but instead shakes his shoulder. “You need to get up. We have to go now because you’re shit-faced. And I guess I’m going to have to be the one who drives.” She nudges him to a sitting position. He vomits down the front of his Costco dress shirt.

“God, ugh.” She looks around for paper towels but finds only air dryers. Yanking off half a roll of toilet paper, she wipes at the husband’s front, her face tipped away from the sight and smell. Of course the night is turning out like this. Why would she expect it to be any different? She is not a person who gets nice endings, nice things, except maybe the cobalt dress, but loose threads have already popped out along the hem.

At least the music is muffled in here.

Positioning herself behind the husband, she jams her hands under his armpits and helps him stand. He sways, but she’s able to lead him to the revolving door and push him into the humid night. She weaves as the thick air hits her and tries to calculate how many drinks she downed. She has no idea.

“This is gonna cost us, but I have to call a Lyft,” she says, secretly happy they get to slide into the clean backseat of a decent car rather than climb into their cluttered truck to drive back to the motel.

Amanda presses her palm to the back window as the lit-up Marriott shrinks away.

Then, the screeching of metal on metal, a hot smell, black smoke, and a fireball where they were just drinking and socializing.

“Holy fuck,” their driver pulls over and they all climb from the Prius to watch. The husband squeezes Amanda’s forearm. All the people they were talking to five minutes ago are in the hotel, engulfed in flame. Maybe some had escaped. But probably not most. The blaze is too big and fast.

Amanda calls 9-1-1 but can barely speak into her phone.

It’s hours later, but still dark. Amanda and the husband are sitting at the edge of the pool, her cobalt dress pulled up to her thighs and his khakis rolled, both still drinking, or drinking again, both with feet pale and magnified in the water. The smell of acrid smoke hangs in the air.

“I’m hungry,” the wife says and stands, dripping water as she slap-walks into the motel lobby, her husband trailing behind. The lights are on, but the desk is unmanned. Along the west wall sits the pancake machine on top of a skirted oblong table. The wife figures out how to lift the steel lid and finds a half-filled bag of batter.

They catch the misshapen pancakes in their hands and eat them noisily, the pancakes sitting warm and soft in their living bellies.