Chapter 7: What Do You Want
Stevie's reply came at 6:47 AM.
That's a weird question for 11pm
Then, a minute later:
I'll think about it
I stared at the messages while making terrible instant coffee, trying to decide if I'd pushed too hard. The text I'd sent was direct—maybe too direct for someone who'd known Mutt as the king of deflection.
But that was the point. I wasn't Mutt. Not really. And if I was going to build something here, it had to be built on a different foundation.
The drive to the motel felt longer than usual. My hands still ached from yesterday's work—the cumulative toll of repairs that should have been beyond me. The ability to learn fast was one thing; the physical cost was another.
Trade-offs, I thought. Everything has trade-offs.
Stevie was behind the desk when I walked in, same position, same paperback, same expression that said she'd rather be anywhere else. But something had shifted. A tension in her shoulders that hadn't been there before.
"Morning."
"Morning." She didn't look up from her book. "Ice machine's still dead."
"I know. I was thinking about that."
Now she looked up. "Thinking how?"
"The compressor's shot. Replacing it costs more than the machine's worth. But there's a salvage place in Elmdale that might have compatible parts."
"You researched this?"
"Couldn't sleep."
It was true. The insomnia that had plagued me since transmigration hadn't improved—too many thoughts, too much information to process, too much awareness that every day brought me closer to the moment the Roses would arrive and everything would change.
Stevie set down her book. "Why do you care so much about the ice machine?"
"Because guests complain about warm ice. And because fixing things that are fixable is—" I stopped, searching for words that wouldn't sound like a self-help book. "It's better than not fixing them."
"Profound."
"I try."
She almost smiled. Almost. The corner of her mouth twitched before training reasserted itself.
"Fine. Go be productive. Room nine's shower handle needs looking at."
"Already on the list."
"You have a list?"
"I told you. I'm trying something new."
The shower handle was a simpler fix than the ice machine. Corroded washers, misaligned valve—nothing that required parts I didn't have. I worked methodically, letting my hands find the rhythm while my brain catalogued every detail of the bathroom. Water stains on the ceiling. Grout that needed resealing. A light fixture that flickered with intention.
File. File. File.
My memory did its thing. Every observation stored with perfect clarity, organized by priority, cross-referenced with repairs already completed. It was overwhelming if I thought about it directly—so I tried not to think about it directly.
By noon, three rooms were marginally better than they'd been. Not transformed, but functional. The kind of improvement that accumulated if you kept at it.
I found Stevie in the parking lot, smoking a cigarette she probably thought no one knew about.
"Those things will kill you."
"So will everything else in this town." She exhaled slowly. "How's the shower?"
"Fixed. The light in room nine needs a new ballast, but that can wait."
She nodded, not looking at me. The silence stretched, comfortable in a way I hadn't expected.
"I thought about your question," she said finally.
I waited.
"The one from last night. About what I want from this place."
"And?"
She took another drag, held it, released. "I want it to matter. I've been here since I was nineteen. Four years of checking people in and checking them out and watching this place decay one broken thing at a time. And I keep thinking—if I leave, what was the point? But if I stay, what's the point either?"
The honesty caught me off guard. This wasn't the Stevie from the show—guarded, sarcastic, hiding everything behind walls of irony. This was someone who'd been asked a real question and decided to give a real answer.
"What would make staying matter?"
"I don't know." She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "That's the problem. I don't know what would make anything matter. This place was my grandmother's. She built it in the seventies, ran it until she couldn't anymore. My aunt inherited it and hired a management company and now I'm the only thing standing between the Rosebud Motel and—" She gestured vaguely. "Whatever happens to places nobody cares about."
The garden, I thought. Her grandmother's garden.
I filed the connection away, letting it settle alongside everything else I knew about Stevie Budd—the woman who would become something remarkable under Johnny Rose's mentorship, but who right now was just tired and stuck and wondering why she bothered.
"What if we started with things that are fixable?" I said.
Her eyes narrowed. "We?"
"I'm already here. Might as well make myself useful."
"And what do you get out of it?"
Something to do while I wait for the timeline to catch up. A reason to exist in this body that isn't mine. The chance to make a difference before the Roses arrive and the real story begins.
"Maybe I need something to matter too."
She studied me for a long moment, looking for the angle, the hidden motivation, the catch. I met her gaze and let her look.
"You're different," she said finally. "I don't know what happened to you, but you're not the Mutt I—" She stopped. Shook her head. "You're different."
"Is that a problem?"
"I don't know yet."
She finished her cigarette, crushed it under her boot, and walked back toward the lobby without another word.
But she hadn't said no. That was something.
The rest of the afternoon passed in repair work and comfortable silence. Stevie stayed behind the desk; I moved through the motel like someone who belonged there, fixing what I could, noting what I couldn't, building a picture of everything the Rosebud needed.
Around four, she called me to the lobby.
"My grandmother started that garden when the motel opened." She said it without preamble, like the words had been sitting in her throat all day. "Out back, near the storage shed. Tomatoes, peppers, herbs for the kitchen. She said every guest should taste something that grew right here."
"What happened to it?"
"She got sick. Then she died. Nobody took care of it." Stevie shrugged, but the gesture was too controlled to be casual. "It's just weeds now."
I didn't say anything about the garden. Not yet. The information was filed—the location, the history, the weight it carried. But some things needed time.
"Show me?"
She hesitated. Then nodded.
We walked around the building to a patch of ground that had once been something and was now nothing. Overgrown grass, dead stalks from summers past, a rusted trellis leaning against the shed like it had given up.
Stevie stood at the edge, arms crossed, looking at the ruin with an expression I couldn't quite read.
"Doesn't matter," she said. "It's just dirt now."
But her voice cracked on the last word, and I understood that it mattered more than anything else in this entire dying motel.
I didn't promise to restore it. Didn't make plans or offer optimism. I just stood beside her and looked at the ground that had grown something once, and might grow something again.
One week, I thought. One week until the Roses arrive. One week to keep building this.
Stevie turned away first. "I should get back."
"Yeah."
She walked toward the lobby. I stayed a moment longer, pacing the garden's dimensions without being obvious about it. Fifteen feet by twenty. Southern exposure. Good drainage if the slope was any indication.
Someday, I thought. When she's ready.
Then I followed her back inside.
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