Alpine for You Read Free

her clothes. She had hair like a wire whisk, a voice like fingernails scratching a chalkboard, and a bank account that was running on empty. The only highlight in her life these days was that she was the undefeated champion of the five-yard dash in the annual Senior Olympics at the mall, a title the other contestants argued was undeserved due to the fact that she removed her hearing aid for the event and couldn’t hear the starting gun go off, so she always got a head start.
    “This place needs a bigger elevator,” Solvay Bakke complained to her husband. “How many people does that one hold?”
    “Three,” I said, having seen the trio who’d squeezed in earlier.
    Solvay shook her head in disgust. “Who’s in there now?”
    I knew that too. “Dick Teig, Dick Stolee, and Dick Rassmuson.” The three men had attended grammar school together, lived in the same subdivision in Windsor City, and always vacationed together with their wives, though if they had their druthers, they might have opted to leave the wives at home. They enjoyed being referred to as the three amigos. I referred to them as the three Dicks.
    Lars Bakke took control of the situation. “Those guys have been joyriding long enough. When that elevator gets down here again, someone yank the damn door open and get those Dicks outta there!”
    I guess Lars wasn’t fond of calling them the three amigos either.
    Forty-five minutes later, Nana and I stood before our room in a high-ceilinged corridor whose only illumination was an occasional motion light. Our key looked like a brass Sugar Daddy attached to a square of leather that was stamped in gold with the number 3310. Nana measured its weight in her palm before handing it to me. “Your grampa coulda used this as a sinker. Don’t drop it. You’ll break your foot.”
    I inserted the brass part into a slot in the front face of the doorknob, then turned the knob to the left. “Wally said to keep turnin’ until we hear a click,” Nana advised. So I turned, and turned, and turned.
    “Did you hear a click?” I asked.
    “Nope. But my hearin’s not so good anymore. You hear anything?”
    “No.” So I turned, and turned. I was glad Nana had asked me to accompany her on the tour. How did management expect old people to get into their rooms when young people couldn’t even figure it out? This was worse than wrestling with the childproof cap on the toilet bowl cleaner. Two weeks from now I envisioned thirty elderly people from Iowa walking around with wrist braces and full-blown cases of carpal tunnel syndrome. The litigation alone would be enough to close the hotel down.
    I glanced up and down the corridor and wondered why none of the other people on the tour were outside their doors, rotating their knobs. Obviously, Nana and I were the only guests from the tour in this wing.
    “Shall I try, dear?”
    I stepped aside and made a sweeping gesture toward the knob. “Be my guest. But don’t fuss with it too long. You’re seventy-eight years old. Your bones are fragile. I’ll see if I can find a maid to—”
    CLICK.
    All right. So there would be one frizzy-haired twenty-nine-year-old from Iowa in a wrist brace. “How did you do that?” I asked as she pushed the door open.
    “It’s like a one-armed bandit. I’m pretty good with slot machines. My bone density’s improved since I been hittin’ the casino circuit.”
    I tried not to knock her down in my haste to see what a deluxe room in a four-star Swiss hotel looked like. Recalling the elegance of the front lobby, I envisioned a four-poster bed, flowered settee, marble fireplace, panoramic view of Lake Lucerne. Maybe a chocolate mint on my pillow.
    Nana stopped dead in her tracks and looked left and right. “Well, would you look at that. It’s just like your college dormitory room, Emily.”
    With one exception. My dorm room had been bigger. “No, this can’t be right.” I noted the twin beds nestled lengthwise against the wall, the exposed pipe