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The road widened to four lanes. The speed limit changed, and Kal rolled through a strip of fast-food restaurants, check-to-cash scams, past a Walmart. There was the hotel, finally.
It looked like the kind of place his mom always found. Clean but cheap. The rooms would smell like carpet shampoo and ancient nicotine. He pulled into the carport area in front of the entrance.
“Wait here, I’ll check us in.”
“Leave the music on?”
“Yeah.”
It was a relief to stand up, and even more of a relief to walk away from his mom’s Outback and pretend for a minute that he was unencumbered.
The man at the desk pulled up the reservation for him. “I’ll just need your initials here and here. Will you be parking with us?”
“Yeah.”
“Make and model go here, and the license plate if you know it. We have you booked in a double room, with two queen beds. All of our rooms are nonsmoking. In the morning, there’s a complimentary breakfast—”
“There’s just one room?” Kal interrupted.
“Yes, sir. The reservation is for one room.”
His phone was vibrating in his pocket. Kal took it out and stabbed at the button, assuming it would be Rosemary with a drunken request or a question. “Hello?”
“Kal! Glad I got you. This is Chris from the Mountaineering Alliance. You have a minute?”
“Not really.” He lifted his finger to the man behind the desk with an apologetic look. He shouldn’t have answered the phone.
“I won’t take much of your time. I just wanted to reach out because I know you were on Everest this year, right? And we want to do a piece for the website on the avalanche and what it means for the future of climbing there—you know, the whole global warming angle, et cetera. I left you a couple messages already—any chance you’d be interested?”
It was Kal’s fault for not calling back. He’d told his mother he would, but he hadn’t. “I don’t think it’s for me.”
“Don’t say no yet. It pays, if that matters to you—not very much, but at the top of our scale. We want to do a big media outreach on this one, and it would mean a lot if we could put your face on it. Just tell me you’ll give it some thought.”
Kal couldn’t keep telling him no. He’d spent the summer working with Chris in Bozeman when they were both raw college interns. He’d roomed with the guy in a four-bedroom crapshack. Partied with him. Stayed up half the night with him when Chris discovered through Facebook photos that his boyfriend from school was cheating on him.
“I don’t know.”
“It won’t hurt you to think it over. I’ll send you some details over email and we’ll talk again tomorrow, okay? And listen, I had a question for you. This Rosemary Chamberlain who was on Everest with the British women—do you know her?”
“Sure, I saw her around Base Camp.”
“I mean, do you know-her know her? She was on the news giving an interview at the prayer service, after the avalanche? And in the background, milling around, I saw this Sherpa dude I could’ve sworn was you.”
“Yeah, I know her.”
“Could you put me in touch? Clayton wants to connect, find out if she’s interested in being one of our ambassadors, you know, helping with outreach? We’ve been looking at her press file, and she’s a whiz at PR.”
“I guess.”
“Would you talk to her? We could use her. She’s got the kind of face people listen to, plus the exposure, the experience—if she was on our side—”
“Listen, Chris, I’ve got to go.”
“Sure.” Kal could imagine him raking his hand through that chin-length mess of hair he cultivated, imagine the view out the window of his office, mountains and sky and maybe a storm coming in. “I’ll send you that email. Think about what I said. We need you, Kal.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. Talk soon.”
