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clouds. The only wildlife he saw was a fat porcupine that ran in front of their headlights and almost sent them into a ditch. When they pulled up in front of their motel room outside of Seattle, it was after midnight. The Lincoln was covered with mud and they were too exhausted and dirty even to think about food. |
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"All I want is a hot shower," Kyna said, "a pair of clean underwear and to sleep for a week." |
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But when Cyrus opened the trunk to dig out their clean clothing he discovered that everything they owned had been worn at least once and then stuffed into two large plastic garbage bags. Soon after checking in, he hauled the garbage bags into the room, upended them in the middle of the floor and began separating the whites from the colors. While he was busy playing maid, Kyna dropped the overnight bags next to the bed and went back to the car for her pillow and the novel she had been reading. When she pulled the pillow out of the trunk, she saw the wooden box and decided to show it to Cyrusmaybe he could figure out what the strange spheres were. Unfortunately, right after she returned to the room they got into one of those arguments that people have when they're tired and have been on the road too long. It started when Cyrus offered to take their laundry down to the Laundromat in the motel's basement so that Kyna could stay in the room and rest. He was trying to be gallant, but Kyna decided his grand gesture was really a veiled criticism of her housekeeping abilities. |
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She said he was anal retentive. |
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He said she was being childish. |
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In the end, they both trooped down to the basement. Kyna crammed her dirty clothes, whites and colors both, into one washing machine; Cyrus shoved his whites into a second and his colors into a third, and they sat on a pair of pink tulip-shaped chairs that were physically close, but emotionally as far apart as the Bosnians and the Serbs while their clothes sloshed round and round. |
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It was a few minutes before two by the time Kyna got her |
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