Audio: Sherman Alexie reads.

The used condoms stopped bothering Marie after a while. At least the people were being safe during their motel sex. She was Catholic and didn’t believe in abortion. But she was more flexibly Catholic than strictly Catholic, so she did believe in birth control—pills, devices, procedures. That’s good science, she thought. And God created everything, including science. One of God’s other names is Big Bang. Sometimes, when she prayed, she said “Dear Big Bang,” and she was half certain that God enjoyed the inside joke. Nobody was allowed to be fully certain about God. And she’d never trusted anybody who claimed to be certain about God. You cannot be confident and faithful at the same time, she thought.

Marie’s fear of used hypodermics had lessened over the years. She got needle-stuck once when she was pulling off a pillowcase. The next day, she went to the free clinic and got tested for H.I.V. For days, Marie prayed. Then her prayer received a response: negative is sometimes a good thing. She rarely saw a needle after crack and crystal meth became more popular and cheaper than any other drug. You could shoot up meth, but it seemed that most people snorted it. Or smoked it. And accidentally started fires in small motel rooms. But the needles were starting to reappear. She felt sorry for those addicts—for any addicts. They ended up looking like starving ravens. Like scarecrows after a brush fire. Like the babies born when starved ravens conceived with burned scarecrows.

After so many years, Marie didn’t even mind cleaning up people’s feces and urine. She had discovered that it was vital to say “feces” and “urine” instead of using cruder terms for the messes that people left in the toilet. Or on the toilet. Or in the general vicinity of the toilet. Or sometimes not even in the bathroom at all. “Feces” and “urine” were medical terms. She was a motel maid, but it helped to think like a doctor or a nurse. It helped to think that she was helping other people.

On a Tuesday morning, she knocked on the door of Room 213. A corner room. Larger than standard. With two big windows instead of one. Twenty dollars more a night. The guest had been there for a few nights and was supposed to check out by eleven. She knocked again.

“Housekeeping,” she said. Then she said it louder: “Housekeeping.”

There was no response, so she pass-keyed the door, pushed it open, and took a step back. That was a learned self-defense behavior. You didn’t enter the room until you had a clear idea of what was waiting for you. On TV, the cops acted the same way when they opened strange doors.

Check your corners, the TV cops always said to one another.

“Housekeeping,” Marie said again. There was no echo. The rooms were too small for echoes.

There was nobody in the living area. Nobody in the unmade bed. Nobody sat in the little wooden chairs at the wooden table. Nobody was squeezed into the doorless closet. But the bathroom door was shut, so there could be somebody in there. She listened for the sound of the shower or the toilet or the sink.

A few years earlier, in Room 122, a naked guest had walked out of the bathroom as she was making the bed. They’d both yelped in surprise. And then she’d laughed and laughed, because he had the biggest penis she had ever seen. She couldn’t stop laughing as she fled the room and hurried to the main office.

Blushing, she’d told the front-desk clerk, Evie, what had happened. Evie had been a maid for years before she got promoted.

“How big was it?” Evie had asked.

“I don’t know,” Marie had said. She knew she’d have to tell her priest, Father James, about that moment. She hadn’t sinned, not really, because she hadn’t wanted to do anything with that penis except laugh at its absurdity. But she’d wanted Father James to absolve her if she needed absolving.

“About fifteen years ago,” Evie had said, “I walked in on a guy with a huge one. It looked like a skateboard with two wheels missing.”

“Oh, Evie,” Marie had said. “You’ve got the Devil in you.”

“That I do,” Evie had agreed.

As she stood in the doorway of Room 213, Marie laughed at the memory. She missed Evie, who had quit one day and said she was moving to Arizona. She’d sent a postcard from Reno that said, “Halfway there!” But there’d been no word from her since. Marie kept that postcard in her purse. She saw it whenever she reached for her wallet or her keys.

“Housekeeping,” Marie said for the fourth time. No response. So she knew there was nobody in the room. The guest was gone. He was a clean one. Almost all the garbage was in the wastebaskets. The toilet was flushed. The sink had been wiped down. The used wet towels were piled in the shower instead of tossed onto the floor. A one-dollar bill, folded into an origami crane, had been left on top of the TV. A small gratuity. There were no human or animal body fluids splashed on the floors, walls, or ceiling. None that were obvious, anyway.

But the guest had left takeout food in a Styrofoam container on the wooden table. A mostly eaten hamburger and fries.

More than anything, Marie hated to clean up food. That’s why she had never worked at a restaurant. It’s why she rarely ate at restaurants. A table full of greasy dishes and half-empty water glasses and coffee cups made her nauseated. In particular, she hated the smell of old cooked onions.

Dear Big Bang, she’d thought more than once, if I am going to Hell, then I hope Hell doesn’t smell like old onions.

In her Bible-study group, she’d referred to Satan as Old Onions so much that some of her fellow-parishioners had started doing the same. She’d even heard Father James say it once or twice.