Twice a week, Eddie Welch’s wife drives him to donate plasma to get money for their room in an extended stay motel.

It’s $60 per session, which adds up to $120 per week. It still doesn’t cover the cost per week of the room they stay in at the InTown Suites, an extended stay motel in Houston’s Westchase area.

It’s just the two of them and everything they own packed tight into a one-bed room with a bathroom, fridge and half a kitchen. They keep their room door open when they can. His wife, 42-year-old Latisha Thompson Welch, just bought the white Honda they take to the plasma center. She can’t pay the car note anymore.

“We’re drawing our bank accounts, overdrafting and we can’t afford to pay the fees back or the money,” she said.

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The couple have lived on the third floor of the motel since October. They planned on having their own place by May. But both lost their jobs because of the novel coronavirus and used what they were putting toward leaving to paying for just one more week at a time.

No one who wound up on the third floor of the InTown Suites meant it as a permanent home. As Eddie and Latisha have met their neighbors, they heard stories like theirs: People like them who have been evicted, couldn’t qualify for an apartment because of criminal charges and convictions, didn’t have family that would take them and used the InTown as a stopping point. But the pandemic trapped them.

Coronavirus has disrupted the lives and finances of people all over the world, but it has put those who were once able to survive paycheck-to-paycheck on the edge of homelessness. And the InTown tenants don’t know what happens if they can’t come up with rent.

Texas suspended eviction proceedings in court until April 30, making it so tenants who can’t pay can’t be put out on the streets. But there’s no clear guideline for what happens to people in extended-stay hotels like the InTown.

“It’s a case-by-case analysis,” said Mark Grandich of Lone Star Legal Aid. “People in long-term hotels are really tenants.”

If someone acts like a tenant — if they’ve stayed for weeks or months, if they clean their own rooms, if they treat the motel room as a home — they’ll have an easier time arguing that they should be treated like a tenant. If they’re legally treated like a tenant, they can’t be evicted as long as the Texas order stands, Grandich said.

The InTown management at the Westchase property deferred comment to the company’s general counsel. Neither the general counsel nor anyone from InTown’s press office responded.

“Before this happened, we were like making plans to be up out of this place,” said Eddie, 48. “It’s stuck, you know?”

‘We’re not trying to be stuck’

Latisha goes to bed every night worrying how they’ll make rent. She doesn’t know the answer in the morning.

She got furloughed from her job as a valet at Texas Children’s Hospital. She still has her badge on her lanyard. Her husband lost his job at Men’s Wearhouse. They’re waiting on unemployment.

Welch started donating his plasma a month ago at the Grifols Plasma Center in Brays Oaks, the centerpiece in a one-story strip mall with a Dollar Tree and liquor store. He found it in 2005 and got rejected because of his full-sleeve tattoos (one with his name and Latisha’s flowing from a heart), but this time the techs found a vein.

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The InTown is a light-yellow building just off the highway, next to fast-food chains and other long-stay motels. Across the street behind the motel, cars line up for a Houston Food Bank distribution.

On non-plasma days, they mostly stay in bed. Watch TV. Leave the door open, walk around the three-story building. Laugh, because they have to laugh in the middle of it all. Back on the phones. Back to TV. Cry. Sleep.

They fight. They’re frustrated. They’re stuck together in one room with nowhere to go. (“Sometimes we take things out on each other because you know you gotta be quarantined and you can’t work, don’t know where our next meal, our next dollar gonna come from. And that’s not us,” she said.)

The couple sat in bed, Eddie on the edge and Latisha leaning against the headboard, playing with their phones and idly watching an infomercial in the hours before his plasma donation appointment.

Her cell phone rang. It was her old colleague who’d gotten furloughed at the same time.

“No, you didn’t — I know they said I qualify for it but I can’t get through to it — you got yours? Oh man. I hope they ain’t sending me no paper check, I need mine. Girl, lemme get off the phone and check.”

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She hung up and tapped her husband. “Oooo, Theresa said they opened up their portal to where you go check, she said they sent her check to the wrong account. I don’t know how she gonna fix that.”

If both get the promised government stimulus, it will last them just 10 weeks at the InTown Suites, without factoring in the cost of food, gas, car payments and overdraft fees.

“We’re paying by the week,” Eddie said. “The week turned into two weeks …”

“… it turned into a month and now there’s no end.” Thompson-Welch leaned back in the bed and fiddled with her phone. “We’re not trying to be stuck in no hotel forever.”

‘I don’t got no choice’

Marcus Dunbar has worn the same N95 mask for two weeks in a row, and it shows.

He took it off and made a face at it. It’s turned gray with dust and lost its shape.

“Wooo-wheee,” he said. “Other than Jesus, this is my lifeline. Does it say ‘washable material’? Doesn’t matter no more, you getting washed.”

Dunbar, 42, is an essential worker in a woodworking plant, one of several on the InTown’s third floor to keep his job. No one staying at the InTown who still has a job can afford to put the fear of the virus over getting paid.

Since July 2018, Dunbar has lived alone in a room he keeps neat. His criminal history (a 20-year-old arson charge, drug and assault convictions) limited his apartment options. He’s gotten friendly with the other residents, but it’s lonely. When he wakes up, he flips on the news (“800 people died — eight what? Eight hundred?”). It scares him.

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Dunbar usually takes the Gessner bus to work. He’s seen the news about Houston’s bus drivers falling ill. He started switching his route and took the 161 Wilcrest Express. One week, he felt sick. He thought he might have it. He took a few days off work. He got behind on the money he needed for rent. By Monday, he had to go back.

“I don’t got no choice,” he said. “Even if I did have it, I would have to go to work.”

He has two bad options: Stay home, keep safe but have no money for food or rent and maybe wind up homeless. Or get on the bus, go to work and pray.

“To think I could give it to one of my family members or one of someone else’s family members — a kid or a woman — I don’t even wanna think about it. It’s too terrifying to go into.”

He gets home around 6:30 p.m. every night, mask on. He leans over the third-floor railing, in blue camo shorts over long pants, and smokes his cigarette. Sometimes, at 2 a.m., he takes laps around the cluster of motels. He doesn’t take the elevator and doesn’t hold the stair rails.

“We just soldiers on a battlefield,” he said. “We can be casualties of war. Not remembered.”

James Wallace, 47, stays across on the other side of the third floor from Dunbar with his mother. They came to the InTown Suites after an eviction. They had planned to be out in March.

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Like Dunbar, they both work. He and his 66-year-old mother work at different Wendy’s with opposite schedules and are rarely together and awake at the same time (“My mother, she an elderly woman. She not supposed to be out there.”). Both of their hours got cut. Wallace used to work 40 hours. Now he works 26. His pay changed; the bills haven’t.

“I say, ‘How y’all gonna put us out? We ain’t got nowhere to go,’” he said. He hasn’t gotten an answer.

What would they do if they were put out? He doesn’t know. Maybe they’d sleep in a car.

No fallback

Every week he pays for his one bedroom, Rodney Jones wonders how he’ll scrape up the money to do it when the next Friday rolls around.

All he’s been told from the office staff is to keep paying. He hates the waiting. His brother gave him money to make it through the last two weeks. The money Jones used to pay for his room was supposed to have been his brother’s car payment.

Jones, 57, and his girlfriend of seven years, 59-year-old Laura Gibson, picked the InTown because it was affordable: $219.99 per week plus an $11 technology fee. They didn’t make quite enough to qualify for three times the rent, and criminal convictions — theft, resisting arrest, drug possession, driving with a suspended license — blocked them from even getting to income qualifications at many apartments.

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Before he was laid off, Jones worked at the iHOP just a few minutes’ walk away from the motel. The room stopped being affordable when the pandemic hit.

He’s been calling numbers that lead him to other numbers. He misdialed once and left a message on a stranger’s home phone. She called back, said she was sorry that she couldn’t help, and wished him luck.

Gibson and Jones have made the place look like a home. They have a fish tank (home to the black-and-white Sue and algae eater Ollie), a toaster oven, stacks of canned goods and an old-school radio.

Jones sometimes borrows his brother’s car to drive Gibson 20 minutes to see her grandkids. They’re the reason she moved to Houston: Her daughter, Jessica Lawrence, wanted her close when she had her first kid.

Now Lawrence, 32, is living in a motel. She used to live on the InTown’s third floor. But it was too expensive. She has one room for herself and two of her children, 11 and 6. They’ll go to their dad’s in Lufkin until she can get an apartment. Her daughter La’Keisha celebrated her 11th birthday in the motel room.

“It’s impossible to live in a motel with kids,” she said. She’s not afraid of the virus, but she misses having the kids in school. “Do you how long this crap is gonna last?”

“Six hundred years?” La’Keisha suggested. Her little brother, 6-year-old Na’Kahi, giggled.

Lawrence shook her head. The kids always ask her for things — to go to the store, to go out, to go to Dairy Queen — but she has to tell them no. There’s no money. They eat noodle cups and splurged on a discounted birthday cake for La’Keisha.

“It’s expensive as all hell,” she said. “You can live here, but be broke. You don’t have no extra nothing.”

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Gibson and Jones aren’t much better.

“I think we got what, $11.49?” Jones asked.

Gibson snorted. “If that. If that.”

If the motel is going to kick him out in the end, Jones would rather know now.

“I don’t wanna wait till the last minute to find that out,” he said. He sat on the edge of the bed and started to cry. “Then we’ll be on the street with no money to find no place else to stay.”

Nothing had changed on the eve of the next rent payment. Jones had gone by a scrapyard to see if they were hiring. They weren’t. The InTown had been his fallback. He doesn’t know where to go from there.

sarah.smith@chron.com