The Three Rooms — Summary

The medal comes off in the car, and Renata Quintana does it without looking. A Saint Christopher on a chain that is not the original chain, worn so flat that the man and the child and the water are a smooth oval with a suggestion of a shoulder in it. It was her father’s. She is not religious and could not tell you the story on it if you asked.

At ten to six she starts a sentence about Thursday and the house answers before she has finished it, because it has worked out where the sentence was going and it is right. She says it again anyway, the whole way through, and it waits the second time. It asks whether there is anything for Efrén’s lunch. It asks this most mornings. He argues with it in the afternoons, about nothing, about whether a thing he said last week counts as having been said, and it argues back.

At the clinic there are twelve chairs and eleven of them are running. The machines do the treatment and will not proceed past certain points on their own, and the points are where a person has to say a number out loud and say it back. So the clinic gives her a range, both ends of it, and does not round, and she reads it back, sixty to ninety times in a shift. It uses her whole name every time and has never used a first name to anybody in the building.

The read-back is not a check on the machine. It is the shape of the job.

At lunch, on the concrete step, Efrén’s school wants an acknowledgment by Friday. It cannot reach the clinic, the clinic cannot see the house, and she keys it in herself with her thumbs in four minutes. She does not experience this as friction and has never thought of it as something that ought to work some other way.

Tuesdays she goes to Bea Trujillo’s on Evans, where the house calls her Mrs. Quintana and calls Bea Mrs. Trujillo, and there is nobody left alive who calls Bea Mrs. Trujillo. She asks about the water bill and it starts at the top, account holder, service address, billing period, and it will not go to the number until it has finished the section it is in. She says the number back. Bea’s house waits, because it does not know what to do with that. Bea laughs at her and says Sal used to repeat the road closures back at the radio.

Between them the three have very nearly all of her, and no two have ever exchanged a word.

The chain goes on the hook by the door at half past ten, and the medal hangs with the flat side out, which is both sides.