The Inn at Clinton

This has been our home away from home for several years and Nicki Tucker Front Desk Managers has always been the best. She is always pleasant and accommodating, she is the reason we keep coming back. She still believe in providing customers with respect and kindness.

Somewhat difficult to get out of the parking lot and head into downtown. Basic room, but comfortable. Have stayed here many times as local options are limited. Ran out of hot water while showering during this last visit.

The Inn, Clinton, North Carolina I stayed there from the first of February to the fifth and I did not expect much, since it was not a chain place and the price alone suggested that mercy would be in short supply, though even with expectations set that low it still found ways to disappoint that felt practiced rather than incidental. The walls were thin as scripture pages and every sound passed through them unimpeded so that at night I lay awake listening to strangers breathe and move and speak inches from my head, listening to lives I had no part in and no protection from, and there was no bottled water in the room, only the tap, and the vending machines offered Pepsi as though no other choice had ever existed or ever would, while in the halls and the rooms beyond there lingered a faint smell of marijuana, not strong enough to accuse anyone and not weak enough to ignore, a smell that did not come from anywhere in particular and therefore seemed to come from everywhere. The sink faced nowhere and the mirror reflected nothing of use, and when I opened the drawers I found hair that was not mine caught in the corners and along the tracks like evidence left behind or forgotten long enough to become permanent, and the drawers themselves were dirty in a way that suggested time rather than neglect, as though no one had ever made a clear decision to stop cleaning them so much as no one had ever truly begun, and I closed them again. There was little hot water and what came from the shower could not rightly be called warm, and I stood there shaking beneath it thinking of the roads that had brought me to this place and of the decisions that had once seemed minor and temporary and now appeared otherwise. Breakfast was spare, fewer choices than a Holiday Inn, and the price was the same. The window unit worked, and I turned the dial as far as it would go and felt the air change, which was the one kindness the place offered and perhaps the only one it knew how to give. It cost what a better place would cost, and the nearest other hotel was thirty miles away, which explained nearly everything, because this was a place that did not need to be good or careful or clean so long as it remained unavoidable, a place that lived on lateness and exhaustion and the quiet arithmetic of the road behind you being longer than the road ahead, and in that way it felt less like a business than a condition, something that waited on the weak moment and the tired body and the small hope that things would improve on their own, and I understood then that the town had already taken my measure and found it sufficient, and that it was in no hurry, and that it would wait.