The Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street
As memory, hardship, and a fierce love permeate her being, a mother bears witness to what endures—even when everything else gets demolished.
Spencer K.M. Brown short story | The Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street | Southern fiction by Spencer Brown
Sheryl said she would buy the beer herself.
Denis was still asleep and snoring on the far bed of the motel room, God love him. She’d allowed him two beers the night before, and they went straight to the poor boy’s head. She didn’t begrudge him it, considering it was New Year’s Eve.
Just after six-thirty in the morning, cold as hell out. She told herself she’d buy the beer herself and spare Denis the trouble. No telling what the stores would be like today, so there was no time to waste. Denis was likely to have trouble and slouch furiously into one of his fits even if no one was out shopping. No use rousing Denis; she’d go herself. No one was waiting for her to begin, of course, but man alive, she’d be damned if she missed the demolition, damned twice if she didn’t have a cold beer to drink while she watched the dark cloud raze it all to the ground.
In truth, she wanted to go herself. The moldy air in the room was beginning to bother her. She’d ignored it, shrugged it off, until now. When she stepped out onto the cracked concrete breezeway, she left the door open to let fresh air in and filled her lungs so full of the cold morning air that she wondered if maybe they’d tear. Can you make your own lungs tear? she wondered.
She shivered violently for a moment as she lit a cigarette, the flame dancing side to side in her grip before finding its mark. Then she told herself, “Stop it, stop shivering and just be cold.” And she did and was. She let the cold permeate all through her, and she stood by the open door of their room, smoking and running through things in her head. She looked back into the smoky darkness of the room. Our own cave of solitude and loneliness, she thought.
Spencer K.M. Brown short story | The Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street | Southern fiction by Spencer Brown
Denis’s face glowed like a moon. She smiled and couldn’t help herself and went back in and kissed her sweet boy on the nose, pulling the blankets higher on him. Her cigarette ash fell on his shoulder, and she dusted it off like it was snow. She gazed at him a moment longer. Twenty-five now, but still as if he were only five.
She could hear the screams and echoes in the shadows.
“He’ll be a five-year-old all his life, Sheryl! What kind of life is that! That’s no life at all!”
“It’s life still, and still beautiful,” she had said back then. And as she touched her son’s greasy hair, she said it again to herself.
She locked the door from the inside, stepped out, and pulled it closed behind her. She breathed smoke and winter. She got in the car, cranked it up, and let the motor run.
The red and green bulbs of the Green Valley Motel sign glowed against the bleak, heavy sky. The trees on the hills behind it stood like dark sentinels amid the white snowfall. Everything was hushed and still, even the highway just behind her. Nothing rushing to awaken, as if she were the only living soul who had shit to do, the only one ready to be done with something and watch dust become dust.
“It’s life still, and still beautiful,” she had said back then. And as she touched her son’s greasy hair, she said it again to herself.
Most everything in the old car rattled as she reversed and then shifted to drive. She’d put nearly 300,000 miles on it, and despite its cranky aches and moans, Sheryl felt like the old heap would last another trip around the sun at least. But she didn’t even need that long out of it. Just the morning would be enough.
As the motel sign hung suspended in the rearview, she remembered how she hadn’t always thought like this, so simply and mindfully. It was quite a new thing in fact, after the poet told her something about how the beauty of life wasn’t in changing the seasons, but in watching a worm crawl across a blade of grass or a leaf. When the poet told her this, she didn’t know he was a poet. She had a broken collar bone (the left one) and an eye swollen shut (also the left) so that as she was coming out of the corner store, she couldn’t see who was talking to her and thought she was hearing voices again. Denis wasn’t but three at the time, and it was their first time staying at the Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street. Just a few hours before, she’d fought like hell for herself and for Denis. She was proud of herself for this. She thought her father would be proud too, if he were alive. Though it was safe to say there wouldn’t have been a fight had he been around. But she fought well. And before she fought well, she spoke quite beautifully about great things—like a house with a yard, and taking Denis to the beach one day, and maybe finally going back to school to become a teacher like she always dreamed of. Parker couldn’t carry her big thinking on his mind and heart just then, and so he lost it. Years later, as she was recalling this particular bad dream, Sheryl could swear she saw Parker’s guardian angel lower its head and sit in the corner and a shadow come up and take its place. Parker did look very strange as he chased her through the apartment. And while up until then she believed she loved Parker, she never could quite find herself comfortable around him. Never at ease, how people in love should be. There was something always looming over her heart, and now she knew why.
Spencer K.M. Brown short story | The Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street | Southern fiction by Spencer Brown
With her good arm, she carried Denis, dragging a duffel bag tied around her waist behind her, and they came to the Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street. It was a bad place, a shithole in fact. A constant air of chemicals burning from the dopeheads in the other rooms; everything smeared with dirt and grease and despair. Everything from the parking lot to the stains grinning down from the ceilings to the patter of rat paws in the night, the whole place could have burned and no one would come to put it out. Sheryl wondered if that wasn’t the exact reason people came and stayed there, why she herself did. For that hope of a great fire.
She thought about things like that for years, great big catastrophe-sized things, things that terrified her. Until the day the poet told her about the worm crawling across a leaf. From that day on, her steps were a little closer together, she felt. She smoked just as much, but she was conscious of the fact she was smoking all the while she was. And with Denis, she told him everything good that she knew. He had a hook so deep in her heart that just thinking of his little round moon face often brought her to tears.
They had been at the Green Valley Motel, this time, since Christmas, and seven days was just about all she could stand of that vicious chemical air anymore. But she needed those seven days. She needed to remember all the days she’d been there before. All the times she’d fallen asleep with her back against the door. All the times she and Denis laughed and wrestled on the moth-gnawed blankets after mending wounds in the tiny bathroom. Because she’d listened to that poet that day and watched so many worms crawl across so many leaves, and most days her heart weighed less than a slice of bread. But that was changing again. Just months before, she was quite certain she was free from all those people and that place that had so many hooks in her heart, free from how they yanked and pulled and tore at her. But now, they all came rushing back like a great torrent of loneliness.
She was only seven when her mother left. “Sometimes we just gotta go, Sherrie, that’s all,” her mother said. “Ain’t saying it’s what’s right, just that we gotta sometimes.”
When the letter came from county officials requesting to buy the house from her, Sheryl was lost. What house? What the hell was this about? Then she remembered everything else.
She was only seven when her mother left. Her father was sleeping off a night shift upstairs, and her mama stood on the front porch, speaking in whispers.
“Sometimes we just gotta go, Sherrie, that’s all,” her mother said. “Ain’t saying it’s what’s right, just that we gotta sometimes.”
“Will you be back on Wednesday then?” the girl asked, remembering the last time she went away.
Spencer K.M. Brown short story | The Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street | Southern fiction by Spencer Brown
“No, I won’t. But you don’t want me back on Wednesday either,” her mother said. With that, she kissed her and stole her husband’s truck, leaving little Sheryl with a note saying someone named Phil would drop it off on Friday.
None of it made much sense to Sheryl. Even though she saw everything so perfectly clear and all the pieces of the moment were in their proper places, it never made sense to her until many years later.
The warm shape of her belly just barely beginning to rise, she sat crying on that same porch, watching as her father and the boy wrestled on the front lawn. Any other day it would have been funny, seeing the two of them wriggling around. Her father, more like a tree than a man, mammoth compared to anyone; and that scrawny little sweetheart of hers. Brave maybe, but dumber than a hammer to think he could wrestle the man.
Her father had the boy pinned with his arm bent backward at a right angle to itself. The boy screamed out as the man told him never, never again did he want to see him around his daughter or his grandchild.
The boy ran off crying, carrying his arm like broken twigs in a sack. Sheryl wondered if it wasn’t for the best. He wasn’t innocent anymore, and she had no use for a dimwit as she sorted out what she would do.
“You’re getting rid of it tomorrow! You hear me! I ain’t raising an idiot grandchild and an idiot daughter! I ain’t and won’t, you hear me!”
But that picture of her mother was all made clear when she came home from the doctor’s months later. She wasn’t in tears or anything, just quiet and thoughtful. This was all it took for her father to ask questions.
“What is it then?” he said.
“There’s a possibility he may have some disabilities,” Sheryl said. “His brain ain’t developed in the way they like to see, they said. I’m not sure what that means exactly. They’re very confusing there.”
“It means get rid of it, Sherrie.”
“What?”
“It means you get rid of it,” her father said. “That child will have a child’s brain until he dies, if he ever even lives.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say,” she said, standing and shaking.
“He’ll be a five-year-old all his life, Sheryl! What kind of life is that? That’s no life at all!” her father shouted. “God bless, I try and help you and you just do what you want!”
Sheryl ran to the porch and sat there in the warm autumn evening. She expected it to be cold, yet the cold seemed to be getting further away. Why was that? she wondered, distracting herself with everything except her father’s voice, which wormed its way like roots into her heart.
“You’re getting rid of it tomorrow! You hear me! I ain’t raising an idiot grandchild and an idiot daughter! I ain’t and won’t, you hear me!”
Spencer K.M. Brown short story | The Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street | Southern fiction by Spencer Brown
Sheryl held her hands on the soft rise of her womb. She hummed softly for a moment and bent forward, whispering. “It’s still life, and still beautiful. You’ll be beautiful, sweetie.”
She stood and walked down the porch and kept walking for miles and miles until she reached the Green Valley Motel that first time. She sat on the concrete breezeway that night and thought of her mother for a long time.
When she made it to the corner store this morning, she tried to remember every time she’d come there to buy cases of beer and packages of cigarettes and little treats for Denis. More often than not, she hadn’t enough money for any of it. She would look around all the aisles just the same, filling her belly with dreams, picking out what they’d get when they could.
She always wondered if leaving her father’s porch was the right decision. It certainly wasn’t the easiest. Nothing about her sweet Denis had been easy, not the screaming fits, not the times he took his clothes off at the store or in school, not the times he cried into her arms after being beaten by the other kids on the bus. No, life was beautiful, but it was also suffering. And they had learned to suffer well. Nothing about Sheryl was remarkable, not her face or hair or words, nothing but this one fact, and the manner in which she suffered well and loved her son made her utterly and profoundly remarkable.
She took a case of Coors and set it up on the counter.
“That all?” the sleepy boy behind the counter said.
Sheryl looked at the rack of Little Debbie’s and selected a couple.
“Where’s that poet who used to sit outside here?” she asked, handing him the money.
“What?” the kid said.
She looked to where the poet used to sit and hold his hand out and spout his lovely words. “A little wisdom for an idiot?” she whispered to him, somewhere. “Just one little line?”
Sheryl took her beer and treats. “Never mind. Happy New Year.”
The kid slouched back down on his stool and closed his eyes.
Outside, she walked around the side of the store, stepping past the scatter of trash and fallen limbs and blown tires left to rot. A blue tarp covered a sleeping figure tucked close to the cinderblock building. She didn’t bother them.
As she got in the car, she felt herself shaking, maybe the cold, but she knew probably not. She looked to where the poet used to sit and hold his hand out and spout his lovely words. “A little wisdom for an idiot?” she whispered to him, somewhere. “Just one little line?”
But there was nothing, no line, no beautiful words. The wind groaned across the old car. She sat and watched the heat melt the frost, slowly, like waking from a cold dream.
Denis was sitting cross-legged on the concrete breezeway when she got back to the motel. She got out and left the car running.
“What are you doing out here, buddy, you’ll freeze,” she said. He smiled. The streaks of tears slowed and nearly turned to ice. “Come on, buddy. We’re leaving.”
“To where?”
“To see something special.”
“Why?”
“’Cause we never have to come here again.”
Spencer K.M. Brown short story | The Green Valley Motel on Paterson Street | Southern fiction by Spencer Brown
Sheryl sat on the warm hood of the car, sipping from her can of beer. Denis lumbered around the scrawl of flattened trees and torn earth, chasing a fat wren as it hopped from branch to crooked branch. They watched from a plateau on the hill, looking down at the men and machines and the drone of the work they did. Ripping everything up from the ground and laying it flat. The house stood there like the last lone line of a song.
Every so often the workers would glance up and look at her or at the strange boy wandering around mumbling nonsense about worms and leaves. In the morning fog, the bulldozer cranked to life. A great dynamo come to set lines straight and make an end meet its beginning, Sheryl thought.
She drank and watched it rattle and roll across the dead trees and slowly push its metal teeth into the front porch, and everything folding in like a wave around it. Old boards buckled and snapped in the cold force. Windowpanes shattered to dust like some colossus deity she no longer wished to pray to. And in a moment the dust swallowed it all with a groan that echoed in rings through the hills for a hundred years.
Denis roared back at the great thundering collapse like a bear, crouched low, looking down the hill. Sheryl laid back against the cold windshield and drank. A life of solving equations and making reckonings, of tugging ends to meet other frayed ends, and all such heartache that never once slouched toward splendor or salvation. Until now.
Staring up at all that winter sky, she imagined the blue just beyond. How beautiful and warm, a small-time paradise just there above her, blessed enough to clean a soul and rest a tired head on.
The house flattened like memory and the men walked among the rubble, planning things to come. The great event come and gone like a breath, but she didn’t begrudge that. She had waited calm and well for some splendor to come forth, for this last equation to be solved and reckoned, for that long beginning to find that end. She didn’t need some great heaven just then, no marvelous life to suddenly begin. Theirs was life, and a beautiful life. But staring up at all that winter sky, she imagined the blue just beyond. How beautiful and warm, a small-time paradise just there above her, blessed enough to clean a soul and rest a tired head on.
Denis sat in the passenger side, holding himself and shaking. “Cold, cold,” he said.
“I know, sugar, I know,” she said. She finished her beer, rolled down the window, and threw the can down the hillside. She pulled him close and kissed his head. “Let’s go somewhere warm and beautiful.”
They drove down the mountain as the last snow of the year fell soft, like feathers from the sky. She didn’t look behind her as she drove past the men and along the river. Denis sang some song he’d had stuck in his head, and she hummed along, looking at the snowfall and smiling, as if she knew every drifting flake by name, and each one that fell loosened a knot in her heart.
More from Spencer K.M. Brown:
Fiction ➡︎ “I’m Bound to Leave This Dark Behind”
Poetry ➡︎ “Quietly Waiting for Catastrophe”
Spencer K. M. Brown is an award-winning poet and novelist from the foothills of North Carolina, where he lives with his wife and sons. His work won many honors honors. He is the author of the novels Move Over Mountain and Hold Fast. His debut collection of short stories, Into My Heart an Air That Kills, is forthcoming from Loblolly Press.
