It was one of those hot, muggy nights that seemed to make even breathing a chore. The crickets were playing their little violins and the katydids were joining in full force. I was lying in my bed trying to sleep, hoping that the occasional flicker of lightning off in the distance might indicate that we were going to get some rain to cool us off later in the night.
Our motel, “The Straight Flush” was filled, so mom had turned on the “NO VACANCY” sign out front. The door between my room and the hall leading down to the motel office was slightly ajar so I could hear the mumble of the TV and could just see the dim flicker of the bluish -white glow coming from the darkened office. Mom was obviously watching TV. We weren’t rich and only owned the one TV for ourselves, but it didn’t really matter as we could only get two decent channels on it and most of them shows didn’t interest me.
It was around ten o’clock and it felt like it was still around ninety degrees outside. I was naked and my pajamas were lying in a wadded up heap on the floor beside my bed. It was just too damned hot to wear them.
I was wondering if I would ever be able to leave Deer Valley and find a life of my own. I’m eighteen and I’d made it through the tenth grade before I had to quit school to help mom run the motel. High school graduation, much less college didn’t seem to be on my radar scope, so I went along doing what I could to help mom and I get along. My pa was never around to help out with what needed doing anyhow.
He’d always been a bit of a drifter, a gambler, and a general ne’er-do-well. Amazingly, he’d won the motel in a poker game up in Atlanta with a – you guessed it – a straight flush. But he would avoid anything which remotely resembled work, so that left running the motel up to mom and me. I was pretty good with my hands and did ninety percent of the maintenance and helped out mom with the linen, room cleaning and just about anything else that came along.
Now it was rumored that Pa wasn’t exactly monogamous. Monogamous? Yeah, I know, that’s a pretty big word for a guy with an tenth-grade education, but I’d decided that if I couldn’t go to school anymore, I could improve myself on my own. Every night I’d take my dictionary and look up five words I didn’t know the meaning of and commit them to my vocabulary.
Oh, yeah, monogamous? It means like the practice of having a sexual relationship with only one partner. Now my luscious blond mom seemed to know about pa’s wayward ways, because I’d hear them quarrelling about it sometimes, but every time I came around they’d stop arguing and start talking about something else. I couldn’t for the life of me see what mom saw in pa and I don’t know why she put up with it all.
Now the Straight Flush Motel wasn’t any Holiday Inn, but mom and I kept the place clean and in good repair. The motel was out on Highway 371 on the edge of Deer Valley and had ten units in it. We rarely received a complaint and most of the little cards the guests filled out after they stayed gave us an above average rating.