The Vacancy

The man who wanted to buy the motor lodge had flown in from California and he kept calling the street charming, which was how David Ah Lum knew he had never seen it any other way. They were standing in the little courtyard by the empty kidney-shaped pool, David and the buyer and the buyer’s agent, in the flat gold light of a South Virginia afternoon, and the buyer was saying that this whole corridor was the most exciting thing happening in the region, that Reno was the new somewhere, that a place like this with its vintage bones was worth a great deal more torn back to the studs and run at a nightly rate to the people coming over the mountain with money. David was fifty-five. He had bought this motel seven years before when it was a wreck with a dead pool and five weekly tenants and a sign that half worked, and he had spent those seven years learning it the way you learn a difficult animal, and he let the man talk, because the man was not wrong about the numbers, only about the street.

He had come to the corridor as a young man in a dying decade. His restaurant was two blocks north, opened in the ruins of the last recession, one of the first new things on a street that had spent forty years going down, and he had watched from behind his own counter as the whole of South Virginia turned, slow and then all at once, from secondhand stores and antique malls and old men’s bars into a district with a name and a reputation and rents to match. He had been part of the turning. He knew it. He was one of the people who had made the street worth coming to, and now the street was worth so much that the people who had held on through the bad years, the tattoo man and the record store and the antique mall that had been there twenty-six years, were being priced off it one lease at a time, and no one could quite say who was to blame, because it was everyone, because it was him.

Prices had done a thing in ten years that David still could not make his mind hold. A house that went for a hundred and fifty thousand when he opened his restaurant went for better than half a million now. Rent on a one-bedroom had near about doubled in five years. The vacancy rate had fallen so low there was almost no such thing as an empty apartment in the whole valley, and the people came anyway, over the Sierra from the coast, chasing the factory jobs east of Sparks and the tech money and the last affordable air on the whole west edge of the country, and the town filled and filled and had nowhere to put the ones already here. Over on Fourth Street, a mile north, a casino man had spent years buying up the weekly motels and knocking them down, whole blocks of the cheapest roofs in the city gone to gravel, hundreds of people who had lived at a weekly rate turned out onto a street with no weekly rate left on it, and the city had opened its big shelter tent out past the yards and said it was doing what it could. That was the other end of the same street David stood on. That was where the buyer’s exciting corridor sent the people it no longer had room for.

The buyer wanted an answer by the end of the month. David walked him out to his rental car and shook his hand and said he would think about it, and then he went and knocked on the door of number nine.

Ray answered in his undershirt with the television going behind him. He was the last of the five. When David had bought the place, in the year he still thought of as the year he almost did the easy thing, there had been five people living week to week in these rooms, and he had stood in this same courtyard with the power in his hand to clear them all out and start clean, and he had not been able to do it, because he was a man whose own great-great-grandfather had helped build the railroad that built this town and been herded into a quarter of it that the town then burned to the ground, twice, and moved the survivors along, and David had decided that he was not going to be, on this small piece of Virginia Street, the man who did the moving-along. So he had renovated around them. He had raised their rent by what the law allowed and not a dollar more, and he had let the rooms turn over to nightly guests only as the old tenants left or died, and one by one they had, until there was only Ray, who was seventy-eight and paid by the week and had lived in number nine for eleven years, and had nowhere on this earth to go if he left it.

“You selling,” Ray said. It was not really a question. He had seen the California car in the lot.

“Thinking about it,” David said.

Ray nodded and looked past him at the pool that had never held water in all the years either of them had been there. “Man that buys it won’t keep me,” he said. “Man that buys it, first thing he does is empty the place. That’s the whole deal. You know that.”

David knew that. That was the deal. You could not run the rooms at the nightly rate the buyer’s numbers required with a seventy-eight-year-old man paying by the week in number nine, and the buyer’s numbers were the only reason the buyer was buying, and so the sale and Ray’s staying were two things that could not both be true, the way the shelter and the empty riverbank could not both be true, the way charm and a home could not both be true on the same square of asphalt. David had spent his whole life inside that arithmetic, on one side of it and then the other, the descendant of people the town had cleared now holding the clearing power in his own two hands.

He stood in the courtyard a moment in the gold light with the sound of Ray’s television coming through the open door, and he thought about his daughter, who had gone to the university and written a paper about the quarter the town had burned, and who would ask him, when he told her, which he had chosen and why. And he found that he already knew, that he had probably known since the man first said the word charming, and that the knowing did not feel like sacrifice, only like the one thing he could do and still be able to eat his own dinner.

“I’m not selling,” David told him. “Rent stays what it is. You’re going to outlive me in that room, Ray, the rate you’re going.”

Ray looked at him for a long moment to see if it was true, and decided that it was, and did not thank him, because that was not a thing men like Ray did, only stepped back and let the screen door swing shut on the sound of the television, and David walked back across the courtyard past the dry pool to lock up the office and drive north to the restaurant for the dinner shift, having turned down more money than he had ever been offered in his life, on a street that would go on getting more expensive without him, one small room on it held back, for as long as he could hold it, from the tide.

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