Sylvia started to cry fat tears that dripped down her face. She made no hiccupping or convulsive sounds. For the second time in a few days she was dissolving from the inside.
Lana could feel the air around them change, her sister change. She turned her head to Sylvia’s remarkably unlined face. “Syl? Are you okay?”
I want my son, Sylvia thought, but she would not live another minute if she said it out loud.
“Turn off the light, Lana,” Sylvia whispered. The streetlight glowed in the clear May night not yet thick with the blanket of humidity of summer that would crinkle the carefully straightened do’s most of Lana’s customers preferred. If you were there that night you might remark on how navigable the way looked without the fear of fog settling into the valley or the danger of erupting thunder clouds. You might note that no forgotten men hung in groups like on city streets. You might wrongly surmise their absence made the streets less mean. You might pass right by and never notice the two late-middle-aged sisters in their separate griefs in the storefront window. If you did notice them, you would not stop.
Sylvia put the joint back up to her trembling lips. She wanted to tell Lana that for years she’d heard whispers that sounded like her son. She almost confessed that when she found herself alone she spoke into the air until it vibrated with her voice and waited for her son’s voice to echo back. She wanted to say that in waiting for her son she had almost surely failed to hear her daughter who clearly needed her, who probably knew better than to ask her for attention. She wanted to tell Lana everything that would identify her as total-lost like a wrecked car and the county people could certify her gone in the ways that they do and finally, finally she could experience the peace, the calm of the diagnosis. So that’s it! Everybody needs a diagnosis. Everybody has disease.
“Oh, honey,” Lana said and put her hand on Sylvia’s, her warmth a comfort that hurt her to feel.
“Please don’t say anything, Lana. Please, not right now.”
30
Used to be Highway 321 was the best way to get from Pinewood to Winston-Salem, though the old roadway twisted and knotted like a bad back. The fixed asphalt looked like a black velvet ribbon as wide as three of the old roads, undulating through Yadkinville to bigger piedmont towns. The grass looked like a loved bedspread spread across the rolling hills where small farms surrounded by pure white split-rail fencing lined the road. Devon didn’t like the new road. A small section still existed where a body could walk on the shoulder and feel the slight distance from the passing cars. If Devon concentrated he could hear above the din of the passing cars and into the weeds themselves. The air full of the noise of crickets, the brittle leaves shaking with the movement of undomesticated animals, though Devon was rarely quick enough to see more than a sharp flash of their wild bodies. Devon could see the actual expressions on the faces of bug-eyed children who turned, not in an unfriendly way usually, but with surprise as they watched him as long as he lasted through the back window.
Devon walked to Morganton and to Hickory and once to Blowing Rock and almost to Boone. On a whim, he’d tried to find Tweetsie Railroad, the amusement park he’d loved as a child. The icon of the park, Fred Kirby, he’d watched on Saturday morning television had to be long dead. But he wanted to see the steam train that took visitors on a trip around the mountain. By the time he’d found the park it was blue with dark and hours closed. But it had been worth it to see the silhouette of the Ferris wheel against the mountain. He remembered the fast ride of the wheel, the stomach-lifting sensation of being at the top of the ride, his breath suspended as he turned, no other thought but the spinning wheel.
Most of his walks were much closer to home. He would walk to a store at the edge of town where the woman behind the counter always talked to him, always reminded him to drink some water when he walked, “Soda will make you feel worser,” she’d say. She’d give him a bottle for free if he tried to leave without it. “Stay in the shade.”
The first time he walked was by accident. Joy, his friend from the sandwich shop, came in on her day off with an extra ticket for a band Devon had never heard of playing a show in Winston-Salem. He didn’t have many friends and no girlfriends, but Joy had latched herself to him like an abandoned float in a pool, figuring they might as well drift along together. Though she never said it. He didn’t ask anything of her, but went with her flow. Or maybe he was shy. Devon had never felt like a shy man, but even his family seemed to not be sure what he wanted or needed from them. It was up to the few women interested enough to stay around, determined enough to drag him out of his cave to stand in the light with them or he’d be ignored altogether. That there were other choices in life simply didn’t occur to Devon.