So much has changed since we were just starting out. The furniture plants that built the town are all but empty. The jobs on the line turning yellow pinewood into the tables and beds for the world are mostly gone. Without the factories there is little work to do. What a difference a few years can make. The jobs that everybody knew as the last resort or the safety net are the jobs nobody can get anymore. Used to be at 3:30 P.M. the roads from Bernhardt, Hammary, Broyhill, and Bassett were hot with cars, bumper to bumper, the convenience stores full of mostly men, but women too with cold ones (Coke or stronger) in one hand, Nabs or Little Debbie cakes in the other for the ride home. These days, go anywhere you please at 3:30 with no trouble. Here’s a math problem for you. How many casinos does it take to make a town? Are you calculating? Got it? No, sorry that’s a trick question. No number of casinos make a town. But if you want a stopover, a place to throw your balled-up trash out the window as you float by in your car, you just need one good casino. Don’t get me wrong, we love a casino and wish for one like the last vial of antidote. We believe despite all experience to the contrary in easy money and our own fortunes changing in an instant like the magician’s card from the sleeve. If one quarter came miraculously from behind the ear, we would milk that ear for days for the rent money. We believe. We hope for the town to morph into an all-resort slick tourist trap, looking like no real person had ever lived here. We are full of the fevered hope of the newly come to Jesus. We can reinvent. We can survive. At least some of us think so. What choice do we have?
Still the rich have moved from the center of town and the near hills to other places in the county. Their homes are estates where their windows look onto the rolling acres of kings. The houses, the once mansions in town that they and their kind left behind, belong to the flippers to turn into cramped and oddly configured apartments or raze altogether. The message was clear as day, the richest person doesn’t live in our midst anymore and what the rich had now, we couldn’t ever see it for ourselves, couldn’t even pass by it and let the images settle in our dreams. Even so, even though we know all that, Brushy Mountain Road loomed in our thinking, in our childhood imaginings. You think you forget those dreams? You get old, but the dreams remain, spry and vigorous. Swat them and they come back like gnats, like plague. You can’t kill them. They can’t die.
The first thing JJ did on that mountain was cut out a whole new road up to his house. Heavy machines of industry, Kubotas and Deeres, used to make the path dotted the hills for weeks, like kids’ toys abandoned in the weeds. Men in town speculated about the tons of gravel and the weight of red clay they had to shift from one place to another to level the hills. The women didn’t care about the road. They knew from their own yards how difficult it was to make a way to get from there to here. They’d dug their own paths, moved their own dirt and rocks in the stubborn Carolina soil. What excited the women was the river rock foundation, the big beautiful windows, the walls rising up like raptured dead.
Most days, JJ would be up there himself, walking around the site, talking to the Mexican men or working hard himself judging by the reports of his sweat-soaked clothes, his close-cropped hair grayed with sawdust. Living in a small town means knowing the news, the broad strokes as well as the lurid minutiae of your neighbor’s life. Your dirty kitchen, cancer treatments, drugged-out child all on the sandwich board of your back, swirled around the body with a stink you could not outrun. JJ was from another small town and did not have nearby family. Few people knew JJ to give out too many details. We are not surprised. We knew too little about him when he lived in Pinewood as a young man. But soon he would show his face. When that house was done, Sylvia knew JJ would be knocking at her door. Years ago that boy had spent too much time in her kitchen, on her back porch and staring at her beautiful child Ava. That JJ had loved Ava was obvious. That Sylvia loved JJ too, like a son, like Devon, her own son, was just as clear. Her son was Devon pronounced like Levon from the Elton John song, though Sylvia was embarrassed to admit that fact to anybody. Devon was her firstborn baby, the baby she wasn’t supposed to have. She never had any romance about being a mother and knew that having a baby was easy if your body was willing. Girls, hardly older than the ones Sylvia passed at the school bus stop at the end of the road every morning, became mothers. But Sylvia’s body had been unwilling until Devon came. She was almost thirty, old in those days and sure that her baby days were long past. It wasn’t that Sylvia loved Devon any more than her daughter, Ava, but Devon was the child that changed her status, the child that made her look at the ordinary world as a big and dangerous paradise. JJ was so like her Devon: both calm boys, funny children with soft voices, with the same warm puddled eyes like they’d been caught crying and they were trying to recover.
Almost a generation had passed, a long time any way you look at it, but Sylvia knew that the feelings were just there under the pancake makeup of the surface. JJ felt them too, how could he not? He had left them, but he was back. That counted. Of course it counted.
They used to say if you love something set it free. Don’t you believe it! Love means never letting anything go, never seeing it stride on long confident legs away from you. You think love leaves? You think you are ever free? Then you are a child or a fool. Flee in the dark, spend a lifetime away, never say its name, never say its name, but one day, or if you are very unlucky, every day, it will whisper yours. And, you know you want to hear your name. Say it, love. Please say it.
2
“I’ve called you,” Marcus said.
“What’s that noise? Is that the boy yelling?”
“Tay Dula. Getting loud. The fat heads will stop it.”
Sylvia had rarely heard any sound in the background when Marcus called. She could almost forget he was in the county lockup.
“I told you about him, Sylvia. He’s like that this time of day.” The brokenhearted sound of the moaning boy scared Sylvia, gave her a sick feeling like she’d uncovered a snake in her yard. She would be trying to forget the sound for days to come.
“Are you okay?” Sylvia said.
“You’ve been somewhere. Why didn’t you answer? I started to think you were gone.”
“Marcus.” Sylvia fought to keep the scolding tone from her voice, but she was way past believing it cute to have a man questioning her comings and goings. “I’ve been sick.”
“What’s wrong? Sylvia? You okay?”
“Not sick. I shouldn’t have said that. Tired. I’m not sleeping.”
“Did Devon get there yet?”
“No not yet. I told you I have a lot to do. I work and I’ve got bills. I’ve not even been here.” Sylvia searched her mind for what else ate up the hours of her day but nothing materialized. The truth was she had been trying to stay away from her daughter’s house and spend some time in her own apartment for a change. “I have a lot of things to do and that’s all there is to it. You need to worry about yourself and don’t be thinking about Devon.” Sylvia sighed. He’s just a scared boy. He’s just a scared boy, she reminded herself. “I’m here now, honey. I’m not avoiding you. I’m here now.”
“I was worried.” Marcus attempted a laugh and sounded younger than the twenty-five-year-old man he was, a boy to Sylvia. Marcus had called her from jail. Not jail; Andy Griffith and Barney Fife run a jail; Marcus was in prison, for months now. Sylvia always accepted the phone charges.
“Just tired, Marcus,” Sylvia said
“I thought you must be busy with Devon.”
“I can come to see you Sunday. I’ll bring you something. What can I bring you?