One afternoon on the way home from Duke, I catch a glimpse of someone who can only be Lyla in the parking lot of the Embers. The two scooters are in place and the door to the room is open and she’s wearing too-tight jeans and holding a cigarette, talking to someone in a beat-up sports car. She’s much fleshier than I imagined, bright peach skin and blond hair stringing down her back.
“It’s Lyla!” I’m yelling, and John’s yelling, “Jesus, stop yelling! You’re going to make me crash!” and I’m yelling, “Lyla! Put down that cigarette!” and then John is saying, “Of course Lyla smokes, what are you even talking about?” and I’m saying, “I really don’t like the looks of the guy in that car she was talking to.”
“Well we should probably stop and go back and you should tell her that right now, along with your smoking PSA,” says John. He usually rubs the back of my neck on the drive home from Duke, but now he’s stopped because I startled him. I’m wishing he would start again.
* * *
Lyla can’t stop making bad decisions. She spends a quarter of her paycheck on a pair of knee-high boots at the outlet mall. She oversleeps and misses her screening appointment for the Certified Nurse Aide program she’s trying to get into. She’s nicest to all the wrong customers at the Waffle House: the guy who is trying to make his way toward the casinos in Cherokee, the guy who suggests how she might look if she was only wearing her boots, the guy who has nowhere to stay and lost all custody of his daughter because some three-year-old kid at his mama’s daycare in the apartments where they’ve been living spilled juice on his Xbox controller and he told the little fucker to suck his dick and now there are child sexual assault charges pending.
She does make one or two good decisions: Sometimes at night when the a/c unit conks out and the guy with the custody situation is snoring and farting and the room gets so hot her thighs stick together, she climbs onto the scooter and rides south on Route 54, out into the county, where she takes off her helmet and wastes a couple bucks of gas at top speed—which isn’t very fast but enough to unstick her hair from her neck, to feel a breeze where there is none.
Other times she slips out the motel door and pads over to the back of the cigarette outlet where they leave out a couple chairs for employee smoke breaks. There, she likes to pull one chair in front of the other and put her feet up and sit and watch the interstate stretching west toward Greensboro, then Winston, and then somewhere past all the lights: the mountains, where Cherokee is. Lyle used to talk about the mountains during his truck-driving days: hundreds of miles of monsters on the horizon, darker than the darkness of the sky at night.
At the Embers, it’s never really dark—with the interstate and the fast food signs and the gas station lights of nearby Graham glowing orange—like something almost on fire, like a cigarette, like something hot in her chest that says: There is no future. There is only this. The firmness of this chair holding you up. A little girl somewhere in town who doesn’t understand the word custody and misses her asshole dad. Not Lyle, but the possibility of Lyle. This nonstop river of cars headed who knows where. Somewhere—maybe thirty miles west—a woman who cannot sleep. A woman who is dying. A woman who can’t figure out how she is supposed to let go.