Ashes to Asheville

by Sarah Dooley

  “Just coffee,” I say, sounding tougher than I feel. “And maybe something for my dog?”

  “Coffee. Whatever you say, Little Sister.” Luther puts on a pot of coffee so huge even Zany couldn’t drink it by herself. “Two minutes,” he says, and continues pulling things out of the freezer to put in the pastry case.

  I occupy my two minutes wandering the store, poking at the wallpaper, scuffing at the floor. There’s a feeling in me that’s part wishing, part relief, and part something I don’t have a name for.

  “Coffee’s up,” Luther says, and hands me a mug that is more milk than coffee. He warms up a spinach-and-goat-cheese breakfast wrap for himself and one for Haberdashery, then puts on a second pot of coffee, this one marked DECAF.

  “Sure you don’t want to eat?” he asks.

  “Nah. I mean, yeah. I’m sure.” I sit cross-legged on the floor beside the dog and pet him, enjoying his company because he’s the only truly familiar thing in a place that is full of half memories.

  Luther startles me, asking, “You’re one of the girls that’s been on TV, right? I recognize the poodle.” And before I can deny it, “Where’s your sister?”

  “I don’t know what—oh—fine. Zany’s with our mama. They found us—or we found them—but then I—I had one more thing I had to do.”

  Luther starts taking the chairs down from the tables. He’s awfully calm for someone who’s just recognized his customer as a missing child off the news. None of the chairs match, but it makes things look cozy. I wish Zany were here. I’m sure she needs another cup of coffee by now, and she could explain things to Luther better than I can. I wonder how long he’s going to give me before he calls the police to report me found. But I don’t ask him, because I’m distracted by the muted TV and its picture of me and Zany.

  In the picture, we’re only a little bit younger and I’m smiling at the camera and Zany’s smiling at me. And then I get it, like that stupid cartoon lightbulb springing on above my head. Zany’s the one who brought us here, ashes and all. Zany’s the one I can’t do this without.

  And Mama Shannon, too. And Mrs. Madison.

  “Hey, Luther?” I ask. “Can I use your phone? I got to fix something.”

  He clicks on the cordless phone and hands it across the counter. I listen to the dial tone for a minute. It takes three tries to dial Information correctly, and two more to get my voice to spit out my question properly. But pretty soon the phone is ringing at the hospital in Wytheville.

  They patch me through to Adam’s dad’s room and Adam sounds terrified when he picks up. In fact, I’m surprised he picks up at all. “Mom?” he says. “Before you start screaming, listen a second. I had to—”

  “It’s not Mom,” I interrupt, “it’s Fella.”

  “Oh!” He swears. Then, “You scared me!”

  “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to scare you. I need your phone number.” I rock my head to crack my neck, shaking the tired loose. Luther’s watching from behind the counter so he can take the phone when I’m done.

  “You what?” Adam asks.

  “Your phone number. I need it.”

  There’s a pause. Then, “You and Zany didn’t get separated, did you?”

  “If you call me running away from her separated, then yeah. But I need to find her.”

  “Fella, you’re all alone?”

  “I’m fine. I’m in a coffee shop and this guy Luther’s real nice. How’s your dad?” I can’t believe it wasn’t the first thing I asked.

  “He’s hanging on,” Adam says in the kind of voice where I know he doesn’t even realize he’s answering the question. He gives me his number and says, “Call back if she doesn’t answer and we’ll figure something out.”

  “Thanks, Adam.”

  “Yeah.” He hangs up first, and quickly, and I know he must want to get his attention back to his father. I smile at Luther as I click the phone off and back on to dial Zany.

  She answers on half a ring. “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “It’s her!” Zany relays. There’s a rustle and then Mama Shannon’s voice comes on the line, shrill and shaky. “Ophelia Madison-Culvert!”

  I take a page out of Adam’s book and blurt, “Before you start screaming, listen a sec—”

  But it’s too late. She’s already screaming. “Where are you? Were you trying to give us all a heart attack, Fella? We’ll come get you. Are you safe? Tell me where you are! How many times in a single day can you give your mother a heart attack?”

  When she pauses for breath, I seize the opportunity. “Before I tell you where I am, you have to promise—”

  “I will do no such thing!” Mama Shannon doesn’t even wait to find out what I want her to promise. She’s beyond hysterical. I hear Mrs. Madison’s voice in the background, and Zany’s, too, but I can’t tell what they’re saying over Mama Shannon’s yelling. “You’re trying to make demands now? You’ll tell me where you are if? Young lady, that is simply not how it works! I did not raise you to—to steal a dead woman’s ashes and make ransom demands! Do you hear the sentences coming out of my mouth? Do you hear how far outside the lines you are? And you’ll tell me where you are if?”

  There’s no room for an answer, so I simply wait. The next time she draws a breath, which is so long I figure she must be three shades of blue by now, I say, “Mama, I need you to promise.” My voice is quieter than hers and this seems to give her a moment’s pause. She quiets, too, a little.

  “Fella, what?”

  “Promise we’ll scatter Mama Lacy, okay? All together. Zany’s right. It’s what she wanted. What she asked for in her letter.” I have gained a new respect for people who are brave enough to ask for what they want.

  There’s a long sigh on the other end of the phone, and something that sounds so much like a sob that my own eyes tear up at the sound of it.

  “Why?” she asks. Mama Shannon has always been so strong and so happy. Although it’s been six months, I’m still not used to hearing her voice sound small.

  “Because she didn’t get to hike the Appalachian Trail,” I say. “And she didn’t get to sing in front of people.”

  “Oh, Fella.”

  “We kept her, and it’s okay. I know she wanted us to keep her. But we kept her and she stayed with us and she didn’t do all those things she wanted to do in her lifetime.”

  “She wanted us,” Mama Shannon says. “She wanted to be with us, kiddo. I swear she did.”

  “I know. I know she did, only people can want more than one thing. I want to keep her ashes where I can feel like she’s with me. But I also want to do what she asked us to do. And I think that matters more.”

  I hear her sigh or sob, I’m not sure which, and then she goes on. “Okay, you’re right. I know you’re right. We will do what she wanted.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “Mrs. Madison has to promise, too.”

  “She promises.”

  “Mama—”

  “Okay, okay.” There’s another rustle and a pause. Then my grandmother’s voice comes on the phone.

  “Fella—”

  She starts to say more, but I beat her to it. One slow sentence at a time, I tell her exactly what I’ve been meaning to say—what I’ve been frightened to say—all this time.

  “Three things,” I tell her.

  “What’s the first?” Mrs. Madison helps me organize my own thoughts.

  “We have to scatter Mama Lacy. We have to. I know you want to keep her. I want to keep her, too. But she doesn’t belong on a mantel in the dark. She belongs outside in the air. That’s what she would want. That’s what she did want, and she told us. Okay?”

  There’s a pause. Then, “Two?”

  “Twenty dollars is a lot of money.”

  “Well . . . okay. What makes you sa
y that?”

  “I just wanted to remind you.” I don’t add, and myself.

  “And the third thing?” she asks after a minute.

  “We’re a family,” I say. “All of us. Okay?”

  There’s a small sigh. “Well, I never said we weren’t.”

  “So after we give Mama Lacy her birthday wish, we all go home together.”

  “Well, of course. We only have one car.”

  Now she reminds me of Zany and I huff an impatient sigh. “I don’t mean the car. I mean we all go home together. Your house is the size of a library, and we’re a family. We’re supposed to be together. Okay?” There’s quiet and I’m afraid I’ve asked too much. My heart pounds and my mouth gets dry, but I make the words come out anyway. “You told me you can’t just know things, that people have to tell you what they want. Well, I want Mama Shannon. And I want Zany. And I want you, too.”

  “Oh.” Such a little sound, with so much inside it. Then she says, in a brisk voice more like herself, “If we can talk your mother into it, I believe that is a wonderful solution.”

  I’m quick to uphold my end of the bargain. “Tell Mama Shannon I’m at Mack and Morello’s,” I say, heart pounding so hard my hands won’t hold still. “It was the closest thing I could find to home.”

  chapter

  27

  Mama Lacy loved walking. I remember being so little I had to reach up above my head to hold her hand. I know in my head she was small for a grown-up—Mama Shannon was always teasing her for being a tiny little person, “put together out of wire and fairy dust,” she would say. It’s funny how I can remember those words, but when I picture Mama Lacy, I picture her big. Sometimes she’s so big, she takes up the whole image.

  “Spirited,” that’s what Mama Lacy called Mama Shannon. She used to gaze at her, a half smile on her lips. “That’s my spirited lady.” Usually when Mama Shannon was getting mad or hyped up about something. But it’s Mama Lacy who I think was spirited, Mama Lacy, whose energy and strength and beauty are still splashed into every shadow on this sidewalk that shouldn’t be familiar after all these years. I remember walking here with Mama Lacy. I remember her singing about sunshiny days while her warm hand kept mine from the cold.

  It’s February, and tomorrow will be March, and spring will come without my Mama Lacy to share it with. She will never take me for a springtime walk just to watch the cherry blossom petals blow across the sidewalk like warm snow. She will never explain which bird is which by their song. She will never again drink iced coffee before it’s quite warm enough, sling her sweater across my shoulders so the breeze can breathe across her skin. The whole world will turn green and sweet and warm, and my mama will stay still and gone.

  She won’t be trapped, though. If she can’t walk in spring, at least she can be free of the heavy urn that has grown so familiar in my hands.

  Zany and I take turns leading the way. I take big steps, remembering being little and trying to keep up. When I forget where to go, Zany edges ahead. We take turns, too, with the things in our hands. I take the phone from her and give her the urn. A while later, she lets me take it back. We keep Mama Lacy between us. Mama Shannon and our grandmother follow behind.

  We stop at the base of the hill, where there’s a fancy new bakery with curlicue wrought-iron fencing and a patio with umbrella tables. It’s not open yet and everything smells like sawdust and paint. Beyond it, what’s left of the lawn stretches down to the main road, where cars slide by without ever caring that they’re passing something very different from what used to be here.

  “Where is it?” Zany asks.

  Nobody answers, because it’s clear where our home above the warehouse is. It isn’t anywhere. It doesn’t exist anymore. The whole building is gone, torn down and replaced. We’re left standing here looking at how Mama Lacy’s last wish might not come true after all.

  I’m ready to start crying, and I think Zany might, too, and then Mama Shannon beats us to it, silent and pitiful, eyes closed and shoulders shaking. She tries not to let on, but there’s no mistaking the tiny gasps and hiccups, and Zany and I are startled right out of our tears. I wrap my arms around Mama Shannon’s right arm and Zany takes her left and we hold her up like that, waiting for her to tell us what to do, but she never does.

  I think I know anyway.

  I slip my hands from Mama Shannon’s and I walk around to Zany, who is cradling the brass urn, loose. I take it from her, and kiss it, and walk back up the hill toward the Happy Thought.

  The walk up the hill is much slower than the walk down. Not just because of the hill, but because I remember so much of this walk, I keep wanting to look at things. Plenty has changed about our city in five years, but plenty has stayed the same, too. Walking here, where Mama Lacy walked so many times with us, I feel like she is with me, not in the brass jar in my hands, but in the city coming alive around us. It’s cold, but the sun is up and people are starting to come out of their homes. People are walking dogs. Biking. A man is playing guitar on the sidewalk. I hear Mama Shannon working on getting her breath back to normal so she doesn’t sound like she’s been crying, and I hear Haberdashery sniffing along the sidewalk for the exact right blade of grass to pee on. It’s normal and comforting.

  They let me lead the way, all the way up the hill until I stop.

  “Here?” Mama Shannon asks.

  “It’s the closest thing I could find to home,” I repeat.

  When we scatter Mama Lacy’s ashes on the lawn of the Happy Thought Coffee Shop, she doesn’t catch the wind and blow away like I had pictured. Instead she works her way down into the blades of soft grass on the hillside. It looks to me like she’s settling in, now that we’ve brought her home.

  At times like these, I think you’re supposed to say a few words. I can hear Mama Shannon whispering, and Zany’s talking under her breath.

  But me, I don’t have to say anything. There’s nothing I can say that Mama Lacy doesn’t know already.

  chapter

  28

  After a while, I notice that my robe pocket is ringing. My family doesn’t look ready to move just yet, so I take a step away before I answer.

  “Adam?”

  He’s quiet too long, and I know.

  “When?” I ask. My voice breaks.

  “A few minutes ago.”

  “Were you with him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you say the right thing?” I know this was important to him.

  Adam laughs a short, sad laugh. “What you told me was right, Fella, it didn’t matter what I said. So yeah, I said the right thing.”

  “Okay.” I look out across the hillside, take in Mama Lacy’s final home. Take in the family she’s left behind, stronger now because of her.

  “Okay,” I repeat. “Wait for us, we’re coming back. I got a few more things to tell you.”

  Author’s Note

  “We could have pushed for both our names on the paperwork.” Jane’s fixing the doorknob with distracted motions. Her hands seem to know what she’s doing without her mind, which is miles away and years in the past, answering my question. As the head of one of the few families in the area to have pursued adoption as a same-sex couple, she is happy to answer my questions, but unfortunately, not all of them have easy answers.

  “They advised us not to list both our names. Said it was less complicated, more likely to go through if it was only one of us. If it was only me. I can’t get this thing to . . .” She trails off, lets the screwdriver rest midair, looks out across the river to the train tracks against the far mountain. We’re standing in my rental house, which is the house where Jane’s family lived when she first brought home her children. The house is rented out now that she and the children’s other mom have parted ways—the closest word is divorce, although neither the divorce nor the marriage before it carries any legal weight. “We could have pushed
for both of us to be on the paperwork, but it wasn’t about us. It was about three kids who needed parents.”

  To those unfamiliar with the time line of same-sex marriage and parenting, Jane’s description sounds like something that happened in the distant past. The truth is, it’s not even been a decade. Jane’s kids are playing outside. Now ranging in age from nine to thirteen, they don’t remember much about those early days when their moms were fighting to adopt them. What they know now is that they have two loving, devoted mothers—only one of whom is their parent, as far as the law is concerned.

  Families like Jane’s have long faced challenges when it comes to protecting themselves and their children. In the United States, gay marriage has only been legal in all fifty states since June 26, 2015. Before that date, the rights a couple or a family had and the challenges they faced depended on the state they lived in. The Madison-Culvert family lived in two states, North Carolina and West Virginia, where gay marriage wasn’t legal until 2014.

  Sometimes it seems like the changes have happened very quickly. After all, when I wrote Ashes to Asheville in 2010, I never dreamed I would have to go back and rewrite it to take place in the recent past. I assumed that when the book was ready to hit the shelves, same-sex marriage would still be a piecemeal affair, and the rights of couples like Lacey and Shannon to marry, make health-care decisions, parent as a unit, and do all the things the opposite-sex couple across the street could do would depend largely on what state they lived in. It was a happy surprise to find myself rewriting parts of the novel to change the time line because the rights of same-sex couples had outpaced my expectations.

  Still, for some, the changes came very slowly. For a lot of couples in the United States over the past several decades, the reality was that, even after jumping through every legal hoop they could find, they were still frequently left unable to add each other to their health insurance plan, file taxes as a couple, make medical decisions for each other in the face of catastrophic health events, or adopt each other’s children.