Ashes to Asheville

by Sarah Dooley

  Mama Lacy’s love wasn’t as loud. But she used to watch Mama Shannon with a smile on her lips. She used to nod at the right places in Mama Shannon’s stories— “Back home, we couldn’t find a church that accepted us as a lesbian couple.” Nod. “Back home, we didn’t want to send the kids to school knowing they were going to get teased for having two mothers.” Nod.

  Zany used to nod, too, seriously, as though she understood. Maybe she did. Zany was old enough to remember moving to Asheville, not just from. We moved to the city in 1994 when she was a first grader after Mama Lacy and Mama Shannon realized our neighbors in West Virginia weren’t ever going to like us.

  In Asheville, our family was accepted. Though it wasn’t legal there or anywhere else for my parents to be married, there were more gay people in the area and it was more accepted for them to raise kids and have families together. We were able to go to school there without much fuss—I remember a couple of dumb kids picking on me about my moms, but those were the same kids who picked on me about my tangled hair or my oversize rain boots that I’d stolen from Zany. And there were some substitute teachers who had a little trouble understanding. Overall, though, Asheville was kind to us.

  Still, in between figuring out what they wanted to be when they grew up—something neither of my moms ever settled on—and going about their daily lives of squabbling and laughing and mopping floors and fixing dinner, my parents watched the news with hope.

  “It’s coming,” Mama Shannon used to say when something good would happen in the news. When civil unions became legal in Vermont, when a politician would mention gay marriage during a debate, when other countries legalized it, Mama Shannon would get so excited she couldn’t hold still. She would work harder on whatever project held her fancy at the moment—building footstools out of driftwood, sanding old chairs to make them look new again. “Picture it, Lacy! Real marriage is coming!”

  I didn’t like when she brought up those things, because it meant pointing out that the marriage they already had wasn’t a real marriage. It sure looked real, just like the marriages on TV. They hugged and they fought and they danced and they kissed and sometimes Mama Shannon slept on the couch and sometimes Mama Lacy washed the same dish six or seven times while thundering under her breath, “Shannon’s too daggone old to play guitar in a band” or, “Can’t Shannon even see when there’s no toilet paper on the roll? It wouldn’t kill her to change it.”

  Sometimes they even fought about their wedding.

  “I’m not getting married in a church, Lace.”

  “That’s where weddings happen.”

  “Weddings happen all kinds of places.”

  “Well, my wedding will be happening in a church, so if you’d like to be one of the brides, you can waltz your happy butt into the church and act civilized for five minutes.”

  Mama Shannon grimaced. “Bride? I’m a bride?”

  “What would you rather be? You’re not a groom, are you? I never meant to get one of those.” Mama Lacy bit the tip of her tongue the way she did when she was teasing. “I can think of some other names to call you. Which do you prefer?”

  “I don’t know.” Mama Shannon was laughing now, too. “I’m your partner. I’m your . . . your significant other.”

  “‘You may now kiss the significant other’? That lacks the ring of romance, babe.”

  “Fine. Wife. We’re wives. ‘Bride’ just sounds so . . . young.” Mama Shannon leaned in toward Mama Lacy. “I mean, you can be a bride. You’re still young and beautiful. You can pass this old ogre off as your spouse, but you can’t convince me I’m a ‘bride.’”

  They had dozens of conversations like this, and at the end, Mama Lacy would lean in to kiss Mama Shannon’s hand or cheek or lips, and then Zany and I squealed that they were gross and would they please knock it off because there were children in the room. And they would break apart and pillow-fight us or tickle us until we thought we were going to pee, but Mama Shannon would always come back to the way things were finally starting to change.

  “It’s really going to happen,” she would say. “We’re going to be spouses, brides, whatever, in this lifetime.”

  Except you never really know how long a lifetime’s going to be.

  When Mama Lacy got sick with pancreatic cancer, we stayed in Asheville for a while. But soon, she wasn’t able to work. It was cheaper to live in West Virginia, and Mama Lacy and Mama Shannon both had family here who could help with things like cleaning the house and watching us kids. The family wasn’t perfect. Mostly, Mrs. Madison took me while Mama Shannon’s mama, Granny Culvert, who lived close by back then, watched Zany and helped with the house.

  I remember being happy with Mrs. Madison in those days. Being in a family with a big sister with such a giant personality, it was fun to have all the attention on me for a while. Mrs. Madison taught me how to play games I was too young for, like bridge and poker. She taught me how to make snow angels, and peanut butter sandwiches with Marshmallow Fluff. At the end of each day, she used to wrap me up in one of her robes and plunk me on the sofa with iced tea if it was warm out, hot cocoa if it wasn’t, and we would watch her game shows together. We were so cozy, I called her Grandma once or twice, though it never quite felt as natural as calling her Mrs. Madison the way everybody else did. She always glowed with pride when I could answer the questions on the TV before the contestants. Any time we met any of her friends out at the store, she would brag to them about the most recent thing I’d known that she didn’t think a kid my age would. She was usually wrong—all the kids at school could do the same things I could do, and sometimes, more—but I never corrected her. I liked her to think I was special.

  In the picture on the dashboard, I’m seven years old, and Zany is eleven and trying to lift me. My hair is in my face, but Zany’s is sticking straight up. It’s exactly like Mama Shannon’s, short and white-blond. That’s because Mama Shannon is Zany’s birth mom and that’s why Zany was able to inherit what Mama Lacy calls “the Culvert gene,” which means Zany is as crazy as Mama Shannon and her family.

  Mama Lacy is my birth mom, and she and I are Madisons. We’re both quiet like cats and just as smart, at least that’s what Mama Shannon says. It’s hard to feel smart when you’re always forgetting things, but Mama Shannon says that’s how you can tell a smart person. They’re too busy thinking about Big Ideas to worry about little details like tying their shoes or remembering their homework.

  Mama Lacy says that Mama Shannon only says that because she’s as forgetful as I am. Not Mama Lacy, though. She was really good with the details. She was good at remembering to take the car to the garage at the right time. She was good at signing permission slips and laying out matching school clothes and using up the vegetables before they rotted in the crisper. She was good at asking each person how their day was in a way that was unique to them so everybody knew she’d been paying attention the last time they talked. I will never feel smart the way Mama Lacy was smart, in a way that made her seem good at everything. She was prettier than anybody else, too. I got her stick-straight, dark brown hair, but she was always better at wearing hers, in loops and twists and braids that never seemed to come down no matter what she did in a day. If I braided my own hair, it wouldn’t stay up more than an hour.

  Of course Mama Lacy’s hair fell out eventually, because of the medicine for her cancer. But even then, she wore scarves that matched her shoes and looked nice with the color of her eyes.

  In the picture, Mama Lacy has her arms ready to catch me, if Zany should drop me. That’s what Mama Lacy did, all the time, every day—she tried to catch me. Now that she’s not here anymore, I feel like I’m falling and falling and I’m never going to land.

  Zany’s driving too fast for the one-lane road we’re on and the photo is bouncing and flapping with each bump. I hold Mama Lacy tighter against my chest. I can’t imagine anything worse than spilling my mother’s ashes
because of a pothole.

  It isn’t till we get past a sign that says we’re entering a new county that I reach out and turn off the radio. The little dashboard clock says it’s ten to ten, but I don’t feel the least bit sleepy. Mrs. Madison goes to bed so early that, most nights, I lie awake for ages before I follow her to sleep. Though Mama Lacy tried her best, we were never very good at bedtime in the Madison-Culvert household.

  “My feet are cold.”

  Zany glances down and rolls her eyes. “Why didn’t you put on shoes, Light Bulb?” She calls me Light Bulb because she says it’s so rare that I have a practical idea, I ought to have a lightbulb that springs on over my head when I finally do think of something, like in a cartoon.

  “I didn’t know we was running away. Where we going, Zany?”

  “You didn’t know we were running away because we’re not running away. We’re taking a little trip, is all.”

  “You gonna tell me where?” The seat is finally starting to feel warm under me and Zany’s cranked the heat up full blast in the direction of my feet. She’ll tease me to death over something like not wearing shoes, but she always tries to fix it, too.

  Zany reaches over and tugs my hair and then touches the shiny brass urn. “We’re taking Mama Lacy where she wanted to go.”

  I think about this, but I’m not sure what it means. Did Mama Lacy have a secret vacation she wanted to take, one she told Zany about, but not me? I feel a pang of jealousy. Then of shame. Maybe she did tell me and I forgot, like I forgot about the ice creams at Mack and Morello’s. Maybe Zany is the good daughter and remembers things for Mama Lacy that I’ve forgotten.

  We’re at least a mile on down the road and I’m still thinking about what Zany said, worrying the inside of my cheek with my tongue and going through all the places I ever heard Mama Lacy mention she might want to go, when it hits me, like that stupid cartoon lightbulb springing on above my head.

  “You mean where she wanted to be—to be—” I can’t say scattered. Moms should never be scattered. They should, at the very least, be kept in one place. And they should preferably stay Mom-shaped.

  Zany eases off the gas a little and fiddles with the cigarette lighter. “Of course that’s what I mean.”

  After Mama Lacy died six months ago—right after, before all the craziness with Mrs. Madison—Mama Shannon read us the letter Mama Lacy had left for the three of us. It had our names on it, not our nicknames but our proper names, in her curvy writing: To my beloved Shannon Culvert, and my sweet girls, Zoey Grace and Ophelia.

  Mama Shannon and Zany have been upset for a while because the letter went missing. They figure one of the cousins or aunts or even Mrs. Madison accidentally took it right along with Mama Lacy’s pretty wineglasses and her father’s wedding ring she wore around her neck on a chain. I feel heavy with shame at the mention of Mama Lacy’s letter, which has been safe in my treasure box since the day Mrs. Madison came to take me. It isn’t that I wanted to keep it from Mama Shannon or Zany. It’s just that they had each other, and I didn’t have either one of them, or Mama Lacy either. I wanted something she’d touched.

  Over and over at bedtime, I take a minute to read the part she wrote for me: To my Fella—my little sweets, you’ve got my hair and my smile and now you’ve got my family to care for. Be a brave girl and do a good job. I’m counting on you. Love you always—Mama Lacy

  She didn’t know her own mother was going to come and take me away from Zany and Mama Shannon. She didn’t know I wouldn’t be with them to care for them. Though I begged Mrs. Madison not to take me, not to talk the judge into making me live with what he called “blood relations” instead of my own family, I feel like I’ve failed Mama Lacy somehow. I was supposed to take care of our family for her and instead I only see them on Sundays. I wish I could write her a letter and explain, or, better yet, curl up on her lap and play with her hair while I tell her all about it. But there’s no way to talk to Mama Lacy anymore.

  Anyway, Zany means the other part of the letter, the part at the end where Mama Lacy explained what she wanted for her body. I only read that part once, but I can’t make my brain forget it, even though the thought of cremation fills me with horror. Mama Lacy, who loved springtime and sunshine and high winds and thunderstorms, didn’t want to be buried, to be closed away in a box, unable to breathe the air or see the sky. Of course she couldn’t do any of that anyway, but Mama Lacy said the thought of being shut up in a box made her feel so sad and so still that she couldn’t bear it. No, she wanted her ashes scattered across the grassy park next to our first home in Asheville, where she could smell the rain and see the sky and move along the earth like leaves with each gust of wind. She wanted to land where our feet landed when we played freeze tag and caught lightning bugs, when we turned cartwheels, when we ran with joy. I can’t think about her words without my eyes flooding with tears, and for a moment I feel as though the whole world is nothing but waves of sadness.

  The home Mama Lacy talked about seems so long ago and so far away, like it’s not a real place anymore. I can’t imagine ever running with joy, ever turning a cartwheel again. I feel like I’m heavy and all put together wrong. Nothing works right since Mama Lacy’s been gone.

  Mrs. Madison has never cared much for the outdoors. She went along with the part of the letter where Mama Lacy said she didn’t want to be buried, but that was the only part she listened to.

  “I won’t lose her twice,” she insisted. Her whole face was drawn up tight, lips pressed together till they went pale. “She’ll stay right here in my home. I won’t lose her twice.” She moved a small glass bell with ALMOST HEAVEN, WEST VIRGINIA etched on it in gold, and three framed photos of distant cousins I’d never met, and a beady-eyed deer carved out of coal, and she placed Mama Lacy right in the center of the mantel. With that taken care of, she set about the business of stealing me from my other mother.

  Zany lights a cigarette and Haberdashery and I both start coughing. Mama Shannon used to smoke, but she quit when Mama Lacy got sick. Mama Lacy said the only good thing that came out of the cancer was it made Mama Shannon quit smoking. Mama Shannon started crying at dinner one time, which was shocking and scary because I’d never seen her do it. Mama Lacy led her quickly from the table, but I snuck behind and followed them down the hall to the door of their bedroom. Mama Shannon was upset that Mama Lacy had to be the one with cancer when she’d spent her whole life taking care of herself, eating healthy, running every morning, refusing to smoke. And Mama Shannon, she ate red meat and smoked a pack a day and drank beer a lot and talked about exercise she never got around to, and Mama Shannon was the one who was healthy as a horse. She cried and cried that night, and I sat and sat in the hallway, feeling cold and small.

  “You shouldn’t be smoking,” I warn Zany. “It can kill you. Your lungs get all black and tough like leather and they shrivel up and they have spots on them. It’s disgusting. I had a test on it in Health.”

  “We all took that test in fifth grade,” Zany says. “You can’t live your whole life afraid of pictures they showed you in elementary school. I mean, hell, it doesn’t matter what you do. It doesn’t matter what you do.” So I know she’s also thinking about Mama Lacy’s healthy lifestyle, and she sounds so sad that I don’t say anything else, not even to tease her when she chokes a little, then tosses the cigarette out, half-smoked.

  I put down my window to air out the car. Haberdashery immediately jumps up behind my seat, resting his scratchy little poodle paws on my shoulder so he can stick his wet nose out into the fresh air. I reach back and lower his window down instead. I like animals fine, but Haberdashery isn’t really an animal, more like another decoration in Mrs. Madison’s big house. He doesn’t get dirty or lick people’s faces or chew up shoes or play with toys. All he ever does is sleep, and eat, and yip yip yip.

  Zany makes a turn onto a different road, and then another.

  “When did you
decide to do this?” I demand. I hope Zany’s thought this through. Ten or eleven more questions suddenly crowd into my brain and I start spitting them out in random order. “Do you have gas money? Did you bring road snacks? Do you even know how to get there? You suck with directions. I know you don’t remember the way. Did you bring a map? Can you even read a map? Did you take the car to the garage and have them tell you if it was roadworthy?” I’m not sure exactly what roadworthy means, but I know Mama Lacy always insisted on getting the car checked for it before we left on a trip.

  “Hush,” is all Zany says. A minute later, she taps the glove box and it falls open. I catch the map that flutters out, then stuff all the bright green parking tickets back in. The map is printed off the Internet and in the dim light, I can only see a mass of tangled lines and numbers. I’ve never been good at reading these things.

  Below is a list of directions to follow. They seem simple enough, and it says it should only take a little over four hours. I do the math, slowly, in my head. If we left Mrs. Madison’s just before ten, we should be getting to Asheville around two a.m. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes to scatter the ashes, and then we could be back in the car and on our way home. We could make it back by six a.m. For the first time, I feel a tiny pang of relief. Mrs. Madison doesn’t wake up till seven at the earliest, and Mama Shannon’s work schedule makes her a late sleeper according to Zany. We might be able to pull this off. Maybe Zany isn’t completely crazy after all.

  There’s really only one problem with the plan, then.

  “If we scatter Mama Lacy in Asheville, we’ll never see her again,” I say in a small voice.