Ashes to Asheville

by Sarah Dooley

“Okay,” I say. “A. Asheville.” I give up on real signs and say the sign I’m dreading. It won’t be long before it looms in front of us.

  “A,” Zany repeats, “is definitely for Asheville.” Her voice is hopeful, like she can’t wait to see that stupid sign by the road.

  Neither one of us bothers pointing out the letter B anywhere. We’re stuck on Asheville, drawing closer and closer.

  chapter

  18

  I remember coming down the mountain years ago, but driving up it in the February snow is entirely different. I see Zany’s knuckles turning white from her grip on the wheel, and she spins the dial to silence the radio.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Playing pinochle.”

  “What’s pinochle?”

  “How should I know? What do you mean, what am I doing, Light Bulb? I’m driving.”

  Sisters. Geez. “I know that, Zany, I see that you’re driving. I meant why did you turn down the radio?”

  “Then why didn’t you ask why I turned down the radio? That’s not what you asked. You asked, What am I doing.”

  Sometimes I don’t understand how Zany and I end up in a fight. All it takes is for me to say one little thing that sounded perfectly simple to my own ears, and she gets mad at me for no reason. “Forget it!”

  She drives on a little ways, then says, “It was distracting me. It keeps getting fuzzy.”

  “Is it the weather?”

  “It’s the mountains. And the weather. It’s making me nervous.”

  The flurries have picked up into actual snow, hitting the windshield with a wet hiss. I don’t want Zany to be distracted, because the road gets scarier the higher we go. There are drop-offs on the other side of the guard rail. But I do miss the radio. The voice in the background was something to hold on to.

  “Zany?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will it distract you if I tell you something?”

  I wait to see if she’s going to get mad, but she only shakes her head a little. “Tell me.”

  “I did something bad.” I’m thinking about Mama Lacy’s letter and how I stole it.

  “What did you do?”

  “Well, I’m not going to tell you. But it was bad.”

  “Fella. You can’t just say you did something bad and then not tell me what. Was it something dangerous?”

  “No!” Now I wonder if she’s picturing something really bad, like drinking or shoplifting or something. “No. It’s not dangerous, it’s just . . . kinda mean?”

  “You? Mean? Never!”

  “Hey, I’m not mean!”

  “I just said that.”

  “But you were teasing, right?”

  “I don’t know, was I?” Bigger flakes start spinning down from the clouds, wet and thick. The truck weaves a little as Zany gets a handle on the weather, and Haberdashery hops into my lap and smushes his head under my chin. I hold him tighter. He’s not the only one starting to worry about the roads.

  “It’s only a snowstorm, you two, relax!” Zany says, not sounding at all relaxed. She slows to fifty and hunches over the steering wheel, looking awfully nervous for only a snowstorm. Snow coats the glass and the windshield isn’t see-through for a minute as Zany struggles to turn on the lazy windshield wipers.

  “Shoot!” she hollers. The left wiper—the one in front of her—spins away into the gray morning. It must have already been broken most of the way off. I guess that’s the best we could expect from Adam’s truck.

  “Stupid Adam,” I groan, “not fixing his windshield wiper.”

  Zany ignores me, or maybe she can’t hear me. She swerves into the slow lane.

  “Be careful!” I warn her. “It might be slippery!”

  “Because you’re an expert!” She slams the brakes and the truck fishtails.

  I shriek. “Stop it!” Scared as I am, it doesn’t take much to get me mad.

  “Kind of busy!” She’s still trying to get the truck moving straight.

  “Well, you’re not doing a very good job!”

  “Oh, lighten up.”

  And I really hate when Zany tells me to lighten up. I smack her arm before I can stop myself. Not hard. Just hard enough to feel a little better.

  “Quit it!” Now she sounds irritated, jerking her arm out of range. She turns to face me. “No hitting! Especially not when I’m driving in the—whoa!” She spins to face the road again as we slide on the slick pavement. She manages to get the truck stopped on the shoulder of the road as I snatch Haberdashery up to my chest. I can feel our hearts pounding.

  “Says who?” I demand once the truck is under control. I look around. “Nobody here but you and me and Haberdashery and I don’t think he cares if I hit you!”

  “Says Mama Lacy!” Zany shoots back. “Wasn’t she always telling you that she knew you could control yourself better? Of course I think that might be the only thing she was ever wrong about.”

  I can’t help it. I slap Zany again, harder this time. Hard enough it leaves a red spot. I’m immediately ashamed and flustered. Zany just rescued us from a crash, and here I am hitting her. I know Mama Lacy would be disappointed if she could see me.

  “Mama Lacy’s not here to care,” I snap, more to myself than to my sister, and I shove my door open, letting the snow in.

  “She can still see you,” Zany says. “She still knows if you’re hitting me.” She sounds tired as she shoves her door open, too.

  “She cannot,” I argue. “She can’t see us or she’d find a way to help us . . . fix stuff.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” Her voice is starting to sound mad. “Of course she can’t fix everything. She’s not here anymore, but that doesn’t mean she can’t see us. I know she’s still watching us and she can hear us. She can hear you saying she can’t.”

  “No she can’t!”

  “Yes, she can, jerk!” I am pleased when Zany sinks to my level.

  “Well, if she can, then she just heard you call me a jerk!” I’m triumphant.

  Zany growls wordlessly and heads off into the snow. I scramble to follow, but it takes a minute to get Haberdashery to stay in the truck. By the time I’m free to run after her, Zany is several feet away, jogging through the gray snow. Fear spikes in me. It’s so lonely out here. Zany might drive me crazy, but I don’t want to be away from her.

  “What are you doing?” I shout, shivering as the wet snow soaks through my robe.

  “Looking for the wiper!” Zany hollers. She’s holding her hands above her eyes to keep the snow out so she can scan the ground. “Where is it?”

  “You’re not going to find it!”

  “I have to! We can’t wait out the snowstorm!”

  “You can’t find it!” I repeat.

  “I have to!” She’s screaming, I’m not sure if it’s because she’s upset or because it’s hard to hear each other, but she’s screaming and it scares me even more.

  “Use the other one!” I holler, even though it’s a silly thing to say.

  “But it’s on the wrong side!”

  “Well, move it!” Even sillier, but what else can we do?

  “You can’t move a wiper!”

  My heart’s pounding. I’m terrified that if she gets out of sight, I’ll never find her again. “Wait!” I shout, pushing forward through the snow. She doesn’t say anything, but she waits. I catch up, and in my hurry to reach her, I can’t stop. I barrel into her hard enough to make her stumble. “Let’s try, at least!” Still arguing to fix the wiper, but all the while holding her hand.

  “Hey, you’re crushing my fingers.” Then, “Geez, Fella, you’re squeezing my hand to death. What’s the matter? Are you scared?”

  “No!” I hear tears in my voice. My heart’s still pounding. I’m more scared of being left alone than I was of the truck sliding in the snow. “You
just shouldn’t leave me alone by the road, that’s all!”

  “Shoot, I’m sorry.” She walks with me toward the truck, catching her breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  I’m breathing hard, too. It’s slow work, slipping and sliding along the edge of the interstate in a snowstorm. I’m not about to admit how frightened I got when she walked away and have Zany call me a baby for the next six months. “It’s okay.”

  A quick search of Adam’s truck reveals a giant stuffed panda—“I’ll have to ask him about that later,” Zany mutters—and about a million fast-food wrappers under the topper over the truck bed. There are three half-used rolls of duct tape and a flashlight with weak batteries. It flickers and dims, but it’s something.

  Through the snow, Zany studies the broken edge of the windshield wiper. I wiggle back and forth from foot to foot, trying not to freeze to death on the spot.

  “Looks like it broke off about an inch above where it hooks on. How in the world did he manage to break his windshield wiper there?”

  I walk around to the passenger side, glance at Zany’s wiper and then mine, and begin working to snap it off the same length.

  “Hey, what are you doing? Fella, whoa! Don’t break off the only wiper we’ve got!”

  An eighteen-wheeler blasts past, splashing us both with slushy water, and we screech and duck away. Once it’s gone, I stand again. “What’s the difference?” I point out. “You can’t drive with the left one missing anyway! What do you need the right one for?”

  She stares at me for a minute, a stare that is every bit Mama Shannon’s Bedtime is when I say it is, not when you say it is, young lady stare. But then her face changes and she shrugs.

  “I guess you’ve got a point, Light Bulb!”

  Twenty minutes and a lot of swearing from Zany later, she’s duct-taped the newly broken wiper to the nub left over on the driver’s side. She’s also taped my fingers to the wiper three times. Once I’m unstuck, we dash for the dryness of the truck’s cab, bringing the snowstorm in with us. Haberdashery makes a disapproving noise and scoots toward the center of the seat, the only dry spot.

  Back in the truck, we have to stop being numb before we can start warming up, so it feels like we get colder for a while before we get warmer. It takes ages before either one of us can speak around our chattering teeth. Zany blasts the weak heater till I start to feel my toes again.

  “Did you know how hard it is to use duct tape in wet weather?” she breathes at last.

  I shrug. Give her a half smile. “It stuck to my fingers all right.”

  She rolls her eyes at me, but she grins, too. We sit in the car awhile longer, feeling squishy and cold and sort of proud of ourselves, before Zany pulls us back onto the road, heading toward a distant streak of light beginning to glow through the snow clouds. It’s barely a glimmer, but I think it might be the sun.

  chapter

  19

  “We’re stopping?” I sit up straighter when Zany aims the car toward another gas station. We’re both shivering steadily now, even with the truck heat on.

  “We can dry off under the hand dryers,” she says. Then reveals her true reason: “Plus, I need coffee.”

  The gas station isn’t a chain. It’s a small country store that has a creepy feel about it, and I don’t know if I can trust that it’s clean.

  Inside, a woman dozes behind the counter next to the cigarette shelf. She’s propped crooked on a tall stool with a ripped seat.

  “Is she going to fall?” I ask out of the corner of my mouth at Zany. Zany nudges me, because we can’t help giggling. Then she clears her throat noisily to wake the lady, even though I can tell she’s worried the lady might recognize us from the news.

  “Welcome to Smart Stop,” the woman says without opening her eyes, but I notice she does balance herself a little more squarely on the stool. “Let me know, I can help you with something.” She leaves out if, as if the strain of that one word would be enough to wear her out completely.

  “No, thanks,” Zany says. “We’re just here for the bathroom and coffee.”

  “Well, you’ll need my help after all, then. Bathroom code is seven-one-seven and you gotta pay a dime.”

  Zany stares at her with guilt on her face, but the lady’s eyes stay closed. I’m dancing in place. I shouldn’t have gulped that whole soda at the Waffle House.

  I’m glad this one has an indoor bathroom, not like the one in Wytheville. It’s not as filthy, either, and the mirror isn’t cracked, we find after inserting a dime into the slot on the door and punching in the code. In the mirror, I’m amazed at the reflection of two wet, worn-out girls.

  “Wow, do we look pretty right now,” Zany says with a crooked grin. “Thank goodness we didn’t get soaked till after we dropped off Adam.”

  “Of course you’d think that,” I say. “You have to look pretty for a thief!”

  She turns on the hand dryer, the noise saving her from having to answer for a minute. Hot air blasts out and we take turns huddling under the fan, trying to dry off. I know the air is hot, but it feels cold rushing at my wet skin and drippy clothes. I realize that unless we stay here all morning, the most I can hope for is that my clothes and hair will be a little less drippy.

  When the hand dryer shuts off, I ask, “So what is it about Adam?”

  “Huh?” She’s still fixing herself up in the mirror, only half listening.

  “Adam. You’ve known him, like—what, eight hours? Less? Why do you like him?”

  “Who says I like him?”

  “Well, you were kissing him.”

  She spins to look at me. “Spy.”

  “I’m not a spy! You were kissing him right out in the open, right out in the truck! Where anybody could see you! And you don’t even know him!”

  “I do, sort of.”

  “No, you don’t!”

  “Well, we’re going through the same thing.”

  “How do you know? He’s a total stranger. How do you know he’s not making everything up just to get away with stealing our stuff?” Though I know he isn’t making things up. You can’t fake the things he said on the phone, or the voice he said them in.

  She rolls her eyes. “We’re the thieves now, don’t forget.”

  “You didn’t answer me.” I really want to know. I can’t figure out what it is about a person that makes them so interesting to another person. It’s a little bit scary, thinking about liking somebody outside my family so much that my life would be sad without them. I already have enough people right here in my own family to lose without adding anybody else.

  “Didn’t answer what?” Zany asks. She’s turned and is leaning against the sink, drawing patterns on the damp floor tiles with the toe of her boot.

  “Why do you like Adam?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugs. “It’s been . . . it’s been a long time since I’ve liked anything. Since I’ve been anything except sad.” She grins sideways at me. “And he is cute. And he makes me feel, God, Fella, I don’t know. Just something. Besides sad, for a minute.”

  “Oh.” I wonder what I have in my life that makes me feel something besides sad for a minute. There’s Haberdashery (who makes me feel annoyed but also like I want to snuggle). There’s Zany (who makes me want to tear my hair out but also makes me feel like I’m home after a long trip). There’s not much else. “Oh,” I say again.

  “Come on. We need to get coffee and get on the road.” She leads me out into the gas station and fills a coffee cup. Then another.

  “I need you to stay awake with me,” she explains, dumping sugar packet after sugar packet into the cups. After pouring in creamer, she presses one warm Styrofoam cup into my hands. “Drink this.”

  I take a cautious sniff. The smell of coffee brings back long talks with Mama Shannon, and the thought of her makes my stomach swim with guilt. Ri
ght now, our mama is worried about us, not knowing where we are or if we’re okay. Mama Shannon has been different ever since Mama Lacy died—no games of kickball in the yard, no laughs, no bad jokes or rowdy laughter. It didn’t use to be like her to worry, which somehow makes it worse that we’re making her do it now.

  In the truck, I look at the gas station through the blurry side of the windshield. Zany has hopped back out to throw away the Twinkies trash we’ve piled up at our stops, plus some of the junk that was already littering Adam’s truck. I don’t understand how Zany can find Adam cute when he keeps his dad’s truck such a mess, but it doesn’t seem to faze her. She scoops out a couple of McDonald’s bags, much to the dismay of Haberdashery, who is waking up enough to scavenge.

  “Stop it, you pig,” she says. “This is Adam’s stuff.” Her voice sounds all googly on the word Adam. I can’t be mad at her for wanting to feel something other than sad, but I can still think it’s gross. “Anyway, we brought you something.” She peels back the top of the tin of food we bought for him. He dives into it with such fury that I have to reach out to steady the can so he doesn’t shove it off the seat. It takes him less than a minute to eat the whole meal, which makes me feel better about his health. He must be okay if he can still be a pig.

  Haberdashery starts to whimper just as Zany starts the engine.

  “Uh-oh. Hang on.” I recognize this whimper because I’ve made the same sound several times on this trip. I start digging around for a leash and finally think to tear off a long strip of duct tape and roll it longwise into a cord. Zany watches with interest.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s a leash!” I’m surprised she can’t tell. I tie one end of the tape around the ring on Haberdashery’s collar, and I hang on to the other end tightly. “This dumb dog is not going to run off again!” But I scratch between his ears while I say it so he doesn’t think I actually mean the dumb part.

  “Well, hurry up, okay? I’m freezing.” Zany stays in the truck to wait.

  “I don’t know how you think me hurrying is going to help you warm up,” I grumble, but I tug Haberdashery faster all the same.