Ashes to Asheville: Chapters 1–7

Right before my sister, Zany, steals our dead mother off the mantel, I’m trying to decide which sock to stuff in Haberdashery’s mouth to shut him up.

He’s barking every five seconds, yip yip yip, all shrill like a smoke detector with its batteries low.

She keeps the thing in her purse, says a widow as pretty as her needs protection, especially with, what she calls it, her assets. I thought she was talking dirty the first time I heard that, till Mama Shannon explained she meant money.

Zany eases Mama Lacy’s curvy brass container down off the mantel and clutches it to her chest. I don’t like the word urn.

There are entire sentences Mrs. Madison says that I don’t understand. Stuff like, “Kindly escort me to the sitting room,” or, “Be a dear and please grant me the pleasure of your company at the breakfast table.”

Mama Lacy was always smoothing my hair and telling me, “You can focus better, Fella. I know you can.” Mama Shannon’s wording was a little less delicate: “If you tripped over a dead body on the floor, you’d say ‘pardon me’ and keep right on walking.”

Mrs. Madison seems formal enough that she could probably write me a ticket or send me to detention or something. Or maybe she hides what Mama Lacy called “a volatile heart” beneath that slippery cheetah robe and she’ll get mad and yell and scream at me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Zany accelerates up the on-ramp, and for a minute she’s preoccupied with merging among the coal trucks.

The room is small and the walls are dingy white.

The carpet feels damp and gritty on my one bare foot.

I know from the way she’s tugging me that she’s still upset about me being in the house, and I’m going to get an earful once we’re out.

At the deepest part of the tunnel, under the tallest part of the mountain, the radio, which we’ve turned back on for noise, loses its signal and fuzzes out. For a minute there’s nothing but silence and static and the whir of tires on pavement and the distant blast of somebody’s horn.

“So I guess I’m an accomplice,” I add. “And a dog thief. You’ve turned me into a dog thief!” With every new realization, my voice gets a little more shrill. “I’m only twelve and I’m going to go to prison till I’m thirty for dog-thieving! Not to mention riding in a stolen getaway car!”

We’re doing okay until the coal trucks start cropping up. They come in fives and tens and they careen around us like we’re in a toy car instead of a big, sturdy Subaru.

She can’t hear me over the radio, which has begun blaring traffic reports from somewhere ahead of us on the highway.

“Zany, I have to pee.”
“God, you’re so crude! Can’t you say you have to go to the restroom? Or you have to make a stop? Do you have to come right out with it like that?”

I can’t help feeling a little smug about Zany’s sweater getting peed on after all. If she’d stopped at the last exit, Haberdashery and I both could have gone to the bathroom.

“It’ll start snowing and a layer of ice will form,” Zany gripes.

We’re zipping up a steep hill and the earth drops away inches to my right.

The buzzing is so loud that Haberdashery keeps barking at it, his muzzle jerking against my arm.

By the time I catch up, she’s got her arm through the driver’s-side window of the robber’s truck, and he’s leaning back into the passenger seat to get away from her scrabbling fingers.

He starts cranking up his window, but Zany tosses herself through headfirst, preventing it from rolling up any farther. Her feet kick the side of the truck to give her more leverage so she can lift herself up.

For several seconds, there is only the sound of car engines idling and the huff of all our breaths.

I drop to my knees beside my grandmother’s dog, and the driver who hit him, an old lady with her face all moon white, comes bustling up beside us.

An ambulance screams past us on the shoulder, and when its noise subsides, Zany says, “We can’t go back. They’ll send us home. The car’s overheating, anyway. We couldn’t have kept driving it. And did you forget? We’re robbers, too, Fella.”

“You can’t stay in my car,” he says. “I’m not harboring fugitives.”