ASHES TO ASHES
On this hazy May morning, the humid breeze smells of fresh-cut grass and something swampy as I exit my car and stretch my aching back muscles. I’ve been in the car too long. I’ve pulled into a tiny convenience store that gives me backwoods butcher vibes. It’s the only building I’ve seen for miles and even with its coat of fresh white paint, it appears to have suffered a Wizard of Oz drop from the sky onto a cleared patch of dirt. It lists to one side in the thick press of trees, the electrical signs in the windows garish against the green backdrop.
Cicadas buzz in the nearby woods, the intensity of their drone raising in pitch as mercury climbs another line on the thermometer. Even in the heat, a shiver races up my spine—it’s both too loud and too quiet at the same time.
Why did I ever leave the city? I’ll bet when the sun disappears, this ominous solitude will become as unnerving as a cold finger touching my neck.
But I can’t rewind time, or a hasty decision.
Already turning into a hell of a day, I crunch across the gravel lot toward the Ash Country Store and Souvenirs. I push through the screen door looking for another human being, but the place looks and sounds empty.
Great. I’ll never figure out where I am if I can’t get directions. I have no choice but to get back on the road and keep searching. As I turn to leave, the linoleum creaks behind me.
A muscled storekeeper in overalls approaches the front counter.
Uncertainty is flying rough circles around me. I can find someone else to ask.
“You want a rattlesnake tail?” His voice is full-bodied, almost rotund.
“What did you say?” Surely, I heard him wrong.
He wears a grease-smeared shirt and a scowl he probably was born with. Hulking over a gray-speckled countertop, he picks up a crossword puzzle and turns his attention to the page. Without looking up, he repeats, “I said, do you want a rattlesnake tail?”
“I’ll pass,” I shift my purse to my other shoulder. “Only directions to Tungston, please. Apparently, it’s around here.”
Here’s the thing. I’m already irritated, tired, and frazzled from driving cross-country because I refuse to get in an airplane. But I also need to remember why I’ve come here. I have to tone down my crabby-meter and settle into my new summer home, start my job and above all, search for my parents. My biological parents.
He ignores my question and asks another. “Which high school you from?”
I snort. “I’ve graduated college. Grad school to be exact.” I fight to keep my voice friendly. I’m here to find connections, not create barriers.
“Sorry.” He continues writing, head down. “Just saying. You look sixteen.”
“Really?” I raise my hands in a what-the-hell gesture. “Because I’m short?”
“Yup.”
When I was thirteen, my grandfather on my mother’s side got throat cancer and had his larynx removed. He spent five frustrating years trying to get people to understand his buzzing speech, those mechanical tones amplified through a hand-held throat vibrator. It wasn’t until he lay in his coffin that he finally looked peaceful.
I hit college and became obsessed with every aspect of retraining people to talk. From fixing broken language, unraveling mangled speech, to giving people a means of communicating when words were frozen in the nerve bundles and unable to move toward their mouths. I couldn’t fix Grandpa, but I’d made a vow to his memory to do my best to repair everyone else.
If only I’d spent as much time learning to follow directions.
My trip had gone well according to Google Maps until about an hour ago when my phone lost its signal. That’s when the road signs disappeared altogether, and the trees swarmed closer, their branches interweaving above the road, narrowing it down to a two-lane strip of spider-veined tarmac.
Verdaphobia. If it isn’t a real word to describe the fear of tight, green spaces, then I’ve created a new one.
Sure, we have trees on the west coast, but they all give each other elbow room. The billion wands of green here dominate every free inch of earth.
Verdaphobia.
I study the store’s sagging interior. The aisles are narrow, the floorboards have warped, and the shelves are loaded with jars—containers filled with what I assume must be stewed squirrel, pickled tadpoles, or something equally inedible.
“Nice place. Quaint and homey.” I try out the compliment.
He squints my way. “As an FYI, rattlers are hard to catch.”
He’s starting to come across as Asperger’s with all this snake fixation. I take a moment to search for words. “I can only imagine.”
“Great souvenir for folks back in California.”
He’d read my license plate. I smile. “So, occasionally you do look up.”
His face firms as if he’s come to some decision. He pushes off the counter and narrows his eyes. He appears to be around thirty-five years old, carrying about two hundred and ninety pounds on a five-foot-ten frame. His dark hair, moussed back in long spikes, resembles a hedgehog’s. “I’ve got a deadline before the mailman shows up.” He taps the sheet. “I’m multitasking by waiting on you.”
This guy cannot be the store’s owner with these stellar people skills. And if he is, it answers why there’s an empty parking lot. “Sorry to interrupt. I’m relocating to Tungston, staying at the Pfoltz Bed & Breakfast. I was heading in the right direction, then my phone died. Now, I’m driving in circles. Or triangles. I don’t know which, but I’m lost.” I push a smile onto my lips, although that isn’t what I’m feeling inside.
I left San Francisco for answers apparently locked away in rural Pennsylvania. I shiver, remembering the police at my apartment door in March. “Terribly sorry. Marc and Janette were killed immediately…at the John Wayne airport. A Malaysian jumbo jet rolled over their Cessna 170.” And that shock was still rattling my being when, only a few weeks later, I found adoption papers in their safe. I was two when someone in Butterfield, Pennsylvania, signed me over to them. With three months to college graduation, I found myself completely alone at age twenty-four. Now I wonder if the woman—and man—who had given me up for adoption all those years ago might still be out there?
A hollow draft of sadness sweeps through me. I shake the chill away.
The shopkeeper is back at the crossword puzzle.
“You’re like Daniel Boone.” He chuckles.
“Huh?” I’m starting to doubt he will be able to give me straight directions with his convoluted ramblings.
“Boone always said he never got lost but he often wandered confused for weeks at a time.”
“You knew him personally?” It’s a mean thing to say but I’m not the same person I was three months ago before my parents died. I barely have a considerate bone left. “Tungston?” I ask. “How do I get there?”
“We say Tungs.”
“What?”
He says it louder, as if my hearing has suffered in those few seconds. “Not Tungston. Tungs.”
“You’re serious?”
“Why would I lie?” He looks directly at me for the first time and his deep-set, brown eyes flash something I’m not going to question.
“No, that’s not what I mean.” I shake my head. “It’s the town’s name. I’m a speech therapist.” I draw in a lungful of air, so ripe with the scent of ancient wood I can taste it at the back of my throat. “Living in Tungs.” Maybe there were towns named Vocal Cord or Cleft Palette I could have chosen for my first job?
“You gotta love irony. I know I do.” He points at me, his silver watch gleaming on his beefy wrist. “You know what? I’ve heard about you. You’re gonna be working with my mother.”
I sort through the unsettling idea that someone at the ass-end of nowhere knows I’ll be arriving. I suddenly miss the anonymity of life in crowded San Francisco. “What have you heard?”
“Therapy on Wheels hired a new speech therapist. Not a local gal this time.”
I offer my hand. “I’m Marleigh Benning.”
He shakes it. “Elyk Ash.”
My hand disappears into his giant paw, his handshake gentler than I anticipated. “Nice to meet you, Alec.”
His forehead knots. “Not Alec. Elyk, E-L-Y-K.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“My mom liked the idea of words going backwards. Kyle seemed boring to her.” He reaches for his pen and twirls it between his thumb and index finger. Then, nodding as if we’ve exchanged all there is to exchange, he returns to writing words in the spaces on the paper.
“Well, what the lleh,” I say.
When his lips compress, and he scowls I know the joke only amuses me.
It occurs to me now—and I find this recognition troubling because it means I’m a snob—that I expected this man to be dimwitted because he lives in this rural area. This is where my parents are from, so what does that say about me? My biological parents. I need to keep practicing those words to make them more comfortable. “Kyle…Elyk. Got it.”
“Short ‘I’… E-lick.”
“Elyk.” I’ll remember it as the sound of a cat hacking up a hairball. My shoulders sink. My inner thoughts haven’t always been this unkind, have they?
“Exactly.” He turns back to his puzzle.
The rotary phone jangles, a jarring bleat compared to a cell phone. Mr. Backward Name takes the call and my directions to the bed & breakfast are on hold. I wander the aisles until I find an office supply shelf. I grab a small notebook knowing without a doubt I’ll be writing detailed directions to my patients’ houses now that I’ve experienced meandering roads with little or no signage. Returning to the front, I spot the old cash register, the kind that dings when the drawer opens. Next to it lies the crossword puzzle. I lean closer to read some of Elyk’s answers. I love everything about words and it’s impossible for me to pass up a puzzle.
With the call completed, Elyk turns back to the counter. He stands across from me, drumming his fingers on the chipped Formica.
I point toward the paper. “Why’s there a deadline?”
He scratches his ample rear end, the denim moving up and down under his thick fingers. “It’s a national contest. Solve sixty puzzles in sixty days and get sixty thousand dollars. It’s been pretty hard so far.”
“Want me to take a look?”
He snorts and steps back. “Have at it.” He jams his hands in his pockets, a satisfied look spreads across his face, like he thinks he has thrown out an impossible challenge.
I read the hint for the first missing word. “To be ready or prepared. Nine letters. I-N, two spaces, N, two spaces then U-S.” I think for a few seconds, mentally scrolling through possible letter combinations. A word flashes in my head. “It’s ‘ingenious’.” I reach for the pen to write in the letters.
“Don’t!” he bellows, lunging forward, arms thrown wide as if he’s pushing me out of the way of a bear. He grabs the pen. “It has to be in my writing or I’ll be disqualified.”
“Sheesh! Calm down.” Maybe lay off the Red Bull a tad. I step away from the counter. “I wouldn’t have helped if I’d known you’d get in trouble.” The puzzle has the number two written in the top right corner. Fifty-eight more to go. I feel sorry for the big guy.
He rocks his head from side to side. “I would have figured it out.”
I challenge him, the irritation riding high in my next words. “What goes here?” I tap the page.
He fidgets some more with the pen. It’s duct-taped to an old-fashioned, blue spiral phone cord, the end of which is nailed into the counter. Finally, he says, “I have the word ‘asswipe’ stuck in my head.”
I grunt, and quickly try to cover the sound up by clearing my throat. I read the clue aloud. “To relieve or soothe.” I pause for emphasis. “And you’re thinking it’s ‘asswipe’?”
He snatches the sheet away. “It fits in the blanks.”
“Not really. It’s hyphenated…not one word.” I shrug. “Try assuage.”
He starts to protest, then stops. He neatly prints block letters in the spaces.
He wouldn’t have gotten the answer, but I hold my tongue. “How much for this notebook?”
“Go ahead and take it. Been trying to unload it for months.”
“Thanks. How about those directions and I’ll leave you alone?”
“Follow me.”
We walk outside and I pull my sunglasses from my hair where they’ve been acting as a headband. My blonde, blunt cut hits my shoulders again.
He points in the direction I’ve come from. “Go back to the first intersection and turn left at the log pile. About two miles up on your left there’s a road that Ts. Turn left again. It winds around but you can’t miss the big inn.”
“Thank you.” I head for the car but before I’ve gone only a few steps, I turn. “What’s your mom’s name?”
“Ivory.”
“I look forward to meeting her.”
“Hold those benevolent thoughts until your first session.” He smiles, and it completely changes his face. I’ve been wrong to judge Elyk. His face shifted from beady eyed to civilized. And despite his hick exterior, and weird name, he isn’t the least bit illiterate. He’d gotten the word vociferous in the puzzle. No slouch there. And I’ll be shocked if I don’t find myself back at his store needing directions. Although I might get points for knowing a lot of words, I have no internal compass.
Lost is one word I’m very familiar with, more so now that I have no one to call family.
