Chapter Four Ashley
FOUR ASHLEY
The stains would never come out of the old wide-plank kitchen floor. Ashley understood that. She’d understood it even as she spent much of her afternoon scrubbing at the pine floorboards with just about every cleaning product in the house.
“You’re the only one who’s gonna notice,” Malcolm said, passing her the joint he’d just lit up.
It was nearly nine. Gram had headed upstairs to bed shortly after dinner, saying she was tired—the canning project had done her in.
She’d been strangely quiet during dinner. On edge, upset about breaking the jar. “Bumbling old fool,” she’d called herself. “Maybe you shouldn’t allow me in the kitchen.”
“It’s your kitchen, Gram,” Ash had told her. “If you leave the cooking to me, we’ll all suffer. And Malcolm will definitely stop coming for supper on Fridays.”
Malcolm came each Friday, and called days before to ask what was on the menu, to put in requests and sweet-talk Gram into making his favorites: chicken and dumplings, lasagna, pot roast, berry pie or chocolate cake for dessert. The Friday dinners were a highlight of all of their weeks.
After dinner, they’d all settled in the living room to watch TV, just like usual.
Gram loved the cooking shows: especially the silly contests where chefs were handed a basket of strange ingredients and given an hour to come up with something great.
Ash and Gram were on the couch, Malcolm was in the big recliner.
But Gram was pretty much silent until announcing she was going to turn in early.
“Don’t you want to see how the sauerkraut cupcakes turn out?” Malcolm had asked.
“Not tonight, dear,” Gram said, already on her way out of the room.
“Shit,” Ashley hissed when Gram was out of earshot. She’d gone too far showing Gram the letter, telling her she wanted to go to Boone’s Ferry. She’d handled it all wrong.
“I’d totally try a sauerkraut cupcake,” Mal said, glassy eyes fixed on the TV. Then he pulled out his phone and did a voice-to-text note: “Business idea: a cupcake bakery where each cupcake has a surprise ingredient. Sauerkraut, beets, ghost peppers.”
After a bit of wheedling, Ashley had convinced Malcolm to leave the cooking show and head back into the kitchen to help clear the table, do the dishes, and put away the leftovers. Now they sat at the table, drinking beer and sharing the rest of the joint Mal had brought.
Rather than relaxed, though, Malcolm seemed anxious, which Ashley recognized as his I’ve got a new no-fail business idea kind of energy. This, like their back-and-forth debates over the dinner menu, was expected from Mal.
Malcolm was always searching for the next big idea. It was an endless cycle: he’d come up with a plan, put all his time, energy, and money into it, and then before it ever got off the ground, he’d lose interest and jump to something new. He was like Mom in so many ways.
Back in May, he’d decided to start a butterfly farm: ordered cages, tented nets, plants, nectar, and caterpillars.
The caterpillars turned to butterflies before he had food and plants ready for them, so he opened up the tent and let them all go.
He’d gone into business with his friend Seth, building wooden yurt kits for people, but only sold one.
Last year he’d started a silk-screened T-shirt business, but didn’t realize you needed to do the lettering backward.
He was wearing one of his failed T-shirts today, one that he had designed for a local band, Red Dog Daze, with the band name spelled backward at the bottom under a red dog.
After that, he got involved in what Ashley was sure was a pyramid scheme, selling an athletic supplement called GoBroGo Greens.
Between his entrepreneurial endeavors, he worked odd jobs house painting, landscaping, and picking up a few shifts at the local food co-op.
“Ash, I’ve got a new idea to run by you.”
“Yeah?” Ashley’s thoughts were drifting, circling back to Gram in the kitchen, to the letter, to Boone’s Ferry. Would she really go? Make the trip against Gram’s wishes?
“So I’ve been reading this book, The Reason You Haven’t Succeeded,” Mal went on, “and doing all the exercises, and I think I’ve been approaching things all wrong. I haven’t been working in my ‘zone of greatness.’ ”
“Your zone of greatness?”
“Yeah, remember, I told you about what I learned from that seminar I went to last month, how twenty percent of your actions account for eighty percent of your results. And that twenty percent, that’s you working at your best, at the thing you do that no one else does like you do. That’s your zone of greatness.”
She gave a vague nod, not remembering, but also not wanting the self-improvement lecture to go on and on.
Malcolm was always reading books, watching videos, and attending seminars that were supposed to help him be his best version of himself and make him attract wealth and success beyond his wildest dreams.
“So most of my businesses, they’ve been focused on me selling a product, right? But I’ve realized that’s not where my talents lie.” He was sitting on the edge of his chair, bouncing his knees.
“Okay,” Ashley said. “So tell me, what do you see your zone of greatness as being?”
“I’m good with people, right?”
She nodded. Her brother was nothing if not a charmer. It was the reason friends and family and even random strangers kept loaning him money for his endeavors and agreeing to go into business with him.
“Hospitality.”
She blinked at him. “Hospitality?” she repeated.
“I want to open an inn or a bed-and-breakfast. Something small and niche. Do a farm-to-table thing. People love that. Maybe we could even grow food and have chickens and stuff on-site.”
Ashley kept nodding, taking a big hit of weed, holding it, letting it seep in, loosen her up, as she studied her younger brother through the haze of smoke.
He needed a haircut, and she still hadn’t gotten used to the dark, bushy beard he’d been growing out.
His dark brown eyes were bloodshot, but had that contagious little-boy excitement Ashley had always loved.
When you were with him, you started jiggling your knees too, and you believed every word he said, wanting to give him whatever he needed to help bring his latest scheme to life.
“I think this is what the visions I had back in Peru were telling me. Remember, I kept seeing a white house with big, beautiful gardens?”
She nodded.
Malcolm had gone in on a cryptocurrency trading business with his best friend, Dan, two years ago and actually made a little money before getting out of it.
But after their mom died, he promptly spent everything he had on a monthlong “transformative journey” to Peru, where he did ayahuasca with a shaman who turned out not to be a shaman at all, but a dentist from New Jersey.
Malcolm returned from Peru out of money and with the beard, which he’d grown because he’d seen a vision of himself—a more powerful version of himself—with it.
Gram had gone up to bed an hour ago, but they could hear her walking around upstairs, slippered feet dragging across the hardwood floors. The sound of doors opening and closing reverberated through the house.
“So what do you think?” Malcolm asked, both of them eyeing the ceiling.
Ashley took in a deep breath, wondering if now was the time to point out that he had no money, zero experience in hospitality, and no chance of getting a loan.
She smiled and looked back down at him. “I think it sounds great,” she said.
“It is great. It is! But the thing is, I can’t do it on my own. I think that’s why you kept showing up in my visions too. You were there with me at the white house with the gardens. It all makes sense now.”
Ash held her breath and thought, Here we go.
“I was wondering if you might want to invest. Help me buy a place. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy.
I can fix it up, put in the sweat equity.
You don’t have to do any work at all, really.
Just provide a little capital so we can put money down on a place.
Once it’s up and running, the mortgage will be taken care of. ”
She shook her head, which felt heavy on her neck. “Seriously, Mal? I work in a bakery. I’m not sitting on a big pile of cash.”
Ashley worked part-time as a baker at the Tin Whistle, a little café in town.
She’d taken the job when she moved in with Gram.
She was just out of the hospital and had decided to take time off from med school.
Time to focus on getting well. She got to work at four thirty in the morning and baked bread, muffins, cookies, and pies until ten.
There was something soothing about following recipes, mixing dough, the ovens heating up the kitchen, filling the whole place with warm, comforting smells.
Baking made sense to her in a time when few things made sense: not her mother’s death or her own breakdown and hospitalization, not the fact that she’d left medical school, giving up on the dream that had been the sole focus of her life for as long as she could remember.
She felt delicate and fragile then, like a woman made of paper who might blow away or disintegrate in a stiff breeze.
Baking gave her a sense of purpose, made her feel solid and real and like she was accomplishing something useful: making food to nourish people.
She didn’t make much money, and most of what she earned went to pay Gram room and board—something Gram said was unnecessary considering all the work Ashley did around the house, but Ash insisted.
She wasn’t going to be anyone’s freeloader.
And it was just temporary, she told herself and Gram. She’d go back to med school eventually.
But it had been nearly two years. Two years of living with Gram and being a baker at a little café. Not the future everyone (herself included) had envisioned for her.
“I get it, Ash. I do,” Malcolm said now. “It’s just that I really believe this might be it. The thing I’m meant to do. It just feels right, you know? And it’s okay if you can’t help. I know that if it’s truly meant to be, I can manifest it. The things I need will come to me.”
Ashley let out a frustrated chuff of air. The room felt too small, too smoky. She looked down at the joint in her hand, fingertips still stained red.
Sometimes Malcolm’s magical thinking amused her, but sometimes it seemed downright pathetic. For a smart guy, he believed a lot of flaky shit.
The dragging sound intensified above them.
“What, is she moving her furniture around now?” Malcolm asked, brow furrowed.
Ashley looked up at the ceiling and shrugged. She thought of checking, but decided to give her grandmother some privacy.
It was the one of the reasons they’d lived so well together over the last couple of years—they both just kind of knew when to offer help or company and when to give each other space.
She and Gram could almost read each other’s minds, it seemed.
And after the fight about the letter, Ashley was sure Gram would want to be left alone.
“Did you do something to piss her off earlier? Cut the beets the wrong way or something?” Malcolm asked with a sly grin.
Ashley sighed. “Worse,” she admitted. “I told her I was thinking about going up to Boone’s Ferry.”
Mal shook his head. “Ash!”
She sighed deeply, reached into her back pocket, and pulled out the letter, handing it over to her brother. “I found this in Gram’s desk a few days ago.”
Malcolm opened the letter and read it carefully, taking his time. She watched his eyes darting back and forth across the page.
“I don’t understand,” Mal said.
“Look at the date, Mal. Mom was in Boone’s Ferry just days before they found her car.”
“But… why?”
“She was there and Gram knew. Gram hid it from us. Didn’t even tell the police when they asked if we had any idea where she might be.”
Malcolm’s eyes glazed over.
“Today I finally got up the guts to ask Gram about it. I told her I wanted to go up there.”
“Wait, why?” Mal asked. “Why would you go there?”
Was he kidding? Had he not just read the letter?
“To look for answers! If I try to figure out what Mom was doing, who she might have talked to, where she stayed, then—”
He shook his head, folded up the letter, and put it in the envelope.
“Don’t you get it?” she said. “The key to understanding what happened to Mom might be there in Boone’s Ferry! She was there, Mal! And what the hell does she mean by ‘I know everything’? What did she find?”
Mal set the letter on the table.
They were quiet for a few seconds, except for Malcolm drumming his fingers on his craft beer can.
“Ash, there’s nothing to understand. I know what happened to Mom.” He reached across the table, took her hand. “She was depressed. She’d been struggling for a while but she hid it really well. She drove out to the bridge, got out of her car, and jumped.”
Ash stared in disbelief at her brother. He spoke the words in such a slow, cool, practiced way, it was like reciting lines from a play.
“I know how much it hurts. I know you haven’t been able to fully accept it. But you’ve gotta see that this isn’t healthy. You’re looking for answers you’re never going to find. This is what landed you in the—”
Ash pulled her hand away from her brother and snatched the letter from the table. “This is proof!” she growled.
“Proof of what, exactly?” he asked, giving her the worried look she knew too well.
“That there’s more to the story.”
He nodded, pushed his shaggy hair out of his eyes. “Ash,” he said, his voice low and soothing, like he was talking to a small child. “Tell me the truth. Are you seeing her again?”
“Who?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.
“Mom,” he said, voice trembling slightly. “Is… is she back?”