A Column of Ash Read online

of Ash

  Copyright 2014 by Roman Theodore Brandt

  Table of Contents

  A Column of Ash

  About the Author

  A Column of Ash

  We’re sitting in the flickering blue glow of the TV when I say to Mom: “I might move away.”

  She’s quiet for a minute, the cigarette burning down to a column of ash between her fingers, and then she coughs. “Away,” she says, like she’s learning a new word.

  “Away, yeah.”

  She looks over at me, leaning down to flick the ashes into the ash tray on the coffee table in front of her. “Away where?” she wants to know, smiling a little, sort of like a shark.

  “College,” I tell her, and the living room is quiet except for the TV, with its happy people and candy bars and bottles of pop dancing on the screen.

  Mom inhales smoke and breathes it out of her nose like a dragon, laughing a little, but it’s more of a rumbling cough. “Yeah, well,” she says at last. “You’re both leaving me I guess. You and your brother." She stares at the TV for a few seconds with her eyes full of game shows, and then she adds, "Just like your father.”

  My stomach tightens up, and my heart is pounding. She picks up her beer can and realizes it’s empty and puts it back onto the coffee table, flicking more ashes into the ash tray.

  “I’ll be home for holidays, Mom.”

  She grins and raises her eyebrows and says to the people on TV: “You hear that? He'll be coming home on holidays.” The audience roars with laughter.

  “I’m not staying here anymore.”

  That shuts her up for a minute. I’m sure our minds are identical for a few seconds: my life playing like a filmstrip but from two different points of view. Her hysterical high-speed drives through fields and yards with me and my brother in the backseat, occasionally waking us up to move to a new house in the early morning hours. Be quiet, she’d say as I carried a lamp out to the car; don’t you break that. My father used to tell me stories about how she used to try to smother me as a baby when I woke her up in the night.

  “No one’s making you stay,” she says at last, putting the film strip back into storage in her mind. She looks over at me and flicks ashes onto my shoe, and then she smiles again, retreating back to her side of the couch. “I love you, though.”

  “I know.”

  She looks at the TV again, her face pinched. “Jeremy,” she says. “I’m so old.”

  “You aren’t old, Mom.”

  “I am; I’m old,” she says, putting her free hand up to her face.

  “I’ll only be an hour away, with Jim.”

  "Oh, I know," she says. She brushes her hair back and takes a final drag off of her cigarette and then drops the butt into her beer can instead of the ash tray. She stands up, thin and sick in her pajamas, and stretches. Her thin form is backlit by the glow of the TV screen for a second. “You’ll both be home on holidays and we’ll be a happy family, I guess,” she says.

  I smile at her and wish for words to help her or a weapon to put her out of her misery.

  “Who’s going to love me when I’m old and my sons are gone, Jeremy?”

  “Mom, we aren't—“

  “Who’s going to be there with all of you leaving me? I can’t win.”

  “Mom, it’s just—“

  “I know, I know.” She smiles and sighs and coughs a little. “You don’t have to say anything, Jeremy.”

  She picks up the beer can and walks into the kitchen, turning on the light for a second to throw the can away, then off again. Her footsteps echo down the hallway to her room. The apartment is silent after that.

  A few weeks pass, and Mom seems to forget about my announcement, except she's in super mom mode. She's chain smoking and making dinner and trying to spend more time with me, and she even invites Jim home for dinner.

  Jim sends me a text: "Is Mom high?"

  I send one back: "Probably."

  On the day Jim takes the bus home, Mom spends the whole afternoon cooking. "Oh Jeremy," she says from the kitchen. "Isn't this wonderful? The whole family together again." I hear her chopping onions, and her chopping becomes a little more violent. "Well," she says. "Most of us anyway." She means our father.

  The cigarette butts are piling up in the ash trays around the house. I've got the TV on in the living room, but I'm not watching it. I'm folding laundry.

  "Jim's spending the night," Mom says from the kitchen. I can hear her scraping chopped onion into a pan. "In your room, of course."

  Jim and I shared a room before he left. I've still got our bunk beds. "Mom, is everything okay?" I ask her.

  "What makes you ask that?" she wants to know.

  "Never mind."

  She laughs. "A mother can't be happy to see both of her sons, I guess," she mumbles. I can smell garlic sizzling in the pan with the onion. "Why don't we rent some movies tonight?" she asks from the kitchen.

  Jim's bus is late, and Mom's smile straightens out into a grimace at the Greyhound terminal. "Damn it," she says. "What if he doesn't show up?"

  I don't say anything, but I stare at my hands on the bench we're sitting on.

  "All that food," she says.

  Her hands are tight little balls at her sides, and it makes me nervous.

  Jim's bus pulls in with the air brakes hissing and Mom stands up, instantly happy again. I follow her out onto the platform and we watch most of the passengers get out of the bus. Jim's still on the bus.

  "Oh hell," Mom mumbles. "Come on, Jim. I need a cigarette."

  Finally, he emerges, his giant suitcase bouncing off the folding bus door. He smiles at me and then at Mom, and the two smiles are completely different. "Hello, Mom," he says.

  She smiles, baring her teeth. "I thought your bus got lost or something," she says.

  Jim glances at me, then back at her.

  "So," she says, putting an arm around each of us and walking us back into the terminal. "How do you like college?"

  "Oh, it's fine," he says.

  "I've told all my friends that I've got a son in college," she tells him. "In fact," she adds, jostling me with her arm around my shoulder. "Jeremy here is going to college, too. So, that's two reasons to brag."

  We're almost out the front doors now, about to start the walk across the parking lot to Mom's car. On the way to the car, she lights a cigarette and blows smoke out through her nose. It's the longest gesture in history; slow motion incineration.

  "It'll be a bit lonely, I guess," she says at last, letting us go as we approach the car. Her smile is gone. She opens her door and looks across the roof of the car at me, not smiling, then she turns to Jim behind her. "I guess that's the price you pay."

  Then, she's in the car, and Jim rolls his eyes.

  "So Jim," Mom says over her potatoes. "Have you decided on a major?"

  "Oh Mom, that's such a boring question," he says.

  Mom's fist slams down onto the table, making the silverware jump, and his eyes are huge. I look from him to Mom and back to him. "Sorry, guys," she says at last. "There was a fly or something."

  "I figured I'd get a PhD in dance and then work as a hooker," Jim says.

  We all laugh, and then Mom says, "If you don't want to talk about it, that's fine."

  We eat in silence for a few minutes.

  "Jeremy's going to college, too," Mom says again.

  "You said that already," Jim says.

  She stabs her meatloaf with her fork so hard the table shakes. "Same college as you," she says.

  "Mom, I already told him that part."

  "My boys are leaving me," she says quietly, and shoves the bite of meatloaf into her mouth.

  After Mom goes to bed, Jim and I stay up talking in my room. He's sent me back up to the to
p bunk for the night.

  "You'll like college," Jim says from the bunk below me.

  I stare at the ceiling and sigh.

  "You'll make friends and it's a lot of fun," he says. After a few minutes, he laughs. "And best of all, Mom isn't there."

  "She's not so bad, I guess."

  He turns over in his bunk. "Yes she is," he says.

  Jim kicks my bunk in the middle of the night to wake me up, and it scares the shit out of me. I sigh and try to get comfortable again.

  "Jeremy, you awake?" he wants to know.

  "What?"

  "I'm sorry I didn't take you with me," he says from somewhere below me.

  The ceiling is starting to come back into focus above me, and I look over at the window, then the closet where some of Jim's stuff still takes up the top shelf. "Yeah, well," I tell him. "You never do."

  The next day, Mom is all smiles again with another column of ash burning between her fingers. She makes us breakfast and beams at us from her side of the table. She sighs and sips her coffee. "My boys," she says at last.

  "Mom," Jim says. "Why don't I stay another night or so and get Jim packed for college?"

  I stare at Jim, then I look over at Mom. Her smile is gone.

  "Fall semester doesn't start for two weeks," she says.

  Everyone is quiet for a while except for the sounds of forks clinking against plates.

  "I figured he could just go ahead and come with me," he says.

  "Did you?" she asks.

  "Yeah."

  I don't want to be at the table anymore. I want to leave. I want to run away.

  "I'll be driving Jeremy myself," she says quietly. She stabs at her sausage and the table shakes. "Just like I drove you the first time."

  "The only time," he says.

  "When you left me," she mumbles.

  I want to vanish into the wood grain of the chair.

  She smiles at him. "Seems your father started a trend."

  "That's not fair," Jim tells her.

  She picks up her coffee cup and smashes it on the table, sending coffee and ceramic in all directions, soaking our food and splattering her face and clothes. She gets up and leaves the table without saying anything else, her cigarette smoldering in her plate of eggs, and goes down the hall to the bathroom. Jim and I look at each other and I smile at him. "We're a happy family." I tell him, and he laughs a little.

  Down the hall, Mom turns on the shower, and I can hear the curtain opening.

  "She's going to start screaming, now," Jim says.

  From the bathroom, Mom's screams of rage are loud enough to wake the pot heads next door.

  This visit is just like the last. Jim has come home and left on holidays since he went to college. Mom drives us to the Greyhound terminal in her car, with Jim in the front this time and me in the back. None of us say anything until we get there.

  Once we're parked and getting out of the car, Mom starts to pull Jim's suitcase out of the trunk. Jim comes around to grab it from her.

  "I can get that, Mom."

  They both have hold of it for a second, staring at one another. "Alright," she says, smiling, and she lets go of the suitcase. She slams the back door and then the driver door.

  We follow her into the terminal and she leads us to the same bench that she and I sat on yesterday.

  "My bus will probably be here soon," Jim says, and Mom sighs.

  "Coming home again soon," she says, sitting down. She laughs a little. "Halloween, I assume."

  "Halloween," he says.

  The car ride home is quiet and uncomfortable until we're almost home. Smoke coils from the ash tray out the windows, filling the lungs of birds with cyanide. As we're turning onto our street, Mom says: "It was nice having Jim over for a visit."

  "I hadn't seen him in a while," I tell her.

  "Oh I know," she says, her voice getting quiet. Her fingers tighten around the steering wheel. "It's like he was never here to begin with."

  I stare at the houses passing outside my window.

  "You know," she says, "He ought to visit more often. I hope you visit more than he does."

  She doesn't have to ask; it's understood that I'm going to visit more than Jim does.

  "It's a good thing you still have those bunk beds," Mom says, and then she stops talking altogether. When we get home, she gets out and goes inside, leaving me in the car.

  My phone vibrates, and it's a text from Jim. "Sorry I couldn't take you with me," it says.

  At first, I figure I might as well not text back. The whole thing makes me sad. After a minute of staring at the words, though, I hit reply.

  "It's okay. You never do." Send.

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Roman is not my legal name, but it's the name I've chosen to call myself because it sounds much more interesting than my real name. I was born nearly thirty years ago in the Midwestern frontier. I am an indie author, which makes me part of a very large group of authors who write independently of traditional publication. I have a lot of respect for authors who are able to publish traditionally, because it's a difficult business to break into that way. It takes a great deal of talent and determination.

  That being said, I believe that I am also among some of the most beautiful and innovative minds of my generation just by being an author, and especially by doing so independently. If you are an indie author, kudos to you. You are doing something most people assume is impossible.

  A Column of Ash is dedicated to my partners in writing, Millicent Rosethorn and Chelsey Barker.

  Also by Roman Theodore Brandt:

  Drive

  Ghosts

  Michael

  Midnight at the Bowling Alley

  Country Roads are Why I Moved Away

  The Last Bus Home

  Table of Contents