But before I could stop my mouth, I blurted a question at his retreating back. “What does the fire leave behind? Destruction? Death?”

Drew didn’t respond until he was almost out of sight. Then he turned and, walking backward for a few steps, he called out, “Ash—the fire leaves ash.”

CHAPTER 14

“He had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O’Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother’s velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster.”

? Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

Five weeks after I arrived in Tennessee I ran out of jokes.

On the Monday that I ran out of jokes, Billy, Joe, and Marissa were sitting with Momma while she dozed, Marissa having decided to stay for supper after her shift ended. I was in the kitchen cleaning up the dinner dishes with Cletus and Jethro, lost in my thoughts while drying pots and pans.

I was thinking about Drew and wondering where he was. He hadn’t come to the house for supper. He’d been MIA since our poetry recitation in the woods. I wondered obliquely if the rain, which had been falling non-stop for the last two days, was responsible for his absence.

Cutting through my musings, I heard my mother’s voice calling my name, and my hands stilled just as Billy appeared in the doorway.

“Ash, Ash—come quick. Momma says she has something to tell you.” He paused just long enough to wave me forward then dashed back down the hall.

I set the pot down and barely registered the sound as it fell to the floor behind me. I was already jogging out of the kitchen and down the hallway to the den.

Momma’s eyes were open, and she looked completely lucid. I tucked this vision of her away, took a snapshot with my mind—because it occurred to me that this might be her last lucid moment.

“Hey, Momma. I’m here.” I reached my hand out and she gripped it immediately.

“Ashley.” Her eyes were wide, and the usual urgency was present. Abruptly, I worried that she would say something profound instead of her usual random bits of wisdom.

I was terrified that this time, she would say something real and necessary and earth shattering, and it would mean the end of her.

But my fears were assuaged when she said, “Ashley, the roosters. We have too many roosters. I told your friend Sandra about it while she was here. You need to butcher them, all but one, or else it’ll cause problems for the hens, and they won’t lay as many eggs. Roosters need a purpose. If you don’t give a rooster a purpose, they make trouble.”

I gave her a small smile and nod, the knot of fear in my chest easing. “Okay, I’ll do that. Tomorrow I’ll butcher the roosters.”

She nodded, relaxed back to her pillows, and sighed. “Good. That’s good. Maybe you can make some fried chicken. Also, I think I promised Julianne at the library a bird. Do you mind?”

I shook my head. “I’ll call her this week.”

“Thank you,” she said intently, her eyes moving between mine. Then she waited, watching me like she expected me to say something else.

I stiffened when I realized she was waiting for me to tell her a joke, and my throat tightened when my mind went blank. The dash into the den, my worry when I found her so lucid and awake, the fear that seized me when I thought she was going to finally share something actually urgent had pushed all the jokes from my mind.

My heart rate doubled as her eyes moved over my face, her expectant smile slipping.

“Why did the rooster go to KFC?” Billy, standing at my shoulder, blurted this question.

I glanced at him and, to my surprise, found that all my brothers were also in the room. Billy’s eyes flickered to mine then back to my mother as he stated the punchline. “Because he wanted to see a chicken strip.”

We fell silent for half a second, then my momma wrinkled her nose and shook her head. But she was also laughing. “William, that is a terrible joke.”

“I’ve got one,” Roscoe volunteered. He was standing on the other side of the bed holding my mother’s hand. “Why did the rooster cross the road?”

“Why, Roscoe?” Her face split with a grin.

“Because he needed to cock-a-doodle-do something.”

Light laughter lit up the room and Duane snorted, “That’s the dumbest joke I’ve ever heard.”

“Then you tell one,” Roscoe challenged, narrowing his eyes good-naturedly at his brother.

“Fine, I will. And it will be awesome. It’ll blow all the rest of your sad chicken jokes out of the water.”

“We’re waiting.” Beau pushed Duane’s shoulder.

“Any day now.” Jethro called from where he stood by Momma’s feet, his arms crossed over his chest.

“Okay, prepare yourselves.” Duane looked at me, then Momma, and cleared his throat theatrically. “Why did the rooster cross the road, roll in the mud, and cross the road again?”

His red eyebrows were arched over his blue eyes as he glanced around the room with cocky—no pun intended—dramatic hyperbole and waited.

“No one is going to take a guess?”

“Just tell us the punchline and stop egg-zaggerating,” Beau said and winked at Momma.

“That would be most egg-cellent,” Momma said, managing to return Beau’s wink.

“Fine,” Duane said, finally giving us the punchline. “It was because he was a dirty double crosser.”

Most of my brothers groaned and I chuckled.

Cletus, however, frowned and shook his head. “I don’t get it.”

This went on for a while, the boys telling terrible chicken jokes while my momma laughed and bantered. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to miss a single second. I tried to remember every laugh, every word, every smile. I was taking a video with my mind, filling myself with the memory, greedily clinging to the feeling of being surrounded by my family and sharing this happy moment.

With every joke, my heart lifted then dropped when the laughter dissipated. I worried it would be the last.

Sometime later, when the last joke did come, and we all looked around—at my momma who was asleep and at each other—a crushing sense of finality swept over me. The seven of us sat quietly in a stillness that felt like a punctuation mark.

It may not have been the end of the story, but it was definitely the end of a chapter.

***

That night I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned on my cot, unable to get comfortable. The rainstorm should have helped, a gift of nondescript background noise, but it didn’t. The muffling of the rain made me anxious. My brain wouldn’t allow me to consider that the sound of it grated against my nerves because I hadn’t seen Drew since the rain began on Saturday.

Around 2:00 a.m., I left the den, taking my quilt with me, and tiptoed to the backdoor. My plan was to stand on the back porch and listen to the rainstorm without the obstruction of walls.

Rain sounded different in the Smoky Mountains than it did in Chicago. The difference between a rainstorm in the city and a rainstorm in the mountains was the difference between hearing a song over the speaker of your cell phone versus listening to a live concert.

In the city, the sound was dull, rain hitting pavement, dumpsters, awnings, windows, and buildings. The sound was all treble with no bass.

In the old mountains, however, rain hit the surface of every leaf, every stone, every stream. It echoed, it surrounded, it felt layered and rich and comforting.

Paired with the smell of fresh, clean water, intermittent distant flashes of lightning, and the nearly constant gentle rolling of thunder—the soft kind that is felt in the chest and subtly shakes the ground—the storm was more than a sound. It was an experience that touched every one of my senses.

Standing on the porch, I closed my eyes, cleared my mind, and breathed in the storm.

And then I cried.

I didn’t know why I was crying. Well, other than the obvious reasons. Really, the issue was that I didn’t know why I was crying now.

I hadn’t cried since the day I found out about my mother’s prognosis. In the last month I’d come close a few times, but the tears hadn’t come. I’d been able to hold them at bay and soldier on.

Maybe it was the rain making the world new and fresh; maybe it was the evening spent laughing with my brothers, enjoying them in a way I’d never done before; maybe it was the feeling of certainty that these next days would be full of lasts: the last time I’d laugh with my mother, the last time I’d see her smile, the last time I’d hear her voice.

Maybe it was everything.

“Ash?”

My back stiffened and I rolled my lips between my teeth at the sound of Drew saying my name. His voice sounded rumbly, sleepy, like he’d just woken up.

“Drew?”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t turn around. “What are you doing here?”

“I was asleep on the couch in the family room. I woke up when I heard you come out here. Are you crying?”

“No. I’m not crying.” I shook my head, still giving him my back. “I am most definitely not crying. Nope. Not. Crying. I’m eye cleansing…with saltwater…made from my tear ducts.” I sniffled, and I felt the corners of my mouth turn down. Try as I might I couldn’t stiffen my chin or squeeze my eyes shut enough to stem the tears.