Good Omen
Miles of cobalt-blue sky stretched around them for miles, tinting the pine trees and even the brush dark blue all around them. Climbing out of her sleeping bag she yawned, stretching. Memory fell over her, dusking her eyes in shadow; somehow, he slept on, holding onto their cooler like a long-lost teddy bear.
Selecting a backpack that she had lugged all of the way up an amazingly long foot trail, she carelessly left the cave's mouth, barefoot and still in her nightclothes.
Alone, she clambered up a nearby outcropped "lip" of rock, which jutted sturdily out over a massive clay-red canyon. Settled on her pajamaed haunches, she settled at the tip of that plateau, her arms akimbo and he hair coming lose from a ponytail in the open air. Locks of reddish-gold flowed around her shoulder, sticking to the tank top she had spent the night in. She looked like a fox and was one.
Well, as far as he was concerned.
"I can't get you up this early when we're on the road," He joked, and settled down beside her on the rock. "Aww, you're crying again, Lee."
"I can't help it," She said, "It's so beautiful. Meemaw would have loved it."
He smiled, cuddling her against a chest that, she couldn't help but notice, was covered in a layer of stubble. She didn't complain about the smell that still clung to him from the day before; her own was probably just as bad, maybe worse. There hadn't been an opportunity to bathe. He lifted himself away from her body and studied the rugged impression she made.
Her hair was wild from the miles they had traversed and the night she had slept; a long, bloody scratch from where she had tripped and fallen, running down her arm like a sorrowful tear, turning black in the slowly growing sunlight. She had tripped and not felt it until he pointed it out.
That was a reflection of their relationship; she never seemed to hurt until he mentioned that, maybe, she should be.
"Is she where I left her?" He asked stupidly, and she had a right to snort derisively at him as she unbuckled the top flap of his backpack and withdrew a small porcelain box from it. She had said something about how her grandmother had loved porcelain; collected it. But every scrap upon her death had gone to the Charleston Historical Society.
For a moment, she rested the container in her lap, unsure of how one does such a thing. When she looked to Adam for advice, she found him squinting into waning moonshine, slugging coffee out of a battery-opperated mug and scratching indiscriminately at his balls, which were safely contained in a pair of flame-printed boxer shorts.
She had to laugh; as her MeeMaw used to say, in derision and disgust, "Oh, Amy, he's such a man!", with negative emphasis on the word 'man'.
MeeMaw had grown to tolerate Adam, after years of insisting that, maybe, Lita should have taken up with Matt. Adam was a bit more self-deprecatory and less serious than Matt could be; something Lita needed in her life on a daily basis, for otherwise she could lose herself in a sea of angst.
But, as far as MeeMaw was concerned, Adam was forever and always 'That Man'. Sometimes "That man who makes you cry'.
The man who always, always made MeeMaw revert to the past and reffer to her modern, sophisticated granddaughter Lita by her rooted, 'billie birth name: Amy.
MeeMaw claimed to tolerate the fact that Lita was her preferable identity and, after months of soul-drubbing days on the road, accepted that her granddaughter would only answer to a name that the boys called her non-stop on a daily basis.
She was fortunate that they hadn't chosen 'Bitch'.
There were so many things about her MeeMaw that caused Lita a yearning pause; she missed her spirited, cajun-tinged voice, waffling through the phone line. She missed coming home on an odd Sunday off and sitting down to a Sunday dinner fraught with Matt's political opinions and Jeff's laid-back attitude, all leavened by Adam's peacemaking soul and MeeMaw's raucous laugh.
She had cursed when her neck injury occurred, but it had happened for a reason; giving her time to be with MeeMaw in her last days.
She pried the lid off of the top of the container. Inside, to her surprise, was a little container that wasn't unlike a Tupperware dish. She burped the lid, and Adam put down his coffee, assisting her. Like her mother's netsuke dolls, there was yet another layer beneath the plastic.
Her MeeMaw was in a paper sack.
Carefully, she withdrew the bag from its container. Adam took the vessels from her lap and tucked them back into his backpack, as she opened the sack.
The ashes were ashes...pinkish, with small, small lumps marring the smooth surface.
His hands returned, to find her flexed knee, "I wish I knew how you feel."
"You don't," She proclaimed, "But you probably will, soon enough."
He didn't want to think of the death of his mother, a woman who had single-handedly kept him on a straight and narrow path for years. Instead, he wrapped his arms around her.
"I love you."
She didn't know if that was true; she'd love to believe that it was, at this point in her life. Lita didn't want to analyze it anymore; she was exhausted. Opening up the bag, she held it up, and a good, stiff breeze began to blow what was left of her favorite relative over the canyon.
And the sun emerged from behind a cloud, winking over a rock, a good enough prophecy to begin the day with.