Ashes.

They stood on the dock, waiting with their father and aunt. It was late for a boat to be on the lake, and the clouds matched the water, both a dull grey.

“Will Mom know where we are putting her?” Mary asked. She stood against her aunt, holding both of her hands. Joan looked down, forced a smile and nodded, stroking the child’s neatly braided hair. The boys stood stiffly in jackets and ties with wingtip shoes that matched their father’s. He held a simple brass urn.

“Here’s Walter, right on time,” he said, looking at his watch as a beige pontoon boat entered the cove. Walter wore a shirt and tie under his bulky winter coat.

“Hi Walter!” Mary shrieked, waving her mittened hand as he brought the boat alongside the dock. Walter smiled and pointed at her.

“Who’s that pretty girl?” he asked.

“It’s meee!” she yelled again. Walter held the boat steady as they got on.

“Okay, not too far,” their father said. “Just to the middle of the cove.” Walter put the boat in drive, giving it very little gas before idling the engine and letting it drift silently toward the open water. He reversed the engine slightly, arresting the boat’s drift, making it still in the middle of the cove. “Okay, let’s all go up to the front.” They filed through the small gate onto the foredeck, causing a noticeable dip. “Is this okay up here Walt?”

“Yep. It’s fine as long as we aren’t moving.”

Their father held the urn. He removed the top and stared at it. “Walt, this thing is sealed…somehow. It’s…sealed.”

“Pass ‘er back here,” Walter said, reaching out to take the urn. He lifted a bench seat behind the helm and took out a tool box.

“Okay!” Joan said, trying to redirect the children’s attention. “Let’s all just look out this way—at the trees and the water…and think about how much your mom loved you all. Do any of you remember something specific you’d like to share?”

Their father grumbled. “You’re going to need a wrench or something to get that thing open. Those pliers won’t do a damn thing.” The two boys looked back where their father and Walter struggled with the urn. He glanced up and saw the boys watching. “You two do as your aunt says. Look at the water and think about your mom! Eyes up front!”

None of the children spoke. “No one?” asked Joan, forcing another smile. “Maybe I’ll go first.” She made eye contact with each of them. “I remember the first time I met your mother—”

“I specifically told those idiots not to seal the damn thing because we’d be spreading the ashes!”

“—and thinking your mom was the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. Your mom had the most…the most elegant way of saying her W’s. She spoke like a princess—”

“Just jimmy the goddamn thing off! Who cares about the urn?”

“Alan, please!” Walter said. “Go stand with your family and let me…just go up there.” Their father walked to the front of the boat but stayed in the enclosed area.

“I was just telling them how beautiful their mother was. Wasn’t she?”

“Oh my God, yes,” he said. “Let’s see, when I first met her she was speaking French to another girl, and—this is actually somewhat amusing. So I walked up with—”

“I know this story. Can you please talk to your children? Tell them.”

“Oh. Right. So anyway kids, your mother was standing there speaking in French to another girl and I was walking across campus with Leo Harvey, who went on to study law at Duke and is now a federal judge. So I casually said to Leo, ‘I have got to meet that girl’—not knowing that they went to high school together. And then Leo just walked right up to her. I nearly keeled over, and he said ‘Miss Martha Tillman, meet Mr. Alan Charles’ and your mom turned to this other girl whose name I can’t remember and said to her, in French mind you, ‘He has two first names. How odd.’ And the other girl said ‘He’s cute. Talk to him.’ Now, I didn’t speak a lick of French, so to speak, but Leo did, and when we walked away, good old Leo tells me what they––”

“Wait, Mom spoke French?” William asked.

“And Spanish, Italian, and a little bit of Portuguese. She studied it in college––literature and poetry in all the romance languages.”

“I never heard her speak French,” Peter said.

Joan reached out and took his shoulder, “Well, when you kids came along, she found something she loved more than romance languages.”

“Um, that’s right,” he said, taking her cue. “In fact, when we met, she once told me that she lived her days in English but all her dreams were in French. And what happened—” He paused as emotion unexpectedly clogged his throat. He coughed to push the words through. “What happened to her, she did not deserve.”

“No, she didn’t,” Joan agreed quickly.

“Why’d Mom get sick?” Peter asked.

Their father and aunt didn’t say anything, and when they did, they briefly talked over each other. Joan motioned for him to continue. “Well, no one knows how this all works. Your mom had a severely schizophrenic uncle who was a––”

“Her uncle had schizophrenia, not was a schizophrenic,” Joan corrected. “He was a person who had a disease. The disease was not him.”

“Oh right, that’s how you say it now. Well, anyway, her uncle had this condition years ago, back when it was poorly understood. So there is some evidence that it’s a family thing.”

“Am I gonna get it?” Mary asked.

“No honey!” Joan answered. “No you won’t. Don’t any of you worry––you’re all fine.” She pointed, drawing the father’s attention to Walter who was handing the open urn up toward the front of the boat.

“Wow. How’d you break that seal?” he asked Walter. “You pry it loose?” Walter didn’t answer, and returned to the helm to put the tools away under the seat. “Okay, so how do you want to do this? All at once or a little at a time?”

“Maybe,” Joan said, “maybe it would be nice if everyone got a chance. You know, if everyone had a part?” Her eyebrows were up again, signaling to their father.

“Sure, okay.” He took the cap off the urn and gently sifted some ashes into it. “To the eldest,” he said, handing the brass cap to William.

“Do I just dump it out?”

“Do it however you want to do it,” Joan told him.
William looked at the gritty, grey ashes that had been his mother. He poured them into the lake. He saw the ash pause at the water’s surface then slowly sift down in a cloud. Some particles, bone fragments, dropped quickly away while a film of finer dust clung to the surface. He handed the lid back to his father.

“Next up?” Their father turned to Peter, repeating the process of pouring a small amount of ash into the cap. Peter took it and did the same as William, pouring it over the side of the boat.

“And now Mary, your turn.”

“No. I don’t want to.”

“Okay, I suppose we can just do the rest all at once.”

“No, I mean I don’t want to put Mom in the lake. It’s cold and dark down there. I want her to come home.”

“But honey,” Joan said, “this is the place your mother loved most.”

“No she didn’t! Not the bottom of the lake! She liked being here with us. Why can’t she come back and be above the fireplace.” Joan nodded at their father. His face was blank. She nodded at him again, her eyes wide for emphasis. “Walter,” he said, turning away from Joan and staring at the water. “Walter, can you seal this back up?”

“Seal ‘er up? Well I guess. I mean, I got some silicone back at the house. I can bring that by tonight. Maybe epoxy first then silicone.” He handed the urn to Mary and she sat with it on her lap. Walter started the engine and brought the pontoon boat back to the dock. “Yeah, epoxy first and then silicone,” he said to no one in particular. “That’s what we’ll do.”

“And I want to have a fire tonight,” Mary said. “Mom liked to sit by the fire,”

The boat bumped the dock and their father reached out to hold the post. “Fellas. Help your sister off first. ”

Mary hugged the urn with both arms and stepped off the boat. “I don’t need their help,” she said, and walked up the dock to the house.