Her eyelids grew heavy, and she dozed again.
Roman woke her at Gainesville. He’d put his sunglasses back on.
“I need better directions,” he said. “The swamp is huge. Where are we going, exactly?”
She gave directions, then allowed her eyelids to fall again, hoping for sleep. Instead, her thoughts dropped into the groove scored by the words he’d said at lunch.
A condition of sale.
Shocking, how deep they’d cut her.
When she’d rushed back from Bolivia and discovered that nearly all of the clothes and pictures and decorations in her grandmother’s apartment—all the stuff that made home look like home—had already been carted away, Ashley had felt betrayed. The hospice worker she met with later said Susan hadn’t wanted Ashley to have to sort through it all. She asked me to put some boxes for you in the trailer, the woman had said, intending comfort. Ashley had tried to wrap that knowledge around herself, but it had only made her feel more like crying.
Not because the opportunity to sort through her grandmother’s property had been taken from her, but because she understood that Grandma had made this choice, this deliberate decision, to exclude her. And that she hadn’t made it once or twice, on a whim, but over and over again.
She must have made it daily, for months—this decision not to call on Ashley. Not to bring her back. Not to get her involved.
Roman’s bald statement made it so much worse because what he was describing wasn?
?t even a decision not to involve Ashley. It was a conspiracy against her, a condition of the sale, and she couldn’t make sense of it unless she allowed herself to believe the absolute worst.
Grandma hadn’t wanted her by her side to help her cross over into death. She hadn’t wanted her to carry on the legacy at Sunnyvale, to step into the shoes, the role, that she’d been training for since she was thirteen years old. To her grandmother, all Ashley was worth was a handful of boxes stashed in a junky old trailer.
The person she had loved best in the world hadn’t loved her back. Or not as much as Ashley loved her.
It turned out to hurt just as much the third time as it had the first two.
She turned as far away from Roman as she could get without leaving the seat and pushed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets.
A loud bang brought her head up.
Roman glanced in the rearview mirror.
Bang.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
Ashley spun around, but she couldn’t see the trailer well from inside the Escalade. “What is it?”
“The door’s blown open.”
He signaled and began to slow.
Bang.
“Sorry,” she said, before she remembered that she was supposed to be torturing him, not apologizing. “The latch is kind of crap.”
“It’s done this before?”
“It used to do this all the time.”
“Why didn’t you fix it?”
“We tried to fix it, but it doesn’t really cooperate.”
They were on a busy state highway, only two lanes, with a narrow shoulder. Roman pulled as far over as he could get and cut the engine. “You have a screwdriver back there?”
“Maybe. Why, what are you going to do?”