Except for Ash.
He ran his knuckles over the outside of my thigh. I grazed his bicep with my elbow. "I'm sure someone is wondering where you are, love. If you were gone from me, I'd, well," he paused, reaching for my hand, "I'd want to know you were safe."
Yeah, except for Ash.
The truth of the matter was, Ash was a yard sale of exceptions. He was every mismatched emotion, every incomplete set of desires, every vintage experience I'd missed out on along the way. And I could have all of it, all of him, for the low, low price of my dusty, old secrets.
"There you go again with the sweet words," I said, affecting a breezy tone I didn't feel. "Much more of this and you won't be able to maintain your reputation as a tyrant."
He kept his focus on the road though returned his hand to my thigh, offering a quick squeeze. "I'd want to know, Zelda, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that."
And because I didn't run away—as much as any thirty-one-year-old single woman with no debts to pay could run away—to cut and shape myself into bite-sized pieces for anyone ever again, I said, "That's nice of you to suggest but I've never had a mother concerned with stocking my pantry."
He shifted his hand to tangle his fingers with mine. "Now you have my mother. Let's give it a few months and then you can tell me how wonderful it is for her to call in the middle of the day, ranting and raving about how much cinnamon we're going through."
"Whyarewe going through so much cinnamon?"
"Probably all the French toast we eat." He ran his thumb over my palm as he said this, as he allowed us to stop talking about the reasons no one cared to know where I'd gone or why I'd left home. "Seems like the next logical step, no? After the pancakes?"
He continued exploring my palm while I watched the passing scenery. It was different here—Iwas different here—and it was never as obvious as when I glanced upward only to find a wide blanket of sky. Nothing interrupting the serene blue, not a single mountaintop to be found.
"Here's a story I don't share every day," Ash said after the subject of cinnamon was miles behind us. "My parents are hippies. Flower children in the first degree. Peace, love, and the rest of that bullshit."
"Wait, what?" I peered at him. "I've met your mother. She was wearing Tory Burch sandals. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news but Tory didn't follow the Dead, and any true hippie would've gone barefoot before walking around in a luxury brand."
"I don't know anything about sandals but that sounds like my sister's handiwork," he replied.
I thought about Ash's very posh, very beautiful sister. "I can see that."
"From what I've gathered, the free-range parenting approach was out there at the time," he continued. "That's the general thesis of growing up in my family. It was all a bit out there. We had the most random toys and were the only kids at school with homemade almond butter and cherry preserve sandwiches and—"
"Those sound amazing," I interrupted. "Who do I need to beg for some cherry preserves?"
"Offhandedly mention to my mother you like that sort of thing and we'll have a case of jam in the fridge when that season rolls around," he said. "You'll have more than you'll know what to do with."
"If that's my biggest problem, I don't have any problems," I said. "Back to you telling me how extremely difficult it was to have a mother who canned her own preserves for your school lunches. Because I sympathize with that, Ashville. I really do. My heart goes out to you. Thoughts and prayers for your difficult time. I can only imagine the hardships of eating real, unprocessed foods and playing with an abacus or some other wooden instrument because everything at Toys'R'Us was too commercial and consumerist. And clearly, it's had a terrible impact on you. You only have one graduate degree, the refrigerator in your apartment has just a few of the features I'd believed to be exclusive to the space program, and you're driving a car that's older than I am yet fully tricked out with sat-nav and cupholders. I get it. You're struggling big time."
He was gracious enough to look affronted. Good man. "All I'm saying is growing up with recovering hippies for parents is not nearly as amusing as it sounds."
"Yeah, I get it. You have nice shiny things now because you were only allowed to play with sticks and rocks," I replied. "I'm not sure I can allow you to caucus with the Society of Banana Babies unless you want to share a juicy story about the first girl to break your heart or the time you were passed over for something really important and that's why you work your tail off to avoid the tiniest suggestion of failure now."
Ash was silent a minute or two before saying, "I don't think anyone's ever broken my heart."
Without thinkingat all, I replied, "That's funny because everyone breaks my heart."
Why was I doing this? Why now, why here? I'd always managed to keep a lid on it all. No one ever knew my true stories because I never gave them reason to look for one. No one looked at me and saw loss or fear or abandonment. I'd always been cautious about letting loose the frayed, knotty bits because I couldn't take them back once they were out. Yet here I was, unraveling those knots with Ash as my witness, nearly begging him to pull the threads and tear it all apart for me.
"Zelda." He plucked my hand from my lap and slipped his fingers between mine. "What's the Society of Banana Babies?"
"People who grew up in completely, unbelievably, indisputably bananas situations."
"Give it to me. Let me take it off your hands."
My defenses gathered around me, rising and closing until I could only speak in fast, snappish words designed to fill the gaps in my armor. "It's weird. The weirdest thing ever."
"Weren't you the one who said something about being outside the mainstream wasn't grounds for disparagement?"
I knew what he was doing and I fell into the trap regardless. "All right, Ash. You want to know, I'll tell you. My mother and father aren't my mother and father. They're my grandparents. My sister is my mother. Since my life is an actual mistake deep fried in shame and regret, I have interacted with them no more than a handful of times in the last ten years." I yanked my hand back because I needed everything inside the crispy shell of my defense mechanisms. "So, no, Ash, my family hasn't noticed I'm gone. The truth is, they're much happier when my sister-mother's teenage lapse in judgment doesn't trouble them."
