“Now that you are warmed up, we can visit about how long you plan to stick around these parts,” she said.
“I’ve only been here a few days. If I had to decide today and if I had enough money, I would be gone by nightfall—but since I don’t, I will stay until I do,” I answered with a long sigh, and wished I could get in my vehicle and drive to the nearest poker game. “How long doyouintend to live out here in this desolate place?”
“Until they carry me off to be cremated, and then Rosalie will scatter my ashes at the base of the mountain,” she answered without a moment’s hesitation. “She will inherit this trailer and can do whatever she wants with my estate. That’s what the lawyer called it, and I laughed at him. She can sell it, burn it to the ground, or move it behind the Tumbleweed. I’ll be dead, so it won’t matter to me what happens to it.”
A cold chill that had nothing to do with the wind slamming against the trailer chased down my spine. My mother had died when she was only a year older than I was, but I had never even thought about my expiration date. Frank had told me that she’d always wanted to go to Florida for a vacation. She’d wanted to smell the salt air and feel the sand beneath her feet. She had never told me anything like that—but then, I was just a little girl. We took the box her ashes were in to a pretty beach and scattered them into the ocean.
It wouldn’t be kosher for mine to be poured out in the middle of a poker table, would it?
Mama’s death had ended my days in public school—at least for the next eight years. But good ol’ Frank cleaned out the house, put it up for sale, and I left all my little friends behind. Frank and I had good times traveling all over the country, though, staying in hotels and eating at small cafés. He took me to Disney World and Disneyland, to Dollywood and Six Flags Over Texas. We saw all the famous spots, like the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls.
At the age of thirty, I would have traded all that for a bunch of friends I could call when I was lonely or scared or had fallen on hard times—like now.
“I haven’t had roots since I was eight years old. I’m not sure I would ever be able to be anything but a poker-playing nomad.”
“Whether you stay or go is immaterial to me,” Ada Lou said. “As long as Rosie and Scarlett are here, it doesn’t matter who owns the Tumbleweed. Matilda made a small fortune at that little bus stop and café. Then Larry went through it all in a year, from what I heard. But the Tumbleweed is still standing. A man I knew long ago once penned a poem for me and it ended with, ‘So, you can stay or go away. It’s all the same to me.’” She laughed and then finished off her hot chocolate. “Now,” she said, “let me tell you a story about myself.”
“Is it why your bike is named Hilda?” I asked.
“Nope, that’s a different story, but I’ll tell you that one right now. Hilda was my wild aunt—my mother’s sister—that I adored. She rode a cycle in her day, and my mama said she was an abomination unto the Lord. Now, back to my real story.”
For some reason, when she saidstory, a memory of my mother readingHarry Pottersurfaced and made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, so I nodded and settled in to listen.
“I was an addict,” she said. “Not to drugs, alcohol, or gambling—or even sex—but what I suffered was an addiction as real as if it had been any one or a combination of all three.”
“I am not an addict,” I declared.
“Not saying you are, or was, or will be, but I was, and a rather unusual one. I am eighty years old. I came up through the era when we fought for women’s rights, burned our bras, and openly believed in free love. I was in my early twenties when Woodstock happened, and I was there. I heard Creedence Clearwater Revival sing. I brought home a severe hangover and a daughter that was born nine months later. I didn’t even know her father’s name, but I loved my Robin from the moment they laid her in my arms. And I raised her as a single mother in a time when doing that kind of thing was not socially acceptable.”
What has all this got to do with addiction?I wondered.
“It was a time of transition, of morals and values changing, and it was hard for older folks to accept. My parents told me if I went to that place ‘where the devil would roam free’ that they would disown me. I went, and they did.” She paused and took a long breath. “I had my own apartment, so it wasn’t a big deal to a rebellious woman like me, but when they didn’t want anything to do with me or my bastard child, it really hurt.” Her voice trembled, but she went on. “I was a kindergarten teacher and was not rehired. Small towns in the Puritan East did not take to unmarried pregnant women around their children. I liked to cook, so I started selling baked goods out of my apartment. That way I could keep Robin with me. The business grew, so I rented a building in town and hired a couple of women to help me.”
Were you addicted to doughnuts or cookies?
“I see questions in your face,” she said with a smile. “My addiction was my daughter. I made sure that she knew she was loved beyond what words can describe. She graduated high school, went to college a hundred miles away, and I was completely lost. That first semester, we talked every day—more than once, most of the time—and then she was gone.”
“What do you mean, ‘gone’?” I asked.
Ada Lou wiped tears from her cheeks with her shirtsleeve. “She was coming home for the Christmas holidays, and a drunk driver T-boned her car. She died instantly.”
The same feeling I’d had when Frank told me that my mother was dead swept over me like an icy cold wind.
“I’m so sorry,” I said past the lump in my throat.
“Thank you,” she said with half a smile. “A few of her high school and college friends came for the service. That was comforting, but the next two years were horrible. I didn’t turn to drugs or alcohol or even work. I visited her grave at least twice a day and got it in my head that I had to go talk to her so she wouldn’t think I had forgotten her. It became a deep-seated obsession.”
“What did you finally do?” I thought of my need to shuffle my lucky deck of cards every evening before I went to bed. Frank had declared that was his lucky charm for the next poker game, so I guess I was following his example.
“I had a dream one night. Robin came to me and said, ‘Mama, you have to let me go so I can find rest and peace.’”
Is this a made-up story or a real one?If it was a lie, she was an expert at controlling her expressions, and I damn sure didn’t want to play cards with her.
“Is she buried in Dell City?”
“No, she’s in a little town in southern Virginia. After she spoke to me in the dream, I tried to move on, but her tombstone kept calling to me. If I didn’t go visit her, I couldn’t sleep. I even stopped eating. The only thing that held meaning to me had disappeared. So I sold the business, bought this trailer and a truck to pull it, and set off on a journey. When I arrived in this desolate place, I decided to stay a week to rest up before I went on any farther.”
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
