“I feel like you’re just telling me the good parts,” I say.
He chuckles. “Well, there’s no bad part—just a few bizarre parts. In order to accept your inheritance, you have to take your grandmother’s ashes to Arcadia Falls and, well, scatter them in the waterfall.”
“Okay. That doesn’t sound too bad. Is it a really rough waterfall or something? Do I have to wear a bathing suit? Are there bears?”
He shakes his head. “The falls are decently calm—you can probably just roll up your jeans. And bears aren’t typically a problem around here except on trash day, and even then they’re littleol’ black bears. So we just need to make the trip today. Since you’re not from around here, it falls to me—ha, falls!—to take you up there and show you the right place.” He’s entirely focused on the papers, straightening them again and again.
“And that’s it?”
I want to reach for the papers, but he’s keeping them close.
“Can I read the will?”
He snatches up the folder. “Once you’ve distributed the ashes, then you’ll sign the papers and have your copy—of the trust.”
“What about my sisters? Do they need to come up and sign anything? I plan on giving each of them a building, even if they want to sell it. Is that allowed? Selling?”
He holds up the folder. “Nobody gets anything until those ashes are put to rest, and you can’t sell the properties, although you can rent them out. That’s what’s so peculiar about the trust, you see. Maggie wanted things done her way, that’s for sure.”
Since I’m not going to wrestle the paperwork away from him, I don’t have much of a choice. My sisters are counting on me. Money is scarce, so unless somebody suddenly marries rich, we’re all doomed. We need this inheritance. If nothing else, we can rent out all these buildings and finance our lives back in Alabama, I guess. All I have to do, apparently, is spread some ashes by a waterfall. People have done a lot worse for a lot less. Hence reality television.
“Okay,” I tell him. “Let’s do it.”
He cheers back up once I agree, his cheeks pink as he locks his office door again and confirms that Doris doesn’t get carsick. He isn’t comforted when I explain that birds vomit on purpose all the time, often out of love.
His car is expensive, the seats black leather and the suspension so smooth that I don’t even feel the bumps and potholes in thewinding mountain roads. As he drives, Colonel points out local spots of interest, from the Biscuit Barn to the animal shelter where his granddaughters read to cats every Wednesday afternoon. The falls aren’t too far from downtown, but there are no sidewalks on either side of the road, the asphalt dropping off to what seems like an endless, dizzy tumble through the trees to the deep valleys below. I can already imagine what it’s going to look like when the leaves start changing color in a few weeks, a glorious crazy quilt of yellow, red, and orange. Finally, he pulls into a gravel parking lot, tires crunching. There are no other cars here, and theArcadia Falls Parksign is small and brown, nearly blending in with the environment. It would be easy to drive right past the turnoff—no wonder he brought me himself.
As I get out of the car and let Doris look around from her bag, Colonel shuffles to his trunk, where he changes into a pair of lime-green sneakers before holding up a silver urn that looks a lot like a cocktail shaker.
“Is this all of her?” I ask. “It seems small.”
He offers it to me and, when I take it, dusts off his hands, although it doesn’t feel dusty at all. “This is how she wanted things done. As I’ve previously mentioned, she was very specific. Her best friend, Diana McGowan—you met her daughter, Tina, at lunch—was supposed to do all this, but Diana left us in the same car accident, rest their souls.”
I realize that in all the talk, no one has told me any details about how my grandmother died. “How did she—”
“Ashes, first,” he says, keeping me on task.
The urn feels warm in my hands, and I resist the urge to pop off the top and see what human cremains look like. I’ll find out soon enough. Better to do it by the waterfall than to test it out here and lose some of my grandmother to a wayward breeze.
Colonel leads me up a trail, pumping his arms and walking with cheerful determination. I follow with my grandmother in one hand and Doris’s backpack on my back, glad I’m just wearingold Chucks and not something more formal. The carpet of brown pine needles gives way to wood stairs during the especially vertical parts.
“Getting my cardio today,” Colonel puffs. “That’s for sure. Should’ve had the fried chicken. As fortification.”
My heart rate is up, both from the steps and from a weird sense of anticipation. I’m not sure why. I’m just going to dump some ashes, which is completely normal when people die and don’t want to be buried in an expensive coffin. I didn’t even know my grandmother, so it’s not like it’s going to be a deep, emotional moment where I say goodbye to a loved one. These ashes might as well be sand for all the connection I feel to them. I don’t know a single thing about my grandmother, other than that my mama hated her, that her will is weirdly persnickety, and that she didn’t know how to run a video store.
I hear the falls before I see them, a busy rush like a cantankerous white-noise machine. I’ve never been near a waterfall before, but the air is charged and filled with mist, and I eagerly breathe it in. It’s exhilarating and exciting, the temperature cool and the forest alive all around us. Our path runs along something halfway between a creek and a river, the churned-up waters that need somewhere to go after pouring down the mountain.
We come around a bend, and there it is.
Arcadia Falls.
It’s strange, when a plural noun is also a singular.
The mountainside rises up hundreds of feet, craggy and mottled gray, and the water trickles from high overhead and then plummets, sheeting down heavily for the last twenty feet or so ina wide wall of water. I’m in awe of this wonder of nature, of the way the cascade has chosen exactly this place to reach the ground and has worn down its path over millennia. I wonder what the water tastes like, if it has the sharp tang of minerals or is gritty with dirt.
Colonel stops, one foot up on a rock, breathing heavily. “You go on now. You’ve got to get herbehindthe falls—she was very particular about that.”
“Is there a cavern back there or something? Like, a secret cave?”
