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“This is the last thing that Mom ever wrote to me. I didn’t take it with me because I knew I’d ruin it. I’d hoped Dad would keep it out of sentimentality, even if he’d junked everything else.”
The man flitted across the room, dragging an old, worn duffel from under the bed and started shoving all his treasures inside. I watched him, not sure what it was I was feeling. My heart wept for him, but also sang with happiness when he found something that brought a smile to his face.
A small stack of pictures of him and his mother found their way to the bag, as well as a small cardboard box that held…
“Medals?”
For the first time, I shoved my way past him to look into the box, because what kind of awards did he earn growing up? I had to know.
Ashton obviously understood that, because he pulled a few out, explaining.
“I played football for a majority of my childhood. These are just champion medals.”
“What about this?” I pointed to another with a stack of books on it. “For academics?”
He shrugged.
“I won a couple spelling bees as a kid, and these are for AP, Honors, and Valedictorian.”
Holy shit! My boyfriend was a fucking genius!
“I’m kind of offended by how shocked you look,” he said, chuckling.
“Uh, I don’t know. I had just assumed that since you’d moved out at seventeen, that you hadn’t finished high school.”
He shook his head. “No way. My mom would’ve killed me if I’d stopped attending school. I kept going, even when it got hard, and busted my ass just to make her proud.”
“Ash, I…I don’t know what to say,” I finally managed, stumbling all over my words.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said finally, fingering a couple medals. “Besides, in a neighborhood like this, it wasn’t all that hard to get Valedictorian. Not a lot of competition.”
“Then why did you go into the Marines if you had such a big brain on your shoulders? Why not go to college?”
He shrugged.
“Didn’t have the money, to be honest. Besides, even if I had a big brain, I preferred working on cars. Mechanic work was my passion, not books.”
“When did you find that out?”
He shrugged, looked around the room for another second, then went back out to go into the other bedroom.
“All through high school, I worked with a friend’s dad at his auto shop. He gave me a chance and I worked hard to prove that his trust was well-placed.”
“On top of school?”
“We needed the money.”
What a privileged childhood I’d had. I didn’t have to worry about anything other than what to wear to the next party and if I had a date to prom.
We went over the crusty carpet until he opened the door to what had to be his parents’ room. It was even more musty inside there than the rest of the house, almost like a crypt.
Surfaces were dusty in there too, but you could see which surfaces Ash’s dad used because they were conspicuously dust-free.
“I just wanted this,” Ashton said, reaching over the bed for a small crochet blanket resting over the back of a rocking chair in the corner. “Mom made this for me when I was a kid. I used it forever, until I grew up and told her like an idiot that I was too big for kid shit like blankies.”
Sadness pinched his brows as he hugged the thing, then hurried back out the door.
“That’s it,” Ashton told me. “There’s not much left here of her, anyway.”
