The Blues & Billie Armstrong 68

EMBER AND ASH

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Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…

The big double doors rattled and chunked, and Marietta Washington appeared. She held the door open wide. “Mr. King, it’s time.”

< Back to Chapter 67

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The day after I testified to the grand jury, the Giants took game six of the NLCS thanks to an eighth inning home run lashed over the right field wall by Juan Uribe.

I watched it down at Remo’s with a well-oiled crowd of fellow die-hards. Yes, I took a cab there and back. They went on to win the 2010 World Series in five games, their first in my lifetime. I watched the final out at the old house on Fourth Street while in town to settle my father’s estate. In spite of everything, I wish we could’ve watched that game together.

Now I live there. I sleep in the dayroom and once in a while Robyn Withrow, of all people, sleeps with me. “We’re old, not dead,” she likes to say. I cook chorizo and eggs for breakfast and we sit in the old wicker chairs on the covered porch and discuss our aches and pains and the frailties of faith. I no longer hear the scratch-scratch in my head. Occasionally, I fire off a column for the Call & Record, where Alice Terwilliger is now the editor and publisher. But, I admit, I don’t trust my opinions as I once did.

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At my age, funerals have become a staple of my social life.

Laurette and Sonny are gone. Nate Henderson, Craiger Robinson and Tom Monihan, too. And Billie died this past summer on her seventy-third birthday, August 22, 2025. Like Frankie’s husband, a plain old heart attack, perhaps the only part of Billie Armstrong’s life that could be considered plain. Her ashes were buried at a hilltop cemetery in the town of Mendocino, where she’d enjoyed the last years of her remarkable life after the feds dropped the charges.

I was not charged either. There was doubt among the medical experts that the deceased would have survived the initial blow from Billie even if I hadn’t come on the scene. In the end the grand jury seemed to agree it took both of us to kill Hank Timmons. There was no way for the prosecution to make a winnable case out of the puzzle, and that was that.

Valentine Jones went on to a successful career with a firm in Southern California. We stay in touch but we’ve never been close. The past remains a barrier—a canyon full of jagged questions. But when Billie passed, Valentine called me with the news and asked if I would be willing to take a DNA test.

At Billie’s funeral, I met my granddaughter. Her name is Ember. I don’t know if her mother realizes how perfect that is. I wore a gray suit. Ember wore a summery floral print dress without a care for gloomy tradition. Wavy strawberry blonde hair dancing about her shoulders on the ocean breeze. She is fourteen years old and already has some of her grandmother’s swagger in the tilt of her head and the spark of dreams in her hazel eyes. And she is brash in that disarming and familiar way. Walked right up with arm extended, shook my hand and said, “I’m Ember, I guess I’m your new granddaughter.”

It was Ember’s idea to set aside small portions of Billie’s ashes for close friends and family to take and spread or keep as they chose. I drove home with the velvet drawstring pouch sitting in the passenger seat of the Cadillac, sunroof open, windows down, that old blues CD blasting on the stereo. I stopped at Main Street Liquors and bought a pint of Southern Comfort, took it down to the Weeping Willow and out to the old bench at the end of Molly’s Pier. I sat on the bench and cried and toasted, and I opened the little velvet pouch, emptied it into my hand and held the ashes there for just a moment before the wind came up and carried her away.

When I was a child the pier was sturdy and freshly painted. Local boys considered it an important rite of passage to dive off the railing, knife into the water, kick down and return from the depths with a handful of muddy proof that you had touched bottom. But Lupoyoma Lake is ancient, its bed layered with silt and sifted to a soft fineness by the ages, and as you rose from the darkness toward the milky green light at the surface, the mud in your hand slithered like mercury and slipped between your fingers, and when you broke back into the world and gulped air and shouted and opened your fist to show your truth, there might be nothing in the palm of your hand but a tiny sandy puddle.

The End

Photo by cottonbro studios at pexels.com

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THANK YOU FOR READING THE BLUES & BILLIE ARMSTRONG

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The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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