Summary
"Ashes" begins in a cafe, as Chris and his mother prepare to embark on some unidentified task. From a close-third perspective on Chris, Kennedy conveys a fraught and imbalanced relationship from the start between Chris and his mother; Chris holds his tongue and silently endures his mother's complaints, snubs, and general disregard of him. Kennedy hints that their task at hand would excuse melancholia and requires a fair amount of walking, but otherwise the readers are kept in the dark up to the first section break (17-18).
At the cafe, Chris's mother makes a show of scraping the artificial whipped cream off of her scones so the server can see she is displeased. She also makes a point to bring up her friends from her book club and their respective grandchildren, and Chris knows that her intentions are to make him feel guilty about not having grandchildren or being married and making progress toward starting his own family. Whatever task they face, despite Chris's warning, his mother is underdressed. Or rather, she is overdressed in the sense of fashion, but underdressed for a hike. They get back in the car, and it is revealed that Chris's father has recently died and that they are riding in what was his car. Reminders of him abound "like little buried landmines," for instance, "[the car] smells so characteristically, still, of shoe polish and peppermints, and in the back seat lies the woolen tartan scarf his father had worn for years" (19).
By the second section, it's clear the ceremony of the day is spreading Chris's father's ashes. Prior to the start of the story, they picked up his ashes from the crematorium, and Chris describes in retrospect his mother's anger about the crematorium's failure to provide them with an urn. Chris places the box with his father's ashes in his mother's drawer along with her china service, and as he does so, he longs for someone named Scott. He thinks about how Scott would know what to do in this situation and provide the occasion with some sense of ceremony, instead of Chris feeling seized by an unresolvable distance between himself and his mother.
After they leave the cafe, they pass a craft shop on the way back to the car, and Chris's mother ducks in to find some kind of souvenir to commemorate the occasion. She returns to the car with a silver picture frame, which she specifies was on sale, and then regrets not buying one for her friend Pam. They continue on, and it becomes clear that they are driving to some relatively remote location by a lake, complete with campsites and nature trails. Chris is continually startled by the cruise control function on his dad's car, which beeps every time he exceeds the set limit. He drives until he recognizes the turn-off, gritting his teeth as his mother spins false mythologies of his relationship with his father. The lake, it turns out, is a place where Chris and his father went on two awkward fishing trips while Chris was in college, trips which Chris's mother has inflated in her mind and assigned undue importance to.
As they drive through the campsite, Chris's mother recounts how much the fishing trips meant to his father; meanwhile, Chris silently remembers the reality of them: "his father’s attempts at blokey conversation puttering out like the dinghy’s outboard, sighing as it gave up the ghost in a bank of weeds, Chris feeling sick with the stink of petrol, his father’s barely concealed disgust when he unwisely asked if he could take his book out on the boat with them the next day" (23-24). Chris then reflects on what inherent quality of his has always made both of his parents so wary of him. Again, the character of Scott is invoked. Chris recalls, "it wasn’t till uni that what was wrong with him had hit him square in the face at last, with a flash of realisation that was so clichéd it was almost comical" (24-25). He remembers telling Scott about the fishing trips, expecting commiseration, and, instead, having Scott outright laugh at the story. Scott says, "Lighten up. You’re not the first gay man whose parents didn’t understand him" (25), and this remembered scene suddenly crystallizes a major source of tension between Chris and his mother. His mother insists that Chris should be finding a wife and having children, but Chris is a gay man; it's unclear whether his sexuality is known by his mother, whether it's something he conceals from her or something she willfully ignores.
This uncertainty is addressed through a memory Chris has of the last time he saw his father at the hospital. His father said to him, "Your mother’s always been proud of you, Chris. In her own way. ... You obviously … you’ve got to live the way you see fit. ... But there’s no need to … well … throw it in her face. It would kill her" (26). Chris reflects on the irony that he's inherited his father's instinct toward secrecy. It seems, at this point, that Chris's parents are vaguely aware that he is gay, but that he has not come out to them, and they would prefer it if he didn't. Kennedy suggests that Chris's secrecy and unwillingness to be open about their relationship ultimately drove Scott away. They drive on, and Chris continues to silently seeth at his mother's shameless revisionist portrayals of his father and his relationship with him.
Since his father died, Chris's mother has been inviting him to dinner more frequently, and each time he dines at her house, dinner is served later and later, and the invitation extends to watching the evening news afterwards. He anticipates that soon, she will be pressuring him to stay the night. She'll claim to feel unsafe alone at night, and she'll use the fact that he doesn't have a family at home to return to anyway, so he has no "real" reason not to stay. As they drive, Chris anticipates the whole progression of events, his mother's invitation's slow evolution from feigned spontaneity, to passive-aggression, to full-on petulance.
When they finally reach the lake, they find a secluded spot to themselves. Chris's mother remarks on how nice it is to have the place to themselves, uninterrupted by onlookers. She's conflicted, because on the one hand, she doesn't want to say anything; the pressure of the moment has her wanting Chris to sprinkle the ashes and have it over with. On the other hand, she expresses regret for not saving any of the ashes. Chris suggests taking a small scoop out and putting it in the camera bag, so she can sprinkle them on her rosebushes later on, and he does so. He opens the box of ashes and waits for his mother to begin spreading them. She turns away and indicates that she wants him to do it, so he does.
As he sprinkles the ashes, which feel to him like "a handful of coarse sand" (32), into the lake, he remembers cleaning pots and pans with his father by the same lake. As they prepared to leave the lake, his father had said, "Great spot anyway, don’t you reckon, Chris?" (32), and Chris remembers and regrets his failure to provide an enthusiastic response. Instead, he just shrugged and fueled the disconnect between himself and his father. He and his mother leave the lake, and she wonders whether they could make it back to the craft shop before it closed so she could buy more frames to give as gifts. The story ends with Chris dusting of a small spot of ash from his mother's lapel.
Analysis
"Ashes" tells the story of a fraught trip to spread the ashes of Alan, the late father of Chris, the character on whom Kennedy focuses the story's close-third perspective. The trip is fraught because of the relationship Chris has with his mother, a relationship that has long been tense and far-from-perfect, but whose imperfections and tensions have been greatly accelerated by the death of Chris's father. Major themes of the story include repression and revision. The entire story takes place in one afternoon, but frequently cuts away to brief memories Chris has of college, his and his father's fishing trips, visiting his father's sick bed, and real and imagined dinners with his mother.
A major source of tension for Chris is his mother's insistence that he should be starting a family. She casts him as "the perennial bachelor" (27) when the truth is, Chris is gay. The story strongly suggests that Chris has never come out to his parents, but that his father, on his deathbed, seemed aware of Chris's sexuality and told his son to live his life "the way [he sees] fit," but not to "throw it in [his mother's] face" because "it would kill her" (26). Chris's sexuality is a major part of himself that he feels the need to repress due to his mother's implied intolerance and the importance she places on grandchildren, normality, and stability. She's portrayed as needing to control, using passive-aggressive tactics until they don't work, but if forced to, having no problem with confrontation and applying guilt to get her way.
Even formally, the story heavily emphasizes repression. Most of the story's narration is a close-third account of that which Chris is holding back from saying to his mother. There is even an entire scene which is Chris's anticipation of what his mother will do and say in order to guilt him into staying at her house. Chris's disdain for his mother is so preoccupying that he imagines how arguments with her will play out. He anticipates her every move and word, and is more often than not, correct in his anticipation. Though despite his disdain, and despite his feeling of being totally alienated and misunderstood by his parents because of his sexuality, Chris also regrets his lack of compassion for them. He regrets not saying small things, like telling his mother "she looked nice" when he picked her up to drive to the lake, or agreeing with his father about how the lake is "a great spot" (31-32).
Revision is also a strong theme of the story, in that most of what Chris's mother says or intimates in the car and at the lake, he categorizes as revisionary. The very idea that the fishing trips were a frequent and significant ritual for Chris and his father is countered from Chris's perspective; there were only two fishing trips, and both were brief and awkward. Chris felt nothing but disappointment from his father, and he also cringes to recall how he rejected his father's attempts at "blokey conversation" (24). From Chris's perspective, his mother also revises her feelings toward his father: "Chris recalls the way she used to speak to him, like he was a slow-witted employee; her eye-rolling, histrionic exasperation at the slightest mishap. All that is gone now. ... Instead she reminisces with a sweet, sad smile about his patience, his bumbling good intentions" (27). Each time Chris is startled by the beeping of the cruise control, he feels like it's his father reminding him to hold his tongue, as if it's not worth it to deny his mother her fantasies and revisions. This light prodding from beyond the grave further underscores the lineage of secrecy and repression between himself and his father.
But with all the bottled rage and restrained disgust, Kennedy ends the story with a gesture of tenderness. Chris wipes the ash off of his mother's lapel, and it's a moment of unsolicited care and maintenance. While the purpose of the day was to spread all of Alan's ashes, bits of him remain. Chris's mother insists on keeping some of his ashes to spread elsewhere, and the smudge on her lapel is another instance of lingering evidence of Alan, not unlike the smell of shoe polish and peppermints, and his woolen tartan scarf.
