LUNAR ACRES
A Memoir of Fathers, Sisters, the Drugs That Took Everything, and the Long Road Back
Robert Wayne Ashley II

In Memory

In memory of my sister, Lacey Michelle Ashley — the name she should have carried her whole life, and the one she’s carrying now.

Author’s Note

I didn’t set out to write a book about my life. I set out to build something called Lunar Acres — a small publishing company, a website, a way to put twenty percent of what I earn toward people fighting homelessness and addiction — and somewhere in the middle of building it, I realized the name meant more to me than a logo. It was a driveway I once drove down too fast, and a stretch of flat land with no trees on it, and a woman who never once, in her whole life, drove past a hurt animal without stopping.

This book is not finished. It may never feel finished, the way a life never really feels finished until it’s over, and even then the people left behind keep telling it for you. What follows is where it starts. There’s more coming — more trouble, more years I’m not proud of, more people I owe better answers to than I’ve given yet. I’m telling it as I remember it, in the order it comes back to me, and I’m telling it because I think somebody out there needs to know that the worst years of a life don’t get to be the only chapter.

Prologue: The Driveway

The land out there doesn’t have trees on it. That’s the thing I remember most clearly, more clearly than the phone call, more clearly than the drive — acres and acres of flat, cut land, so open you could see weather coming from three counties away, and not one tree standing in any direction to break it up.

I drove an hour and a half to get there. I don’t remember most of that drive. I remember the beginning of it — the phone against my ear, somebody’s voice telling me it was bad, telling me to come now — and I remember the end of it, which was the driveway itself, gravel popping under the tires, and more cars than I’d ever seen parked in one place that wasn’t a funeral already happening.

Because it was. That’s what I didn’t understand yet, coming down that driveway too fast. The ambulance was still there. The hearse was already there. My family was standing out in that flat, treeless yard in little clusters, the way people stand when they don’t know what to do with their arms, and every single one of them was waiting on me.

They’d been waiting an hour and a half. They wouldn’t move him until I got there.

I want to tell you I remember getting out of the car with dignity, that I walked up like a man who’d had time to prepare for this. I didn’t. I don’t remember getting out of the car at all. The next clear thing I remember is being inside, and my father not being the man I’d spent a handful of good years finally getting to know, but a shape on his couch, already gone, already somewhere I couldn’t follow him to yet. He died right there on that couch, not in his bed — he’d taken to sleeping on it more nights than not by the end, and it’s where I found him.

I was the last one there and the first one they needed. That’s a strange kind of math to carry for the rest of your life — that a whole yard full of people who loved him held still, in the middle of all that flat, empty land, just so I wouldn’t have to walk in on an empty room.

This book starts there, on that driveway, because in a lot of ways so did I — the version of me that’s writing this, anyway. Everything before it was a childhood. Everything after it was a different story, and not always a good one. But you don’t get to the after without the before, so let me back up. Let me start with South Carolina, and a wooden sword, and a mother who would stop traffic for a turtle.