Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  ACCLAIM FOR Shelby Hearon’s

  Life Estates

  “An ambitious book graced by supple, witty prose. Shelby Hearon’s storytelling skills … are enough to keep the reader engrossed in the fates of her well-rendered characters.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Peopled with Southerners of a certain age and class, their mores and manners expertly observed, Life Estates tell[s] truths about the emotional lives of women.”

  —Boston Globe

  “In Life Estates Shelby Hearon has written an unblinking and graceful novel of contemporary widowhood, filled with the pleasures and sorrows, loves and deaths, of three generations of coping women.”

  —Alix Kates Shulman

  “Engrossing … thoughtful and honest. Hearon explores the mysteries and ironies of marriage, friendship, parentage and love with a frank, searching and compassionate eye. She writes with energy and acuity; her wit takes the form of sharp aperçus about human nature and society.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Compelling … a warm and touching story, well endowed with crystalline impressions of relationships and possibilities.”

  —Booklist

  ALSO BY Shelby Hearon

  Armadillo in the Grass

  The Second Dune

  Hannah’s House

  Now and Another Time

  A Prince of a Fellow

  Painted Dresses

  Afternoon of a Faun

  Group Therapy

  A Small Town

  Five Hundred Scorpions

  Owning Jolene

  Hug Dancing

  Shelby Hearon

  Life Estates

  Shelby Hearon was born in Marion, Kentucky, lived for many years in Texas and New York, and now makes her home in Burlington, Vermont. She is the author of thirteen novels, including Hug Dancing and Owning Jolene, which won an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award and will soon be released as a film. She has received National Endowment for the Arts and John Simon Guggenheim fellowships for fiction, an Ingram Merrill grant, and has twice won the Texas Institute of Letters fiction award. She has taught in numerous writing programs, including those of the University of Houston, the University of California at Irvine, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Miami, and currently she teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION

  Copyright © 1994 by Shelby Hearon

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1994.

  Portions of this novel were originally published in Countryside, Shenandoah, and Southern Review.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Hearon, Shelby, [date]

  Life Estates/by Shelby Hearon.

  p. cm.

  1. Friendship—United States—Fiction.

  2. Women—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3558. E256F75 1994

  813.54—dc20 93-13977

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79068-2

  v3.1

  for my sisters

  with love

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  ONE

  THE PHONE WAS RINGING when I came in with Gentle Ben. It was fine dog-walking weather, still chilly in the early mornings here in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Pulling off my zip-front jacket, I was thinking that I did not want to talk to anyone, wishing instead that I was in my car headed for the pine forests, the Wild and Scenic River overlook, the sight of Georgia. They’d all been calling me, early, late, even at the shop, since Nolan died: my family, the lawyer, bankers. As if my time were now a blank sheet of paper on which they needed to write their messages.

  “Sarah,” Harriet said. “I was afraid I’d missed you and was going to have to go through that girl at your shop.”

  I was glad to hear from her. Pouring myself a cup of coffee, I pulled a wicker chair over to the kitchen windows, where I could look out on my peach trees, and sank against the seat while Ben, my broad-faced black Sandyland labrador, settled at my feet. My trees were much in need of feeding, already leafy, full and green, the Georgia Belle, the Monroe, the Tyler, the O’Henry, as dear to me as kin.

  “We were out trotting,” I said. I did not rise to the defense of my partner, knowing that we were all “girls” to Harriet.

  “Do you have a minute?” she asked.

  “No rush.”

  “I wanted to warn you. Don’t wear any jewelry.”

  “Do I ever?” I had to smile at that. I was in my baggy faded chambray dog-walking pants, a worn workshirt, a sweater which had once been called, in the catalogue, cobalt blue, and was now a much-washed Sarah blue. I lifted my French braid, thinking I must pin it up for the Texas trip. I was too old for so much hair. The plait was a compromise; I couldn’t bring myself to cut it.

  Harriet and I had kept to these twice yearly reunions, me going to see her in April, East Texas’s finest month, her coming to see me in October for western Carolina’s glorious fall, since our children were toddlers. We had let nothing stand in our way, and this loss-filled season, we’d agreed, would be no exception.

  “I mean it,” Harriet said in her determined voice. “Public places these days are full of idiots, criminal idiots. We’ve had a rash of stickups, nothing like Houston naturally, but still—creeps following women home from the malls because they spotted a Rolex watch on their wrist or diamond studs in their ears, women in jogging clothes who didn’t even realize they had a piece of jewelry on. Following them right out of the parking lots and attacking them in their own driveways. One woman, I heard about this at Birthday Club, had a stud ripped right out of her ear. Another almost had her finger cut off because she didn’t get her engagement ring off fast enough. Following people home from the airports, can you believe it? Watching them get their new cars out of short-term parking.”

  “I promise to look worthless.” I could hear the fear in her voice, but could not recall how long it had been there. Was it just since Knox died, since she was living alone?

  “You’re teasing, I know,” she said, “but I’m scared to death to go out anymore. We had a woman right here in the county, somebody’s neighbor, who was carrying in her groceries and her .22 caliber single-action went off and shot her in the eye. Slipped out of her pocket. You try to defend yourself and look what happens. I’m sleeping with Knox’s Browning lever-action 308 deer rifle next to my pillow until I get a gun of my own.”

  I had a little trouble with that, imagining Harriet, small, blond, in her emerald green bedroom, in her green satin robe and mules, hefting a shotgun on her shoulder. An Annie Oakley heading for bed. It must be that a husband, even sleeping across the hall, had seemed a protector. I asked her, “Is it being there by yourself?”

  “No. Yes. Not really. I don’t know, Sarah. I don’t. The world does seem less user-friendly since Knox died. I guess I feel like I’ve lost my job. Wife. I’m unemployed. That’s enough to make me jump at my shadow. What about you? You’re the one—”

  “I’m taking it slow,” I said. “A day at a time.” In truth, I didn’t know how I was doing. Nolan and I, who had begun in heat, had ended up with a coolness between us for which I w
as still sorry. It was disheartening to lose someone before you had the chance to make things right, to go back and take a different path. The fault, I thought, was not his—I gave him that—nor even, I wanted to believe, mine, but rather that of the encasement we had coexisted in: marriage.

  “You had time to get used to his going,” Harriet said.

  “Yes.” It was true. I’d done most of my mourning while he was dying. The bad prognosis—cancer of the pancreas—had come the middle of November; then, while we were still trying to get used to the idea, talking to Nolan’s doctor, Harriet’s husband, Knox, had wrapped himself around a hickory tree on a curve he’d taken drunk or sober for thirty years. We had all been stunned, numbed by the suddenness.

  Harriet’s tone brightened. She didn’t like to stay too long on gloomy topics. “Isn’t it amazing, when you think about it, incredible really, how the two of us have always done everything at the same time? I mean, gone off to boarding school at Miss Pritchard’s, dated those cadets named Stewart with an ‘e’ and Stuart with a ‘u,’ been in each other’s weddings, married bankers, had our boys and then our girls the same years, got separate bedrooms at the same time. You even got your tubes tied when I had my hysterectomy. Now, imagine, both of us widows. It gives me the goose bumps, things working out that way.”

  “I think about that, too,” I said, looking out at the trees. Thinking perhaps that a close friend, after all, was someone who had gone down the same road with you, who’d made the same stops along the way. Grateful that Harriet had walked my lifeline with me for forty years.

  “Well, not every single thing,” she amended, vexed. “We aren’t both grandmothers. That’s the exception, but don’t get me started on our girls. Me, the boy-crazy one, having a daughter thirty years old who is not only not married, she’s not even living with anyone. And you, who could never even remember whether you had a date or not, having a brood hen with four babies already.”

  “Maybe they were switched at birth, our girls.” This was an old joke between us, one I often made when Harriet got on the subject of our daughters.

  “It does make you wonder—”

  “They’re not us, that’s all.”

  There was nothing to say which helped. If Harriet had been nearby, I’d have given her a squeeze, a Carolina hug. It was fine as long as we talked about her son, who wasn’t married either, but she didn’t worry about him. It was her Pammy, so different from her, who was the Achilles heel of Harriet’s lovely legs. How she had expected and expected for her daughter. Through the years of summer camps, high school honors, sorority pledging, law school, every step painful. Because if things went fine, then it was such a relief, such a reprieve, but then the next stage was already upon her, and this time Pammy might not do it right. Now the job with one of Houston’s mega-firms was forgotten; it was time for marriage and children. I sometimes thought that Harriet’s very breasts were less flesh to her than her daughter’s smallest choices.

  “It seems strange,” she said, her voice faltering, “nobody at either of our houses but us. I can practically hear that hound of yours breathing. Remember how we used to talk on the phone with the kids screaming in the background, people knocking on the door, husbands hollering where was their breakfast, or their supper? We used to talk about how grand it would be to have phone booths in our kitchens. Remember?”

  I admitted, “It helps to have Ben.”

  “Maybe I’ll get me a cat. Knox never liked cats. Some long-haired Abyssinian or Persian who’ll sit up here on my pillow sham and lick her whiskers.”

  “You don’t mean that.” I couldn’t imagine Harriet tending an animal.

  “I don’t. Fur balls and shots and shedding all over my clothes. But it’s a nice image. With a little jewelled collar.”

  “Then you’d have to hire a guard.”

  “Oh, Sarah, can you believe we’re about to have a visit with no children, no husbands? I know this probably isn’t all right to say, so soon after Nolan—but I’m so excited you’re coming. I’m so thrilled that it will be the two of us again, just like old times.”

  LATE, I LET myself into Rooms of One’s Own. Katie, my partner, was sitting cross-legged on the floor, doing her controlled breathing. When the door opened, she rose slowly, not using her hands.

  “I was on the phone to Harriet,” I said.

  “I’d think you had enough on your mind these days without carrying that woman around.”

  “We go way back,” I said. I didn’t feel the need to rise to the defense of my old friend, knowing that any traditional homemaker was “that woman” to Katie.

  “How about way forward?”

  “She’s scared,” I explained.

  Katie and I had on the rust jumpers we wore to work, with white T-shirts since it was a spring day. We’d decided when we started the shop that dressing up every day, having to think about that, what to wear six days a week, was going to be a drag. “Let’s do uniforms,” I’d suggested. And we’d each bought three heavy cotton jumpers with dropped waists and pleats almost to the ankles. We’d also got mammoth brown cardigans for when it was really cold and we were out traipsing around the county looking for ideas for new wallpapers.

  We sat behind the counter on stools and Katie filled our Rooms mugs from the thermos of coffee. “I should have bought donuts,” I said.

  My partner, a slender woman with café-au-lait skin and her hair currently worn high in a rooster comb on her head, looked younger than her years, our years. She had no children and no husband—maybe that was her secret. She was glad to live alone, having raised all her younger brothers and sisters. What she did with men was her business, although in the fifteen years we’d run the shop, I’d met two who were serious contenders. One, a local contractor, had been in the picture until last year. The trouble was, Katie was too smart and too good-looking for any available man in the area, and I felt some responsibility that the shop had held her here in South Carolina. The good side of that was she had security, and a house on the road out of Mineral Springs, our hometown. (My house was on the road into Mineral Springs. The county still had these firm but invisible boundaries.)

  “What Harriet misses most I’m most glad to be rid of,” I told her, looking around the shop.

  “I expect that means a husband.”

  “Being married. The title.” I stirred around my already mixed feelings about widowhood, trying to separate my real grief over Nolan’s going so young, not yet even sixty, with my equally real relief at finding myself, after thirty-three years, unattached. “I don’t think I knew I felt so bound. I’d got the right to operate the shop as a femme sole, got him to put the notice in the paper saying he wasn’t responsible for my debts. Got his accountant to give up and let me file a separate return. Got my name, the Cooper name again, on everything I signed.”

  “You got your own credit cards.”

  “I did.”

  I turned the pages of the sample books stacked on the counter, full of familiar interiors: the Clarence House, the Wickam-Valentine House, the Grange, the White House of the Confederacy. “I didn’t understand before that once you marry, you are never again not married. You can legally change your name, you can take back your maiden, as they say, name, but you are never single again.”

  “Some of us figured that out watching our moms.”

  “I’m a husbandless wife. A widow. I’m married to a man underground. I feel I’m destined to be the Widow Rankin until I’m buried with Ben beneath some peach tree.”

  “Join the club. All of us get defined by how much husband we’ve got. I’m an old maid, you’re a widow, that’s two names for being without one. Divorced is a third.”

  I emptied the thermos into our cups.

  “Hey, we quit working for your man anyway,” Katie said.

  “We did that.” I smiled, remembering those days. How long ago that seemed.

  I’d hired a cleaning service through the employment agency twenty years ago, when Nolan, nearing for
ty, a new vice-president, had begun to entertain bankers and clients in our home, once my grandmother’s. I’d been in my dog-walking pants (Rogers it was then, Will Rogers, my first black lab) when the doorbell rang. And there was this black woman dressed in a taupe suit and heels, handbag and carryall under her arm, standing at the door.

  “Yes?” I’d asked, confused.

  “I’m the Pegues Cleaning Service.”

  I straightened up and stared. “You look like you should be hiring me.”

  “Today you’ve hired me.”

  I let her in, but gestured to her clothes. “How can you—”

  “I came from a real estate closing,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute.” And before my eyes she slipped into walking shoes and a smock, tied a scarf around her cropped hair. “There,” she said.

  “Is anyone else with you?” I’d expected, I suppose, half a dozen men with brushes and brooms, pails and mops. A crew to scrub the place top to bottom.

  “I’m it.” Katie had looked around the downstairs, talking as she looked. “I work for a realty company most of the time, cleaning up houses before they show them, or after they show them if there’s an open house. But some weeks are slack, and I got this idea of getting myself some work for the lean times, as a party service.”

  “Was that hard to do?”

  “Was what hard to do?”

  “Set up a business.” I was at that time railing almost daily at the credit strictures on a married woman. Angry that anything at all—getting my tubes tied (which was on my mind), buying stock (which was on Nolan’s), even ordering bath towels and sheets—required either a husband’s signature or, at the least, use of a husband’s name.

  “Not if you’re single,” she answered.

  “Is that right?” And I felt envy along with my admiration that she’d taken her finances in her own hands so firmly, this pretty young woman. “Well, I can’t even get myself a credit card in my name.”