Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  “Toe Goes In First,” I supplied.

  “At home,” Harriet said brightly, “our sheriff is concerned about crime, too. He’s got a program that puts habitual offenders to work fixing highway right-of-ways. It’s a rehabilitation program. I don’t know if they use dogs—”

  “That’s not rehab, that’s a chain gang,” Katie snapped, then looked at me and shook her head as if she couldn’t help herself.

  “I don’t think that’s its purpose,” Harriet replied stiffly.

  “Sorry,” Katie said.

  “Do you know why men never ask directions?” Will said. “They never ask directions because they have an aversion to finding out they’re lost. We tell ourselves we’re in this dark alley with no exit and the bad guys are heaving toward us, aiming to put our lights out, because that’s where we mean to be.”

  Suddenly Harriet rose, seizing her white dress.

  I reached out a hand but the sounds of a racking cough stopped me in my tracks.

  She clutched at her chest, but shook her head, as if to say, Don’t notice, it’s nothing, it will pass. But she couldn’t seem to stop, her eyes wide with pain.

  “I’ll do the honors,” Will said. He bent to pick up her glass as if to get a refill and remained standing inches from her. To Katie and me he said, “Why don’t you two serve up our supper? We’ll join you in a spell.” Then, just as the screen door swung shut, he called, “Get my bag, Coop. On the floor of the car.”

  WE ATE AT what my grandmother used to call the candlelight hour, in the dining room, the wall lights dimmed. The large room had the heavy flocked brown and rust paper that was a favorite of mine, English about 1890, the original in silk, peonies if you looked closely, but the whole seeming only a variation in color. The floor was bare, the high ceiling papered also. I was glad to reclaim for my own this room which had once been saved for company.

  Katie ran her hand over the waxed surface of the gateleg table and smiled at me. “Nice place you got here,” she said.

  “Glad you could come,” I replied.

  I ladled out the stew, which gave off steam as it reached our plates, and scooped up mounds of spoon bread swimming in butter. Will had brought us each a sweating bottle of cold Grolsch beer and glasses. I’d tossed dandelion greens, arugula, Boston lettuce and endive with a buttermilk dressing to have after the heavy dish.

  Katie told that she’d been given a recipe by Patterson, a client of Rooms from Asheville. “I think she took one look at me and her mind shifted right onto Brown Betty, and she didn’t even know where the idea came from.”

  “And did you make it?” I asked her.

  “Sure I did. A little mace, a lot of vanilla in the crumbs. I’m going to do another room for her. Hey, maybe I’ll get brown-butter cookies this time.”

  I laughed at that; Patterson was a new client, still on trial. I saw that Harriet was stirring her stew, picking her fork up and putting it down. She looked uncomfortable, but Will had eased her, done something that seemed to give her temporary relief, a respite from the coughing.

  Dessert, I thought, would help. Harriet could be counted on to perk up. She had a sweet tooth.

  “A largesse of peaches,” I promised them, bringing in the cobbler and the pie with apple slices. How grand both smelled to me. I brought in the shortcake and whipped cream while Will poured coffee for us and decaffeinated for Katie and Harriet. As an extra, he brought sugar cubes and brandy to splash.

  “You understand,” he said, loosening his belt at the sight of the three treats, “this has got to be a quick fling between us, Coop. A one-decade stand. I can’t be around this much food on a regular basis.”

  “We can order takeout from Rae’s Cafe, next time,” I told him.

  I heaped the plates—old china ones with paintings of fruit glazed in the center—with a sampling of each dessert, trailing whipped cream across the top of all of them. It made me happy to taste the difference in the peaches, to wonder if I would have known, if someone else had made them, which peach was in which dish. But of course I would have. I could even smell the difference as the steam from the cobbler and pie mingled with the cold fresh-peach aroma of the shortcake slices.

  “When on earth,” Harriet asked, amazed, “did you find time to make all these?”

  “While you were napping.” I hoped that was all right, to mention a nap. I tried to make it sound natural. “While you were sleeping off the trauma caused by the distressed passenger.”

  Harriet, reminded, told us the story of her plane flights, making much of the screaming woman whose death had passed before her and everyone else’s eyes, and the seat-mates who drove her nuts with their repetitions. She was enjoying her performance as someone upset by such episodes. It charmed and it also disarmed. How, the implication was, could this tanned blond woman with the gold ear globes be in real trouble, how could she be dying, if she could make such a fuss over trifles? Clearly she must be fine, or we’d be hearing about it. And even though it went against what we all knew, it worked. We laughed with her, relaxed and easy.

  (Perhaps the boy had cried “Wolf” again and again so that when the real wolf came no one would believe it, no one would panic or freeze with terror or rush to his side to see the carnage. But would instead say, Oh, him, and go on about their lives.)

  Harriet accepted a little brandy and flirted a bit with Will, coaxing out of him stories about his bachelor days, about the judge he almost married, going on in her thin squeaky voice about how she was going to take lessons from him. She was not going to tie herself down too soon, but was going to wait for the right one to come along. She mentioned that she had a young man now, “young enough to be your son as a matter of fact,” but she was not making any commitments.

  “If he’s young enough to be my grandson,” Will said, “don’t tell me.”

  “Well, let’s see now.” Harriet pretended to count on her fingers. “Not even if you were precocious,” she said.

  “Most like the opposite,” he told her. “It’s taken me thirty-three years here to get this one even to invite me to a sit-down dinner.”

  I licked the last of the whipped cream on my plate with my finger. “Let’s leave all this,” I suggested, gesturing to the dishes, “and catch the sunset.”

  We were pushing back our chairs and putting down our napkins when the phone rang.

  I looked at Will and hurried to the kitchen. I couldn’t let the machine get it and ever after have Harriet imagining me at home screening my calls and choosing not to answer. I had to show that whenever I was home I picked it up on the second ring.

  I’d called Fannin while Harriet slept. She said she was going home tomorrow; she missed the boys too much. She was going to make them promise to stay close to home when they were grown.

  It was Edith on the phone. “Mother.” I was delighted. “Everyone’s here.” What a pleasant evening to share. “How nice of you to call.”

  The others followed me into the kitchen.

  I heard Harriet whisper, “I thought the Spider Lady was off in the jungle.”

  “I hope nothing’s wrong with her bum hip,” Katie said, pulling out a stool and sitting at the counter.

  “She’s just trying to reach her drug supplier,” Will told them. “We’ve got a little smuggling going.” He poured me half a cup of coffee to wet my whistle while I talked.

  Mother sounded no farther away than Greenville. It was amazing that she could place a call from such a distance, a trunk call, to use Edith’s term.

  “I wanted to ask about my granddaughter,” she said.

  “She’s fine. I talked to her this afternoon; she’s on her way home tomorrow.” I could see Harriet adjust her belt, square the small buckle under the buttons of the white piqué. Was she irritated that I’d called my daughter while she napped?

  “Will is there?” Mother asked.

  “They all are,” I said. “We just ate.”

  “Put him on.”

  “Mother wants you to join
her in Tierra del Fuego, Will. How do you feel about that?”

  “Lukewarm,” he said, taking the phone, obviously pleased. “Edith. We miss you.” He shook his head. “No thanks required. I’m sending you a further trio of medications that for all I know have also become controlled substances. Argyrol, iodine and ipecac. Add those to your store and you can handle anything.” He smiled, rubbed a hand over his eyes. “It went fine, as well as could be expected. It got their attention at least. I decided to go with calling it the Siege of Shiloh—the message being: our war, our boys, but not our yard. How’s the hip?” He listened, grinned, looked at me. “I don’t know, I’ll ask her. Edith wants to know, are you getting serious about me?”

  “Tell her OLAT.”

  “She says don’t rush it, please, one leg at a time.” He paused, then handed the phone over to Katie. “She has a message for Ms. Pegues.”

  “Hello, E-dith,” Katie stretched Mother’s name out. She was standing with one wedged heel on the rung of the stool, her hand on her hip. “I will do that. I think that’s more than fitting. You take care now. The tropics are hazardous to your health.” She handed me back the phone. “She says she’s taking the money she’d put away for baby Rankin’s nest egg and is sending it to me for EMILY’S List. Where, she says, it will probably do her granddaughter more good in the long run. I expect she’s right about that.”

  I told Mother I’d sent Fannin lilies in her name and would be getting bulletins from Bess to pass along. She said, speaking of my sister, she’d ordered a hammock for her for her birthday before she left and did I think she’d ever use it?

  “You didn’t?” I was amused at the duplication. “I did, too. I bet we’re sending the exact same one. Crate and Barrel’s Pawleys Island natural cotton hammock extra wide.” I laughed when she said that was the one. “At least she can pile up with the little boys when they come visit. What will she think of us?” I asked.

  “That we had her on our minds,” Mother said, ringing off, as was her style, without a goodbye.

  Still holding the phone, sensitive to a possible slight, I said, “Harriet’s here, too.” Waited a bit, then said, “I will, I’ll tell her.” Off the line, I turned and told my old friend, “Mother says she’s so glad you’re on the mend.” Putting my arm around Harriet’s shoulders, I said, “Let’s go watch the last of the sunset.”

  But she wanted to fix herself another splash of brandy, she said, and headed for the dining room.

  Katie took her decaf out onto the porch.

  I was feeling relieved. We’d all helped Harriet along, making conversation. There’d been that one flare-up, but I felt the two women had both hurried back to the one safe topic between them—men—and the meal had gone fine.

  Walking down the hall with Will, I asked him, “What about that doctor’s bag? Where did that appear from? It looked like a stage prop from a Fifties film.”

  “I thought I might be making a house call,” he said.

  Harriet, catching up with us, told him, “Thanks a lot, Will. You worked a miracle.” Then, hesitantly, dropping her voice, she said, “I guess you know what’s wrong with me, don’t you?”

  “I do,” he told her. “I have a picture of it right here somewhere.” He fished in his wallet while Harriet took a sip of her brandy, looking anxious, afraid she was going to get a diagnosis. “Here we go.” Will unfolded a small sheet of notepad paper.

  I was touched. It was the drawing I’d made on the phone to Harriet, when I got the bad news: the lung with the tiny dried tomato in it, the heart with the vine growing from it, the flower. Imagine. He had saved my sketch for her.

  “What is this?” Harriet asked, relieved.

  “My partner’s illustration of your lovely chest,” Will told her.

  “Sarah”—she looked at me, surprised—“did you do this?”

  “I did, sure enough.”

  Outside, Will whistled up the pups who were running around under the trees in the dusk. I took the rocker beside him, swinging my feet, content to be sitting here on my porch watching night arrive with the three of them. The women might jostle between each other a bit, but perhaps there was no more to it than Ben and Missoula scuffling in the grass, chasing the same scent; perhaps it was a way of getting acquainted. At least I was not headed upstairs to a night of recriminations such as had always followed having company when Nolan was alive.

  “I wonder,” I asked them, “if any place on earth has sunsets so grand as ours. Cherry sunsets in autumn, persimmon sunsets in winter, strawberry sunsets in spring, watermelon sunsets in summer.”

  As the whole horizon grew blood red against the darkening sky, Katie put her back to the rail, Will took my hand and Harriet caught her breath.

  WHEN I GOT upstairs after finishing up in the kitchen, Harriet was on a rampage. She was throwing her clothes off the hangers onto the bed, had dragged her garment bag out and was stuffing shoes in the side pockets. Her face was angry and she wouldn’t look at me.

  “Distressed passenger is catching the next flight out,” she yelled over her shoulder. “You needn’t have bothered to ask me to come, but you did, so you have. So I’m going home.”

  At first, walking through the door and seeing her packing, I assumed she’d taken a bad turn. That maybe it had begun to hurt too much. That it had become the punching pain, front and back, Will had said it might. But she wasn’t coughing, although her voice had a strained, scraping sound.

  “What is it?” I asked her, not comprehending what had gone wrong. “What?”

  “If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.” Her mascara was streaked, but she wasn’t crying.

  “I don’t, and you must tell me. What is it? I thought everything went so well; it was a special evening for me.” I moved into the room and stopped, hesitant to come too close.

  “And a perfectly dreadful evening for me, if you want to know.” She was almost shouting, her face red. “I don’t understand why you bothered to have me. The three of you talked all around me the whole time as if I wasn’t even there, as if I didn’t exist. It reminded me of how it is with your children, the ultimate in feeling totally invisible.” She took the two-tone slingback shoes off her feet and crammed them into her bag. The motion caused a crushing cough which she got under control. “Dumb me, bringing us those T-shirts, thinking it was going to be old times, really old times, before we even had husbands, when it was just us, talking our heads off. I might as well have been in a foreign country. I couldn’t understand anything anybody was saying. You and your doctor with all those initials—TGIF—and your partner going on about EMILY’s List as if everybody in the whole world knew who Emily was, and all those detective stories you’d all read, going on as if I was an illiterate. I could have evaporated on the spot and none of you would have cared.”

  “But the dinner was for you,” I protested. I didn’t know what to say. Had she been fretting all through the evening? All through the meal? “You were the guest of honor. I’d never had them both here before. It was a celebration.”

  “The dinner was for you—to show off how many different desserts you could make out of your old peaches, that’s what it was for. I mean, when you handed me the Hershey from the airport—airport—you said you didn’t have time to make any chocolate dessert for me. Who would rather have chocolate to eat than shoes on her feet, and you know that. We kid about that. Even Mom, who’s stone deaf and mole blind and can’t even fix an egg without putting a cream sauce on it, melts me some chocolate on her puddings.” She began to wail.

  I tugged at my plait and sat on the side of the nearest bed. I felt as if I’d been kicked all the way to Georgia. Stunned and dispirited, too. That an evening I’d so looked forward to and so enjoyed had been so differently perceived. Had it always been that way with Harriet? Her grand times at cadet dances had hardly been mine, I knew that. Had we, standing in our wedding gowns and maid-of-honor dresses, been of different minds about what was beginning and what was coming to an end? Posing wi
th our babies for Doll’s photo album, had we been worlds apart on what a new generation promised?

  My mind kept going back to similar fights with Nolan, after evenings with company, that I had attributed to him, to me, to the nature of the beast called marriage. I had to rethink that. It might be that no two people ever shared the same evening. But where did their anger come from, his and now hers? Where does anyone’s anger come from? When we perceive we have not been given our due.

  The chocolate—to Harriet’s mind, the least she could have expected from me—must have seemed the last straw. Piled on a series of hurts, gratuitous and arbitrary, that her family and her body had hurled at her. Well, that, at least, I could redress.

  “It was,” I agreed, “a treat for me. Pure and simple. Let me make amends. Come on. You’ll find worse company than your echolalia ladies at this hour of the night on a late flight, even if there is one. Come down, and I’ll make the richest darkest chocolate dessert I know how to fix, and you won’t have to share a bite of it with anyone else.”

  Harriet wiped her streaked face. She’d taken off her belt, and, barefoot, in her piqué dress, she looked like a camper in Sunday whites, waiting for her parents to arrive. She’d taken off her velvet bow as well and her glossy yellow hair fell across both cheekbones. She looked thin, in the way of a young girl.

  Down in the kitchen, I gave her a juice glass of brandy, then tended to the melting of chocolate and butter on the stove. I’d decided on fudgies—the double chocolate butter-laden flour-scarce brownies frosted in double chocolate icing I used to make for George and his buddies. Squares Harriet could pile on a plate and carry upstairs to bed.

  “What really did it,” she said, still pushing at her hair, still agitated, “was the phone call from the Spider Lady. I mean, I’ve seen Famous Edith maybe five times in my entire life, five times since we’ve been grown at least, if that. She’s some sort of myth, not a real parent anybody ever saw, not even you and Black Beauty Bess. I always thought she had to reintroduce herself to you and your sister every time she happened back in this country.”