Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  “Some of my friends aren’t married anymore,” he said, starting up his Honda. He honked at the fenced pups, knowing they hated to see us take off without them.

  “Some of us aren’t.” I’d pinned up my braid and worn the same suit I’d worn for Nolan’s funeral, black, pleated, old.

  “What about your Christmas party?” he asked. “You making big plans?”

  The thought of the annual bankers’ party seemed a scene from another lifetime. I smiled at him. “Were we giving those parties for each other?”

  He reached over and took my hand in his. “How about a dinner at my place when Edith gets back? I’d like those mountain toys to come down my chimney this year.”

  I nodded. I knew what he was saying. That life goes on. Grandsons still want to open gifts on Christmas morning. Famous mothers approaching eighty still want a hearth where they can warm their bones against the chill. I dried my eyes for the tenth time this morning. “One of these years,” I said, “we’re going to have two new puppies under some tree.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, Coop,” Will said.

  DRIVING OUT OF town, I saw that half the yards had already decorated their trees for Halloween, and it not yet October. Dozens of tiny white ghosts (strangled handkerchiefs) dangled from hardwood branches. I’d busied myself on the weekend cutting back the clematis and covering them with straw, packing the roses with peat moss and fertilizing the grass. I’d dug up what bulbs I wanted to replant next year—wearing my old gardening sneakers and heavy red socks, my dog-walking pants and a sweatshirt, with a scarf on my head and latex gloves on my hands. Something of a scarecrow.

  I was “riding through my prosperity,” the week after the funeral. On Long Creek Road I passed the signs that signalled the approach to the state park: HOT BOILED PEANUTS, PUMPKINS, SALMON EGGS, HONEY, HOT CIDER, U-PICK APPLES, CHAIRS CANED, FILL YOUR WOOD SHED. A new short-order cafe appeared after Rae’s Cafe and the HIGHWAYS NOT DIEWAYS sign. Below its banner claiming BURGERS-HEROES-SUBS was a hand-painted likeness of a four-foot submarine gun.

  On the radio, I listened to the call-in show. The deejay was telling his upstate listeners that Virginia to the north of us was the handgun supermarket of the East Coast. What, he asked, did they think about gunrunners able to buy handguns by the carload? I shut it off. Thinking that Knox’s deer rifle and Harriet’s .22 had provided her no protection after all.

  The Sloane family plot had looked much the same as it had in April. Although the wildflowers were all gone, the pecans and willows were fully leaved. East Texas was short on seasons. I’d stood for a minute, before the crowd arrived, looking at the black granite stone that still awaited her name and dates. This time, there was a fresh mound of earth next to Knox’s grave.

  Harriet was not laid to rest alone. All of Birthday Club came, so a woman named Jo in a black turtleneck sweater and gray suit told me. “You can pick us out,” she said, tears streaming down her angular face. “We all put on our jewels for her.” And, sure enough, when I looked around the dry ground beside an open field shaded in the late morning by a thicket of trees, I could pick out the other women come to grieve for Harriet: they were all of an age, all had wet faces, and all wore sparkling gems on their fingers, on their lapels, at their throats and ears. I wondered if each, in tribute, had tucked a handgun in her leather handbag along with her handkerchief.

  Nat was there, and I was amazed to see him after so long, even though I might have expected to find him there. He looked shrunken both in stature and in his face, and his teeth and eyes seemed to have receded into his head. But the two-tone shoes, bow tie and twangy voice were just the same.

  “Not right for a man to outlive his child,” he said. “It’s not the natural order of things.” He kissed my cheek as if it had been last week. “Have you met my friend here? David? He wrote up my radio.” He said the last proudly, rounding out the syllables: ray-dee-oh.

  I shook hands with Harriet’s “young man,” although he didn’t, in fact, look much younger than most of us, forty being as adult as a man was liable to get. He was handsome, just as she had said, but, I thought, seemed uneasy with the fact. As though he awoke one day in a Kevin Costner suit and was still rattling around in it, wondering what he was supposed to do.

  “You were a welcome addition to Harriet’s life,” I told him.

  He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and cleaned them. “She was a fine lady,” he said. “I wish we’d—we were—”

  “Thanks for bringing Nat,” I said, to save him some embarrassment. “I’ve missed him.” Which was true.

  He said, “I didn’t actually. Bring him. I went to get him, Sarah—may I call you Sarah, she talked an awful lot about you, as I guess you know—but he decided to drive himself.” He looked at the old man, somewhat confounded, but fondly.

  “You didn’t?” I squeezed Nat’s arm. “Aren’t you sly?” He seemed steady enough on his feet, not as wasted as I’d been imagining him. Certainly not bedridden.

  “It was the graph that did it. Did you see the graph? You read the papers, don’t you—?”

  “I’m not sure—” I had no idea what he meant.

  “The graph.” Harriet’s dad waved his hand, including David and me in his audience. “There was this big article claiming older drivers were a hazard and menace to the road. With this graph that showed that the over-seventy drivers had half again the accidents of the forty-year-olds. But not a word about the fact that the under-twenties had three times as many accidents. No mention that if they followed their own figures they’d make the minimum age to get your driver’s license thirty years old. Take all the twenty-year-olds off the road.

  “It made me mad enough to get a mechanic out to the house to jump-start the car and give it an overhaul. Then I had to find myself a chiropractor to fix my back before I could start up driving again.”

  “I’m truly glad you did,” I said.

  I saw Dwayne, whom I hadn’t set eyes on since he finished college. He caught sight of his grandfather and broke into a lope, threading his way through people he didn’t know, past monuments to people too unrelated to note. “Granddad,” he said. “I thought I’d seen a ghost.”

  “I’ve come back to life,” Nat said. “There I was sitting stewing in my juices while my girl was expiring. I’m not proud of that.” He sniffed and wiped his nose. “You know these folks? Sarah? David here, who wrote up my radio?”

  “You got that stuff I sent you about Apple PIE?” Dwayne asked.

  “I got it. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but I appreciated the thought. They’re over my head these days with what they can do. The last thing I wired together was a radio. I’m not likely to make it into the twenty-first century, but I have to tell you, if I did I still wouldn’t catch up.”

  “Just listen, Granddad, and I’ll give you the gist.” And while Dwayne talked, I could almost see the polished broker’s persona disappear and a pocket full of pens appear, and horn-rim glasses and a pencil behind his ear. How the course of history—one boy’s anyway—would have been changed if he’d gone to live on the other side of the Big Thicket.

  I thought I should say something more to David, who stood watching Harriet’s kin with me, but I couldn’t think what. I’m sorry you didn’t get your trip to the Rockies? I’m so glad you stayed close until the last? But he, doubtless feeling awkward, too, moved on, nodding to Doll, then standing next to a small group of well-dressed older men. Perhaps he had his recorder in his pocket.

  Doll was sitting under the same pecan tree where I’d seen her at the grave-cleaning in the spring. Her soft face crumpled under a small-brimmed felt hat. She was in black, a church dress with buttons up the front, and someone, as before, had buttoned a thick sweater about her shoulders as a wrap against the mild breeze blowing across the headstones.

  Uncle Bob, looking chipper in dress pants, a tie and windbreaker, fussed around her, not seeming to take into account that his older brother had come all the way from the other side o
f the cypress swamps for the occasion, or even that he, Bob, was Nat’s kin and not Doll’s. The family plot seemed to be the badge of kinship; those who tended it and frequented it were Family with a capital F, and the others—Birthday Club, old friends, bankers who’d come out of remembrance to Knox, the dead woman’s daddy and boyfriend and I—were outsiders.

  “Hello, Doll,” I said in a low voice, knowing that she didn’t need my words. “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.” I pressed my face against the old woman’s, thinking how alone she must feel, how out of line to be burying a child. I could imagine the anguish it would cause my mother to be standing by the kneeling lambs and fenced plots at home, her hip stiff, her face set, burying one of her girls. It was not the proper order of things.

  That eventuality was not something you ever considered. Having children, you assumed for them a life opening up, flowering long after yours had closed. That was the price you contracted for: your life for theirs. Who wanted to be left? Who wanted to have the entire responsibility for children: giving birth to them and burying them, too.

  “She’s over there,” Doll said in the hollow tones of the deaf. “She’s going to be buried with him. She’s a Sloane on her daddy’s side.” She looked around, baffled by the crush of strangers. “I married a Sloane,” she said loudly, as if claiming her right to be there. She seemed disoriented, weaker than when I saw her last. The loss had shaken something loose in her. “Are you going to stay with me?” she asked, reaching up and pulling me down so my face was next to hers. “I’ve got eight beds, all made up.” She looked in Nat’s direction, and I wondered if they would speak. “Nobody’s sleeping in them.”

  “Next time I will,” I said, “I promise.” I bent closer until my lips pressed her white cheek. “Next time.”

  It wasn’t until Dr. Snow, the elderly slump-shouldered vicar, was standing by the grave, the kin and friends arranging themselves in clusters, that I spotted Pammy. The one person I still hadn’t seen.

  The girl was huddled inside a heavy black jacket that came almost down to her knees and a straight skirt that hit the tops of the heavy shoes that had so bothered her mother. She’d cut her hair close to her head and she looked wretched. She held herself tight, her arms wrapped as if in a straitjacket. The Class Favorite, who was now a first-class attorney, was without makeup, her dimples obscured in her strained face.

  I saw her wave at her brother—perhaps they’d come together and she had taken time to regroup. She didn’t come up to the front of the half-circle of people; didn’t stand with the family, Nat and Dwayne, Uncle Bob and Doll.

  As I moved toward her, Birthday Club got out their handkerchiefs, while a group of portly, balding men coughed as if on signal. I heard a mockingbird, and the faint cry of a loon.

  “Are you all right, Pammy?” I walked up to the solitary girl, not touching her.

  “I’m lousy.”

  “It must be hard. My mother has lived long enough, she’s almost eighty, that we’ve had time to say some things we couldn’t say earlier.”

  “She hated me.”

  “No such thing. Nor you her.”

  Pammy’s hands disappeared inside the sleeves of her jacket, and she rubbed her cheeks with her woolen arms. “I used to think she was more married to you than she was to Daddy.”

  I didn’t know how to say what was on my mind. “You needn’t blame either of them, Pammy. Marriage is—a destructive snare.”

  “You’re telling me.” She tried to tuck her chin out of sight in her high collar, looking more like her mother than either of them would have been pleased to know.

  I studied the troubled young face before me. “Maybe you’re trying the hard way to avoid it.”

  Her eyes flared. “Don’t tell me how to run my life,” she said.

  I strolled with her toward the grave, still keeping my distance. “I may try my hand at it, from time to time. You’ll just have to put up with me.”

  Pammy sobbed. “They made such a fucking mess of it.”

  “We all do.”

  “Not me.”

  “Even you. Even you will make a mess of things.”

  She wailed, a pale tough stalk of a girl. “I didn’t want her to die.”

  “None of us did,” I said.

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.…” Dr. Snow, holding the Book of Common Prayer upside down, was reciting all too familiar words when we joined those at the graveside.

  The last call I’d had from Harriet had been the day before she went into the hospital.

  “Just because it doesn’t last doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Her squeak of a voice was faint. “Remember how we used to lie out in the sun and baste ourselves with baby oil, getting those deep glorious tans? Just because we know now you can’t set foot outside without sun block 40, that doesn’t change how it was then.”

  “Yes,” I said, “we had those afternoons.” I was on the bed upstairs and Will was rubbing my back while I talked and tried not to cry.

  “I’ve decided I’m only going to keep those times I want and throw the rest away. I want the day we met at Pritchard’s, the day I was your maid of honor, the week Knox and I had together in Aspen, and the day David showed up on my doorstep like the answer to a prayer.” She was coughing dreadfully and had to wait before she could go on. “I’m going to write each one on a slip of paper and tape them together like a filmstrip of the good times of my life. I’m going to hang it over my hospital bed so that when I wake up that will be the very first thing I see: the Best of Me.”

  When I returned from Texas, I began to make calls. I wanted to talk to everyone. I called my family—Mother, Bess, Fannin, George; and Harriet’s—Doll, Nat, Dwayne, Pammy. I called porky Theo Kenton of the silly red suspenders to arrange a trust fund for my grandsons. I called Miss Pritchard’s School for Girls (now Pritchard’s Preparatory) to set up a Harriet Sloane Calhoun scholarship. I wanted to call every Stuart and Stewart from the old days. And every Bitsy and Binky, Muffy and Missy, Tiny and Teeny, to tell them that Harriet was dead. Harriet, the one who had more boyfriends than a tree has leaves. Harriet, who never let anybody but her husband touch her treasure. Harriet, who wrote her mom those weekly letters claiming: “I must lead a charmed life.”

  I wanted to call them all while it was still possible. People central to your life could vanish. We have so little time one with another.

  In the state park this afternoon, the leaves were beginning to turn. The black oak and scarlet oak, ash and sumac, sweet gum and maple, sassafras, hickory, walnut, beech, turning red, yellow, rust, brown. In another two weeks Will and I would bring the dogs to tunnel under them, to chase smells and each other. We would rent a cabin and light a fire. An apple-wood fire to celebrate fall.

  At the Wild and Scenic River overlook, I parked and got out of the car. In the distance, past the trees, I could see a four-year-old in her shorts and canvas shoes, gathering pine needles with her mother—already pregnant with her sister, Bess—and hear again her daddy, young and slim, call out to her, “Where’s my Sarah?”

  Looking out across the familiar hills of home, I was grateful for each and every one of us who had made it to the last chapter.