Nell and Lady: A Novel

by Ashley Farley

  ALSO BY ASHLEY FARLEY

  Sweet Tea Tuesdays

  Saving Ben

  Magnolia Series

  Beyond the Garden

  Magnolia Nights

  Sweeney Sisters Series

  Saturdays at Sweeney’s

  Tangle of Strings

  Boots and Bedlam

  Lowcountry Stranger

  Her Sister’s Shoes

  Scottie’s Adventures

  Breaking the Story

  Merry Mary

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Ashley Farley

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503903005

  ISBN-10: 1503903001

  Cover design by PEPE nymi

  To the nurses on Six West of ART at MUSC

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE LADY

  CHAPTER TWO NELL

  CHAPTER THREE NELL

  CHAPTER FOUR WILLA

  CHAPTER FIVE NELL

  CHAPTER SIX LADY

  CHAPTER SEVEN LADY

  CHAPTER EIGHT NELL

  CHAPTER NINE REGAN

  CHAPTER TEN LADY

  CHAPTER ELEVEN BOOKER

  CHAPTER TWELVE NELL

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN NELL

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN BOOKER

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN REGAN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN LADY

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN LADY

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN REGAN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN NELL

  CHAPTER TWENTY LADY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE BOOKER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO REGAN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE NELL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR NELL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE LADY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX NELL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN WILLA

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT LADY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE BOOKER

  CHAPTER THIRTY REGAN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE NELL

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO BOOKER

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE REGAN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR BOOKER

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE LADY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX REGAN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  LADY

  Present Day

  Adelaide Bellemore was known to family and friends as Lady, although no one considered her a lady, least of all her mother. She stood at the sixth-floor window of the medical center, admiring the orange horizon as the sun set over Charleston Harbor. Clusters of nurses, dressed in cobalt-blue scrubs with totes slung over their shoulders and lightweight coats and sweaters draped across their arms, migrated past her to the bank of elevators. She studied the faces of the men and women—young and old, black and white, blond and brunet, slim and heavyset. Would she recognize Nell in this passing parade after thirty-one years? Nell was her sister, bound forever with Lady by legal documents but not by blood. They were no longer friends, hadn’t been for years. The close friendship they’d shared from birth, the cherished memories of carefree childhood days, had come to a tragic ending as a result of the events of Lady’s sixteenth birthday party on a rare snowy night in January of 1981.

  The sound of more voices from around the corner soon brought another group of nurses into view. Lady spotted Nell among them, her lovely caramel skin and thin brows arched high above eyes the color of cognac. She wore a long-sleeved white T-shirt beneath her scrubs and her glossy hair pulled back into a tidy knot at the nape of her neck. She’d grown from a scrawny little girl into a stunning middle-aged woman. They locked eyes for an instant. Nell’s posture stiffened, her jaw tensed, and she quickly looked away.

  Lady crowded into the elevator with the nurses and eavesdropped on their conversation as they made plans for the evening ahead—the household chores and children that needed tending, the sleep required to refuel their bodies and minds before returning for another grueling twelve-hour shift at seven the following morning. The sign on the elevator wall, which hung high above their heads, served as a constant reminder to hospital personnel not to discuss patient care in public spaces.

  The elevator doors parted, and everyone stepped out one by one. Lady trailed the nurses at a respectful distance through the vast lobby and across the open-air connector. Inside the parking deck, they bid each other good night as they separated. All but Nell disappeared into yet another elevator that would carry them to other levels where they’d left their cars. Lady followed Nell past three rows of parked cars to a sleek silver Mercedes sedan.

  Nell clicked the unlock button, opened her door, and tossed her things inside. She turned to Lady, her lip curling slightly as her eyes traveled Lady’s body. “What do you want?”

  Lady felt herself cringe under Nell’s scrutiny. She was no longer the beauty she had been in her high school class with her white-blonde hair, her pert nose, and a body all the boys lusted over. But mirrors don’t lie. That perky nose now looked out of place among the broken capillaries, wrinkles, and age spots. She drew her tattered cardigan tight around her body to hide the muffin top spilling from the waistband of her jeans. “Nice car,” she said, her words competing with the sound of vehicles bumping over concrete grooves in the exit ramp.

  “My husband gave it to me for my fiftieth birthday three years ago. He’s an anesthesiologist.”

  Lady nodded. She needed no further explanation. Everyone knew that anesthesiologists made the big bucks.

  “Why are you here, Lady?” The nickname rolled off Nell’s tongue with a tone of condescension.

  Lady coughed to clear her throat. “Willa sent me. She’s dying.” She paused to let the news set in. “And she wants to see you.”

  Lady palmed the steering wheel as she emerged from the parking deck. “Damn it! I can’t go through this again.” Her words sounded hollow inside her mother’s 1991 Buick Riviera. “If it were anyone but Willa . . .”

  A tear sprang to Lady’s eye at the thought of her mother dying. Growing up, Lady’s friends had called her mother a freak behind her back. But Lady preferred to think of Willa as unconventional, an eccentric old kook. But a lovable one most of the time—not that they didn’t have their issues like all mothers and daughters. Willa lived life by her own set of rules, regardless of what anyone thought of her. Most of the time, Lady humored her by letting her have her way.

  From the moment Lady had uttered her first words, her mother had insisted she call her Willa. The same held true for Lady’s daughter, Regan.

  “I’m too young to be a grandmother,” she’d declared when Regan was born seventeen years ago. “She’ll call me Willa, like everyone else.”

  Lady never referred to Willa as Mom or Mama except when she was angry or needed to get a point across.

  Willa’s one dying wish was to see her adopted daughter one last time. Why would Nell refuse to see her? Willa had done so much for her. Not only had she provided food and shelter when Nell had nowhere else to turn, but she’d also paid for Nell’s education all the way through nursing school.

  Lady took a left onto Calhoun Street and wor
ked her way over to the Battery. She rolled down the window and gulped in the fifty-degree air. She fumbled in her pocketbook for her pack of cigarettes, lit one, and took a deep drag, tasting the stale tobacco as the nicotine calmed her nerves. She rarely smoked but kept a pack on hand for times of crisis.

  She turned onto Water Street and parked in the driveway alongside her mother’s house. Her parents, as newlyweds, had purchased and lovingly restored this antebellum home. Willa was a wealthy woman, although she lived like a miser. She’d inherited a fortune from her parents and a considerable amount of life insurance when her husband, Patrick Bellemore, died. But when Lady’s meager alimony from her stingy ex-husband ran out, which happened on a monthly basis, Willa refused to float her a loan. Never mind that Willa kept the exterior of their house in pristine condition. Her priorities were obvious, signified by the absence of rotting wood or peeling paint on the shutters or wooden facade.

  The single house, with original gray siding and black shutters, was the width of one room street side but stretched deep to the rear of the property. A spacious two-story porch, which Charlestonians referred to as a piazza, ran the length of the longest side. A glass-and-wooden structure, a hyphen, now connected the main house with the building, or dependency, that had once included the kitchen house, servants’ quarters, and stables. The rear addition featured the family’s den, which Lady had claimed as her own hangout growing up, and a small apartment upstairs where Nell had once lived with her mother, who had been Lady’s parents’ housekeeper.

  Lady entered the house and went straight to the kitchen cabinet where she kept her martini supplies. She removed a chilled martini glass from the freezer and dumped several cubes of ice into a metal shaker. She poured a healthy amount of Tito’s vodka over the ice and added a splash of vermouth.

  Sensing her mother’s presence behind her, she fastened the top on the shaker and shook it. The sound of ice cubes pinging against metal filled the room. Lady watched through the kitchen window as the neighbor next door took out his trash with his Jack Russell terrier barking and nipping at his heels, and she thought back to another night thirty-seven years and sixty-seven days ago. Same house. Different neighbor. Different barking dog. The night that had forever changed her life.

  She strained her martini into a glass and turned to face her mother.

  “You’ve been smoking again,” Willa said. “Why would you smoke those nasty old cigarettes when your poor mama is dying of lung cancer?”

  Lady lifted her glass to Willa. “Ironic, don’t you think? When you never smoked a cigarette in your life. Or did you smoke marijuana during your hippie days?”

  Willa, a self-proclaimed leftover from the hippie movement, still wore long flowing dresses with Birkenstocks on her feet. Of all the silver-framed photographs that adorned the grand piano in the drawing room, Lady’s favorite was of Willa, taken with her bridesmaids at their luncheon the day before her wedding. Wearing a Pucci minidress with a crown of daisies on her head, Willa stood out like a sore thumb among her bridesmaids, who were all dressed like Doris Day.

  Willa raised a brow. “Did you find Nell? What’d she say?”

  “She said to tell Miss Willa she’ll be praying for her.”

  Nell’s message caused Willa to stumble backward. She gripped the table beside her and lowered herself into the chair. “Did you say what I told you to say?”

  “Mostly. I asked her to come see you. I did not ask her to come nurse you. She has a full-time job. We’re doing fine on our own anyway. At least for now.”

  Lady had nursed her mother through two chemo treatments, with two more to go. Each treatment left her vomiting for days. Willa’s long gray hair was falling out in clumps, like a dog with mange, and she appeared to be shrinking in size by the minute.

  “I don’t understand why she won’t see me. Did she offer an explanation?”

  “She said that no good could come from dredging up the past.”

  Lady turned away from her mother’s pained expression. She refused to cover for Nell or sugarcoat her words. Lady wasn’t dredging up anything. She lived in the past every single day. She was a character in a movie with a worn-out theme—waking up every morning to repeat the same traumatic day over and over again.

  She drained her martini and refilled her glass as random thoughts ran through her mind. The interior of her mother’s home was as equally well kept as the exterior. In exchange for food and board, it was Lady’s job to make certain everything was polished to perfection—that windows sparkled, silver and brass gleamed, and random-width oak floors were buffed to a sheen. Although the exterior and interior surfaces of the house were kept in mint condition, the furnishings—drapes and Oriental rugs and upholstery—were circa Betsy Ross. That included the kitchen with its original General Electric appliances and wallpaper with bouquets of orange and yellow daisies. Much had transpired in this kitchen over the years, and Lady felt at home at the worn pine table surrounded by green Formica countertops and white metal cabinets.

  She moved to the table and sat across from her mother. “I don’t get it, Willa. You did so much for Nell after Mavis died. It hardly seems fair for her to treat you this way.”

  Willa’s blue eyes clouded over, and Lady followed her gaze to the linoleum floor in front of the stove where Mavis—Nell’s mother, Lady’s nanny, and Willa’s maid and beloved friend—had suffered a stroke and drawn her last breath on a sweltering summer day in August of 1979.

  “I’m not giving up hope just yet. Nell always was slow to come around.”

  “That’s true,” Lady said, and they sat for a moment in silence while she sipped her martini.

  “I’ve never gotten a straight answer from you about what happened all those years ago,” Willa said. “Whatever you did to Nell to ruin your friendship is the reason she shut us out of her life and why she refuses to see me now.”

  “I resent the way you assume it was me who drove Nell away.” Lady waited for her mother to respond, but she remained silent. “My answer hasn’t changed since the last time you asked that question, but I’ll give it to you anyway. I don’t know what happened. Nell didn’t trust in our friendship enough to tell me.”

  The door banged shut, and Regan rounded the corner from the dining room into the kitchen still dressed in her school uniform—plaid skirt and hunter-green polo with the logo for All Saints Prep School embroidered on the upper left breast. Regan barely glanced at Lady as she pulled a rocker up close to her grandmother and plunked down. She removed her laptop from her backpack and opened it on the table.

  “Is it time?” Willa asked, rubbing her hands together in anticipation.

  “Almost.” Regan checked the time on her computer. “Nine more minutes.”

  Lady’s mother and daughter were kindred souls. They even resembled one another—small in stature, with dimples on their cheeks and bright blue eyes that sparkled with life. Like her grandmother, Regan fashioned her golden hair, the same color as Willa’s in her younger days, in a single braid down her back. Lady felt guilty for resenting her mother and daughter’s close relationship. If only they didn’t irritate her with their whispered secrets and inside jokes.

  “Nine more minutes until what?” Lady asked.

  Regan’s fingers tapped the keyboard. “Until I find out if I got accepted to Chapel Hill. Today is notification day.”

  Lady ignored the pang of disappointment. Why hadn’t her daughter told her about the notification date?

  She had long since given up arguing with her daughter over her choice of colleges. Lady thought UNC too big, but Regan was determined to attend her father’s alma mater. As if becoming a Tar Heel might somehow make him pay more attention to her. Lady worried her daughter was setting herself up for more heartache where her father was concerned. Letting her daughter make her own mistakes was the hardest part of parenting.

  Far be it from her to be the party pooper. “All right, then.” She clapped her hands. “The countdown is on! It just so happens
that I have a bottle of bubbly. This seems like as good an occasion as any to drink it.”

  She got up from the table, and while her mother and daughter whispered with their heads pressed together and their faces planted in the computer, she retrieved three crystal champagne flutes from the breakfront in the dining room and popped the cork on a bottle of Barefoot Bubbly she’d purchased at the Harris Teeter.

  She was topping off the third glass when cheers erupted from the table. She smiled to herself. Despite her belief that UNC was the wrong choice for her daughter, she was proud of Regan for working so hard to get into the college of her dreams. Regan had little interest in sports or boys. Although there was one boy in her grade, Booker, whom Regan spoke of often but whom Lady had never met. She sometimes wondered if they were more than just friends, but Regan assured her their relationship was all about healthy competition to get the best grades.

  “This calls for a toast,” Lady said, handing each of them a flute. She raised her glass to her daughter. “To ACC football, sorority sisters, and dates with handsome frat boys.”

  With her glass held high, Regan countered, “To an undergraduate degree in political science from UNC, a law degree from UVA, congresswoman by the time I’m thirty-five, president of the United States by age fifty.”

  Lady clinked Regan’s glass. “That’s my girl!” Her daughter was hell-bent on fixing everything she deemed wrong with the country, but Lady secretly considered Regan too reserved to endure being in the public spotlight as president.

  Willa beamed. “I’d say you’re off to a good start. You’re president of your senior class, and you’ll graduate with honors as valedictorian.”

  Regan set her glass down without taking a sip. Her daughter wasn’t much of a drinker anyway, but Lady suspected something else was bothering her.

  “Did I say something wrong?” Willa asked, her face pinched in concern.

  “I hope you won’t be too disappointed if I’m not valedictorian,” Regan said, staring down at her computer. “Right now, Booker’s GPA is a fraction below mine. He could catch up at any minute, and he seems determined to.”