The Fortunate Ones

by Ed Tarkington

  “He was at the Capitol when the news broke,” Vanessa said. “I was at work. When we got home, Arch and I made a drink and turned on the TV, and it started to sink in. We cried—oh, how we cried. But the next day, the NRA lobbyists were lining up outside his office doors. Arch went in that day ready to break ranks. But his name was already on the short list for vice president. He didn’t need much persuading to accept that taking on the NRA would put a swift end to that possibility.”

  “Maybe it would have been brilliant,” I said. “Maybe he would have looked like the most principled Republican in the Senate.”

  “This is Tennessee, Charlie,” she said. “Half the people who voted for Arch are stockpiling ammunition and watching the sky for black helicopters.”

  Vanessa set her coffee down at the table and gazed off at the yard.

  “Did the other thing have any influence on his decision?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know, or you don’t want to know?”

  “We never talked about it. After the scare he’d had before, I assumed Arch was discreet. Still, it’s possible. Nick swore to us that he’d taken care of it for good, but it’s hard to make anything disappear anymore. Arch would hardly be the first member of Congress who cast a vote to protect a secret. The big lobbying firms have a file on every one of them.”

  She crossed her legs and smoothed the hem of her dress. “The bill never had a chance anyway,” she said.

  I stamped out my cigarette and watched the glint of the sunlight on the morning dew.

  “About a week after the gun bill died, Arch got a letter from one of the Sandy Hook moms,” Vanessa said. “He let me read it. I think I have it somewhere. I don’t ever want to look at it again. I guess that was the killing blow. Did you see the news about the walking tour?”

  It had been a big story. During a Senate recess, Arch had grown a beard and gone undercover, hiking and backpacking around East Tennessee, visiting little towns and farms while pretending to be a vagabond traveler so that he could get to know the good people of his state up close.

  “That was nothing but a big charade,” she said. “Andy Goldberg and Nick Averett orchestrated the whole thing. The beard was real. Arch grew it because the treatment center wouldn’t let him have a shaving razor, for fear he might split it open and use it to slit his wrists.”

  “What about all of those farmers and store clerks he became so friendly with?”

  “All very well compensated, carefully coached, and required to sign agreements that would all but doom them to a chain gang if they ever told anyone the truth.”

  Vanessa’s phone buzzed on the table. She picked it up, glanced at the screen, silenced it, and placed it facedown next to her coffee.

  “I guess the treatment didn’t take,” I said.

  “Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t,” she said. “Maybe Arch thought he was acting honorably, like one of those ancient Romans Walker Varnadoe tried to make you all worship back at Yeatman. I’m tired of being expected to excuse everything with illness.”

  It didn’t seem a good time to note the irony of a powerful man secretly afflicted with depression shooting himself out of shame over voting down legislation designed to deter the mentally ill from having access to guns.

  “I’d like to see the garden again,” I said. “Will you come with me?”

  “It’s not much to look at anymore.”

  “Just the same.”

  “Okay.”

  We followed the path leading around the house to the rose garden, its heirloom vines pruned and winterized, the leaves already yellowing, a few red scatterings of new growth coaxed out by the variations in temperature so typical of the change of seasons in Middle Tennessee, where summer seemed always to tease with the possibility of return before the first frost.

  “I’m selling the house,” she said.

  “I thought when I saw all of the furniture covered that you might be,” I said. “When does it go on the market?”

  “It’s already under contract. I just have to sign some paperwork. Mother and Daddy have already come through to mark what they’d like to have. Jamie didn’t want anything except a share of the equity. I’m not keeping much myself. There’s no room for any of it where I’m living now. The closing is in a month, but I won’t need to be here.”

  “You’re staying in Washington?”

  “I’m with a nonprofit,” she said. “We raise money and lobby for women’s health care and education in the developing world.”

  “That sounds like a noble calling.”

  “It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself when you’re holding the hand of an Afghan woman who has had her nose and ears cut off for trying to escape slavery.”

  “It’s good that you’re helping her.”

  “She’s helped me far more. As have many others. Isn’t that always the case with people like us?”

  “In my experience, people like us do more harm than good, despite our best intentions. But I understand what you mean.”

  She stopped and faced me. A wistfulness came over her. How strange, I thought, to feel at once so close and so distant.

  “Have you found someone yet?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Have you?”

  “I have. A man I work with. We didn’t start seeing each other until Arch was gone, but the feelings began before. We’re keeping it under wraps for a while longer. But I thought you should know.”

  “Did you think I thought you had called me for that?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  I looked back past the roses toward the long yard.

  “I thought I loved you once,” she said. “I think now I was using you to love myself. Or maybe it was something else. I don’t know. Besides . . . you loved Arch first. So did I. We both know that’s not something we could ever get past.”

  There was so much I wanted to say to her. Instead, I just smiled—that sad, sweet smile they say makes me such a comfort to the bereaved.

  “I have one last favor to ask,” she said.

  “Anything,” I said.

  “The new owner has hired an architectural engineer. There’s structural damage in the walls. They’re going to keep the bones, but it won’t look the same. I want to be able to remember it the way it was.”

  “I’m out of practice,” I said. “I’ve only just begun to try again.”

  “You’re the only person I’d ever ask,” she said.

  I returned a few days later with an easel and a stool and a box of oil paints in the trunk of my car. The house and grounds were still and silent. I walked down into the yard, found a spot in the shade of the red oaks, set up my easel and board, and prepared the pallet. The air was cool and redolent with the scent of the oils and the late blooms in the gardens and the coming of fall.

  I sat down on my stool and glanced across the yard. As I studied the house, I thought of the first time I’d visited it on that summer day when I was boy—how grand and glorious it had seemed; how I could hardly believe anyone might actually live in such a place. I thought of walking up the driveway with my mother heading toward the kitchen, and Jim calling out to us, desperate not to let my mother enter through a door meant for servants. I thought of our years in the carriage house, and how I had been lulled into believing that my time in that place and that world might be more than temporary—that I belonged there. I thought of the day I returned after my sojourn in Mexico, of how much my absence had altered my view of the things that had not changed and seemed as if they never would. I thought of how, soon, the house would look so different—how, at that very moment, it already belonged to someone else, someone who knew nothing of what had taken place there, just as I knew nothing of what it had meant to others who had known it before me. Those people were long dead, the moments of joy in which they delighted and the sorrows for which they suffered now forgotten. Or perhaps they were sealed away somewhere, in lost letters or old diaries moldering in a box somewhere to remain unread,
unknown, unremarkable, just as mine were destined to be, but for whatever trace of them might flow from my heart to my hand onto the bare white canvas over which I gazed as I prepared to make my final offering at the temple in which I and those I loved best were formed.

  The sun lit up the facade of the house. A breeze whispered through the trees, sending golden leaves cascading around to rest, suspended, on the tips of the long blades of grass. I bowed my head and cast up a silent prayer. A deep calm came over me. I opened my eyes and picked up the brush and began.

  Acknowledgments

  Deepest thanks to Gail Hochman, for your faith, your wisdom, and your inestimable kindness. Thanks to the good people at Algonquin, past and present, especially Betsy Gleick, Michael McKenzie, Lauren Moseley, Stephanie Mendoza, Brunson Hoole, Elisabeth Scharlatt, Craig Popelars, and Andra Miller. I am so very grateful for Kathy Pories, the kind of editor that isn’t supposed to exist anymore.

  Many thanks to Maria Browning, Tim Henderson, and all the good people of Chapter 16 and Humanities Tennessee, stalwarts of literary life in Nashville and beyond. Thanks to my dear friends at Parnassus Books for providing a home away from home and a place of belonging to my family and so many others. To the American Booksellers Association and to all the independent booksellers: thank you for keeping the culture of books and ideas alive and thriving.

  To everyone at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Chapel in Nashville, especially Scott Owings: thank you for, among many other things, reminding me occasionally to take a few deeper-than-normal breaths and teaching me to listen in both the silence and the storm for the still, small voice.

  To Peter Taylor: thank you for helping me remember why stories and language still matter, and for prompting me to write the letter that changed the course of my life in the most unexpected and beautiful way. To all of my family—Pettyjohns, Webbs, Lees, Stevenses, Hearnes, Spencers, and Hoods: thank you for your steadfast love and support in this and all things. To Izzy and Trent: let’s gooooo! To Mary-Randolph and Lettie: this whole world is yours and mine.

  Finally, to Helen—first and last, forever and ever, Amen.

  Also by Ed Tarkington

  Only Love Can Break Your Heart

  About the Author

  Ed Tarkington’s debut novel Only Love Can Break Your Heart was an ABA Indies Introduce selection, an Indie Next pick, a Book of the Month Club Main Selection, and a Southern Independent Booksellers Association bestseller. A regular contributor to Chapter16.org, his articles, essays, and stories have appeared in a variety of publications including the Nashville Scene, Memphis Commercial Appeal, Knoxville News-Sentinel, and Lit Hub. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

  Published by

  Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 2021 by Ed Tarkington.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA; LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025221

  eISBN: 9781643751078