The Shade of My Own Tree

by Sheila Williams

Bette popped on her Chanel sunglasses and grabbed me by the elbow. I never saw anyone move so fast in high heels.

  “Believe me, hon, you don’t want to know.”

  Chapter Three

  Historic Home for lease or sale.

  Needs TLC. B&B license.

  1010 Burning Church Road, Prestonn.

  Call Bette Smith, Realtor Extraordinaire.

  There were five telephone numbers listed: Betty’s office, home office, home, cell phone, and pager. Her E-mail address was bettesmith@bette.com. Bette is an original.

  It was 7:30 in the morning and the office was still quiet. I’d come to work early that day to get caught up with some paperwork before the phone calls, E-mails, faxes, and meetings started. I also wanted to use the time to check the classifieds in case there was an interesting apartment or house ad that I could check on. Not that Bette would ever miss anything. The Burning Church Road listing caught me by surprise.

  At the dawn of time, the area that is now Prestonn was a summer settlement for hunting parties of the Cherokee.

  The river bottom land was rich and the surrounding areas were teeming with game, including bison if I remember my local history. The white man came in the early 1700s and settled there, too. The town charter says “1792,” but it was probably settled much earlier than that. The founding father’s last name was Preston, but sometime during the past three hundred years the extra n was added. No one knows why.

  In the early 1800s, Prestonn had a great reputation as a lawless river town complete with gambling, houses of “ill repute,” opium dens, and life-or-death card games. There were so many duels and gunfights that the sheriff formed a guild with the sole purpose of picking up bodies and cleaning up the streets. There were thirty saloons and two churches for the three thousand semipermanent residents.

  In the middle 1800s, the town ran off the undesirable elements and transformed itself into a retreat destination for the wealthy who built palatial summer homes along the river road. In the 1960s, Prestonn fell into an economic slump because it didn’t have a base of manufacturing or service industries. Many of the grand residences fell into disrepair and decay.

  The late 1980s brought another transformation when a historic district designation was granted and the old river town got a facelift. The Victorian and pre-Victorian era houses were restored and rehabilitated. Antique shops, boutiques, restaurants, and trendy bistros moved onto the main drag and the tax coffers bulged. Prestonn was born again.

  I hadn’t considered Prestonn. It was close enough and yet far away. Folks didn’t pass through it to get to the town I lived in now, and unless you were going there for a reason, it was not on the way to anywhere. The main bridge to the big city was three miles downriver. Would I be safe in Prestonn? Would I be happy there?

  I smelled a bargain (I love bargains) and punched out Bette’s home number, then her home office number, then her office number, then her cell number. She was at the gym working out with the personal trainer she’d told me about, a twenty-something named Charles. Yeah, right.

  “Hi, hon!” her voice came through even over the sound of the music accompanying her “workout.” She was breathing hard. I would have given anything to see if she was really on that treadmill.

  “Bette, you’ve been holding out on me,” I started. “You didn’t tell me that you had anything on Burning Church Road.”

  The sound of Meredith Wilson’s “Seventy-six Trombones” came blaring over the receiver.

  “Hold on; I can’t hear you. Just a minute.” There was rustling in the background. Then the music stopped. “Now. What’s this about Brendan Woods?”

  “No, Burning Church. What about your listing on Burning Church Road?”

  “Opal, you don’t want that house! It’s too big, it’s too far away, it’s too damn old, and it’s a dump! Nothin’s been done to that barn since Caroline Xavier was in pigtails, and she lived to be over ninety!”

  “I’m not opposed to using a little elbow grease,” I said eagerly. Especially if the price was right. I had always loved old houses. Besides, a big old house would have a room that I could fix up for my studio. I could start painting again. Not to mention room for other throwaway women who might need a place to stay for a couple of nights. I had decided that if I got out of my situation, I would help other women get out of theirs.

  “Elbow grease! You won’t have any elbows left when you get finished scubbin’, tearin’ down, wipin’ up, and plasterin’ that pit! Besides—”

  “How much, Bette?” I interrupted her. I had better get that question answered before I argued with her any further. When she told me, I was surprised.

  “It’s not haunted, is it?”

  Her laughter trickled through the phone line. “No, sugar. I went there myself right after Miss Caroline died to make sure that she made it over to the other side OK. She could be a contrary old woman. The house seemed fine to me, but I had Father McEachern do a spirit sweep anyway.”

  What a relief.

  “Opal. It’s pretty antebellum, especially the kitchen. I don’t think that house has been touched since before Sherman went through Kentucky.”

  “Bette, Sherman didn’t go through Kentucky.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  I made an appointment to see the house. How bad could it be?

  It was awful.

  The house was an Italianate painted a soft yellow color that reminded me of lemon custard. Part of the porch was falling down. Correction. Part of the porch had fallen down. On one side of the house, there wasn’t enough wood left to build a fire. The electrical system was new and all of the lights worked. The plumbing was old. Really old. When I flushed the toilet it sounded like an elephant with gas.

  As I looked at the slimy water, I thought I saw something move. I blinked. The water was still. Sort of. I flew out of the bathroom on Bette’s heels.

  There were, literally, bats in the belfry, and an owl was living in the attic of the coach house. When Bette clicked the light on in the basement, I saw something small, dark, and furry scurrying into the shadows. I froze at the top of the stairs. Bette was already halfway down the steps.

  “Bette, what was that?” I asked.

  “Just one of those fuzzy brown things,” she answered calmly. “Nothin’ to worry about.”

  Fuzzy brown things. Well, that was helpful. I’d look them up in the encyclopedia.

  “OK …” I said as I took the stairs very, very slowly. “How many legs do they have?”

  “Five or six,” was the reply.

  “Oh, that’s all right then,” I commented sarcastically. “Spiders have eight.”

  Bette rolled her eyes at me.

  “Coming!” I yelled back.

  The basement was dark and scary and housed a furnace the size of Montana. The walls were stone, and several sections appeared to have been bricked over sometime in the Jurassic Age. Human torture probably took place here in the Dark Ages.

  Bette was wrong about the kitchen. It wasn’t antebellum. It was prehistoric. The walls were water-stained and the refrigerator was a relic from the 1940s. As I glanced at the ancient sink and the huge stove, I imagined a family of Neanderthals gathered around waiting for the mammoth roast to get done.

  The second-floor commode backed up with greenish burgundy-colored water and a smell that could fry your liver. Bette wasn’t concerned.

  “I have a plumber who’ll fix you right up,” she said brightly, making a note on her pad.

  I was skeptical.

  “Unless he’s going to take out the entire sewer line, I don’t think it will do much good.”

  Bette saw my expression and chuckled. “I told you that it was a dump.”

  But the house did have its good points.

  The rooms were spacious and the tall windows let the sunlight shine through in all of the right places. The wallpaper, where there was any, was p
eeling, and the fireplaces were small and narrow. The hardwood floors were original, and Miss Xavier had kept them in perfect shape. The thin slats of wood gleamed in the warm sunlight, highlighting the rich hazel color of the grain. Where the kitchen made me anxious, the parlor won me over. It was small but had an alcove with three windows on each side that faced the street. I could picture a tall Christmas tree standing there during the holidays and a little couch nestled in for reading during the rest of the year.

  The dining room was grand.

  I had never had a “dining room” before. The house that I owned with Ted had one big room that combined a dining room, living room, and family room together.

  The dining room in the yellow house was for “dining.” In my daydream, I saw a well-set table with gleaming silver and delicate floral-patterned china and crystal wineglasses. Bette pointed out the peeling plaster and commented that the room would need to be redone since there had been some water damage from the bathroom above. But the faded brown stains on the ceiling didn’t ruin the effect of the intricate crown molding around the chandelier. The tiny lights reflected like diamonds.

  I noticed peeling wallpaper at the end of the room near the door to the kitchen.

  “Prob’bly four layers of wallpaper under there,” Bette said, scratching at the edges with her fingernail. “Folks didn’t bother with scrapin’ paint or peelin’ off the old paper back then. If the styles changed, they just painted or papered right over it.”

  The upstairs rooms were cozy and charming. Even in their careworn state, I could see the majesty of the house in the strong woodwork, beautiful brass-trimmed light fixtures and now-peeling floral-patterned wallpaper. But if I was frightened in the dungeonlike basement, overwhelmed by the 19th-century kitchen, and concerned about the peeling plaster in the dining room, the third floor took care of all of that.

  Once I got up there, that is.

  “In the days when these gracious homes were built, the family used the front stairs, which were, gen’rally speakin’, wide and long, with a generous banister or handrail. So, o’ course, the lady of the house swept down those stairs with her long crinolines rustling. I’m sure it made quite a picture!” Betty explained.

  “The real business of the house took place in the back, however,” she went on, gesturing toward the dark and narrow stairs at the back of the house that led directly into the kitchen. “That’s why this staircase leads into the kitchen. It is merely functional.”

  “And unsafe,” I said under my breath as I struggled up the stairs behind her. I had to wonder how many maids and laundry women nearly died trying to move up and down these stairs wearing long skirts and high-buttoned shoes, carrying trays of food, tubs of water, armfuls of laundry, and smelly slop jars.

  “Here we are! You’re gonna love this! It’s darling.”

  We rounded the corner of the hall and Bette pulled open a tiny door.

  I looked up. Straight up. The steps were barely two feet long and less than a foot wide. They stretched into the clouds. I felt a little dizzy.

  Maybe I could take Bette’s word for it that the third floor was “darling.”

  “I won’t need a Stairmaster after a few weeks in this house,” I complained as I climbed, almost on all fours, up the steep stairs to the third floor. My thighs were calling me everything but a child of God. I could feel my hamstrings and the backs of my calves crying. My chest was getting tight. I thought I was having a heart attack.

  Ahead of me, Bette climbed the steps like a Sherpa strolling up Mount Everest. I hated her.

  “Bette, I trust your judgment.” I was still breathing hard from coming up the last staircase.

  “Opal, I’m gonna have to get you to the gym. You should get an appointment with Charles. He’ll get you in shape.”

  I thought about the last time I had called her and heard Charles’s voice in the background. Perfect shape, my ass.

  When I finally reached the top I thought I was going to have to lie down. And die. There was a buzzing sound in my ears.

  “What’s the altitude up here?” I whined as I breathed heavily. “Have we reached base camp yet?”

  “Hush up and look!” Bette ordered.

  I did look.

  The front room was filled with sunlight.

  Two windows, one facing east and one facing west, gave me enough light to see all that I could want to see. The room was at the very top of the house, so I was, literally, standing on the roof. The view was wonderful. I could see the river. There was so much space. At the very back was a closet-sized space that held only a commode and sink. The ceiling was stained from roof damage, but the floors were sound. And there were bookshelves.

  “Miss Caroline was plannin’ to use the room as a library, but she fell in the tub and broke her hip.”

  “I thought you said that she was over ninety years old!” I could not imagine an old lady climbing up and down these steps.

  Bette smiled. “She was old, but she didn’t act old. Scampered up and down these stairs like a mountain goat. Had all her own teeth and could see a ladybug on a leaf on the tree across the street without binoculars.” Bette shook her head in a gesture of appropriate sympathy. “But you know, after they break a hip, things are just never the same.”

  I made a mental note to be careful.

  I walked around the room and placed all of the furniture that I hadn’t bought yet (and couldn’t afford) in their proper places. The wrought-iron bed, the antique chest of drawers, the white crockery pitcher and bowl on a stand, an easel and worktable that I didn’t have yet. There was a tiny closet on the side that was large enough for the few clothes that I had. In my mind I added up what I thought would be the cost of putting a shower in and fixing up the sad little bathroom.

  I had it all planned out.

  I stood in the neglected rose garden only halflistening as Bette rattled on about the history of the place, the Xavier family and the legendary Lorene Xavier, Miss Caroline’s great-great-aunt, who was beautiful and accomplished and who had presided over a salon during the summers when wealthy folks came to Prestonn. I wasn’t paying much attention when Bette talked about the Xavier secret that Miss Caroline bragged about or the suitor who died of diphtheria in the Philippines in the thirties. I was off in another world thinking about pruning the roses and fixing a cup of tea on the stove. I was thinking about three rooms that could give some woman a break for a few days while she got herself together. And I was thinking about a dog or two and perhaps a cat to keep in the coach house to keep the mice away. I was thinking about painting the studio a pristine white and mopping the floors until they were sterile, then throwing down old-fashioned rag rugs and covering my couch with a throw I found at the flea market last week. I loved the way the yellow house looked in the sunlight. It was warm and soft and welcoming, despite the basement dungeon, the questionable plumbing, and the Mount Everest climb to the third floor.

  “How much again?”

  The figure that she quoted wasn’t bad. But I had let my daydreams run away with me. I started running down the “minus” column:

  No air-conditioning. This was a river valley. Even the Devil would ask for air-conditioning in this valley in the summer.

  Heating. The old house probably wasn’t well insulated, although I didn’t know that for sure. I made a mental note to have the elephant-sized furnace checked.

  I had to do something with that Stone Age kitchen. Even if I had previous lives, there was no way I could remember how to cook on a woodstove! And the plumbing.

  I can rough it with the best of them and I was prepared to make sacrifices, but I have to have indoor plumbing that works. Plus there was the small problem of the creature in the burgundy lagoon in the second-floor bath.

  The dollar signs got larger and larger.

  “What do you think?” Bette asked.

  “I don’t know, Bette,” I told her dejectedly. “It’ll
take more cash than I’ll ever have to get this barn together. I think I need a place that already has indoor plumbing.”

  Bette stuck out her tongue at me. Then she glanced at her notes. “Don’t bail on me yet, hon,” she said confidently. “I told you, the seller just wants to be rid of this place. He’s willing to …” She flipped up one of the pages. “He’s willing to replace the kitchen appliances and fix up that third-floor bath so that it’s functional. Maybe we can negotiate some other repairs.”

  “What about the roof?”

  Bette didn’t bat one long mascara-coated eyelash. She flipped through her book and pulled out a business card. “Call this guy. I use him all the time. He’s a house inspector. Plus he’s single,” she added with a wink.

  Second to finding me a piece of real estate, Bette’s primary mission in life is to find me a man.

  I rolled my eyes at her. Anything male was simply not on my “to do” list.

  “Hon,” I said, using her favorite word of endearment, “the last damn thing I need in my life is another man!”

  She laughed and handed me a folder. The front cover had her picture on it, red lipstick, cantaloupe-colored hair, and all. “Bette Smith! The Hardest-Working Woman in the Real Estate Business!

  “That’s everything you’ll ever want to know about this house,” she said as she turned quickly on her heel. I had to jump out of the way to keep from being body-slammed by her huge purse.

  “Think it over, hon, then give me a call,” she called over her shoulder as she marched off to the red Cadillac.

  I stood there in the rose garden and watched her drive away.

  I didn’t know what I wanted to do.

  My mind was crowded with information. And the circuits were beginning to overload. Money, always money. Imani. Moving. Would the restraining order hold? Money again. Ted. Ted. All of a sudden, I didn’t know which way to turn. I could barely find my car keys. There was so much to think about.

  Bette’s car was just a red streak in the distance. I sat in mine and stared off into space.