Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  “We drew up joint wills, years ago, each leaving everything directly to the children.”

  “That’s right, you did. Back when you opened up your little gift shop. That was the idea, you’d have your own thing and so forth. Am I right?”

  “Wallpaper.”

  “Right. We did the paperwork then, everything in order. But Nolan never took that too seriously, I’m guessing. I’m guessing he never thought that was the end of it, just a whim. The long and short, here, Sarah, is that he wanted you to be provided for. He wrote a new will, the very next day, as I recall. He didn’t see any need to upset you with it; still and all, he didn’t want to pop off and leave you in a fix. Prescient, as it turned out.”

  “What are you telling me?” I tried to keep my voice calm. His kind could never say a thing straight out.

  “Everything to you, life interest. Lock and stock. Meaning everything. To the kids after you’re gone, what’s left. The residual.” He paused and must have been taking a swallow of something, as if he were speaking at a podium. “Now, he wanted me to restrain you from flying off the handle when you got the news. He expressly wanted me to keep you from making any hasty decisions.”

  “Such as telling you what you could do with that will.”

  “I believe that was the gist of his concern.”

  I moved a sample book, looked at our pleasant space. “I don’t have to take the money.”

  “Life interest,” Theo explained with patience, “means you skim the top, give the bulk to the kids. That’s fair to both generations, all parties. You can’t liquidate the assets. We didn’t think you’d have an objection to that, a life interest.”

  “I don’t have to take it.” I tried pacing while holding the phone, but the cord didn’t reach. I sank back on the stool. Picked up the empty thermos and considered hurling it. “You don’t have to accept an inheritance. You know those tidewater people refused the land their granddaddy left them because they figured it would cost millions to drain it and clean it and get it so they could sell it.”

  “You read too much, honey.” I could imagine him mopping his fat brow with a monogrammed hanky. “A life estate, it’s yours. You die, you pass it on.”

  The only estate Nolan had held for life had been laid to rest in the cemetery. “Draw up what you have to to convey it directly to our children,” I said, “George and Fannin.”

  “This was his will, Sarah.” Theo’s voice had grown testy. “I’m looking at it, witnessed and signed. You know what that means, his will? It means his wishes. It’s the same as saying he wanted his ashes spread over the steps of the state capitol or scattered on Sassafras Mountain. Think it over; sleep on it.”

  I stood, as if ending the conversation. “You sleep on how fast you can execute the transfer.”

  “Will you come into the office? Let me talk it over with you? Explain the details?”

  “I’m overheating, Theo. I’m going to let you go.” I did not sail a sample book across the room, only hefted it to get an idea how far it would go. I tugged my braid: maybe this was why I didn’t cut my hair.

  Hanging up the phone, I considered Nolan. Wondering why he had had to make it so difficult, had had to go behind my back in this way. Why he’d had to have the last say. There was no way this wasn’t going to get out, have tongues flapping. Theo Kenton would be telling this to his partners over big gin drinks filled with those little onions that looked like mothballs. Gibsons. He drank Gibsons.

  My children would think me militant and utterly out of line not respecting their father’s wishes, disregarding a life estate. At least in Edith Huntt Cooper I had a mother who wouldn’t give a fig about what I did or didn’t do with a husband’s money. Who would not give it a passing thought. How dreadful it would be instead to have one of those parents who said, How can you possibly do this, dear, you’re breaking my heart, you have to think how it will look, and more. I’d been blessed, having such a mother. A woman who had not one time ever suggested that she wished her daughters had done other than go into wallpaper and horses. Who, rather, had conveyed relief that we’d found something we liked and so did not begrudge her her own work. A mother who would not have turned a hair if we’d sold corsets or bonnets, run boardinghouses or taverns.

  I’d said it to Nolan at least a dozen times before he fell ill: I don’t like the way the world is set up. Men on the embalmer’s table paying off their wives’ mortgages, setting a little series of loophole trusts in motion. Men, stretched out, breathing their last, envisioning the financial complexities they were about to put into play. It used to be, I’d argued, Heaven and Hell that a man thought about on his deathbed; now it was life estates and residuals.

  When he was dying, we hadn’t talked of wills at all. We’d talked instead about putting a new horseshoe pit down by the peach trees. About the annual party for bank stockholders, and if he should make a little speech over dessert. About Fannin’s boys, and was her husband, Johnny, going to be able to care for them. About George, and were his investments shaky.

  How was it possible that there had been so little communication between us that he could have changed a will and never mentioned it for a dozen years? Or more? How had we come to that, leading lives so separate that in the end even our thoughts were separate, our words no longer conveying where our minds were. Oh, Nolan Rankin, how could you? Why would you?

  I left the shop less in anger than in grief over what was lost.

  HEADING OUT OF TOWN in my generic gray Toyota, I thought, as I often did, of towns such as ours, possessing a past far grander than its future.

  Mineral Springs before the Civil War had been the site of the most famous spa in the country, so in demand that eight trains a day deposited travellers come to take its medicinal iron-rich waters. The legend was that the planter who owned the land had been “riding through his prosperity” one day when he got drowsy, dismounted and, napping, dreamed he found a fountain with healing properties. When he awoke, he parted the vines in a damp spot nearby, and discovered a crystal clear spring, laden with iron like the fabled chalybeate springs of Asia Minor. Now there were more people in the hilly green cemetery where I had recently buried Nolan than lived in the entire town. The old train tracks had been torn out, the depot moved and turned into a cafe, nothing remained of the hotel but a few pieces of the foundation, and the spring itself was now only a trickle of water that bubbled up in a low fountain sheltered by a frame springhouse.

  Only the sunsets seemed to me to belong to those early days—in our part of the state, each night, summer and winter, as if the atmosphere reflected the iron-filled bedrock below, the departing sun covered the horizon with carmine color like lava flowing forth across the sky.

  I had three drives I liked to take. One led to the Wild and Scenic River overlook on the Georgia border, and the sight of the blue ridge of mountains in the distance; one followed Long Creek Road—past the Chattooga white-water-rafting rapids, the signs for boiled peanuts, hot cider, scuppernong grapes, salmon eggs, winesaps and roseapple honey—to the cottages, picnic tables and wild animal smells of Oconee State Park; one wound toward North Carolina, curving up along Lake Keowee, around a chain of smaller, interlocking lakes.

  Unless I had Gentle Ben along, used to a set routine, I didn’t have to choose until the road forked north and west and then again west and northwest. Unless he was with me, I could let the car decide. Whichever road I took, I climbed red clay hills dense with the scent of pine. Whichever way I went, I found a beautiful part of the world, nestled on the rolling remains of the oldest uprising on the continent. My love for its sights and scents never lessened.

  One of the pleasures of “riding through my prosperity” was being out of touch with the rest of my life, beyond the reach of those who called, and called upon me. When I was in the car, all I had to do was drive—as long as I didn’t get myself in a wreck, or lost, which was possible on Long Creek Road since each of every two forks on the dirt two-lane also said Long Creek, so th
at you could go in looping circles, eating up your gas, past the same boiled peanuts sign three times before you put your mind to it and took care to peel off at the right time and hit the state road again. But that was my choice when I was driving; no one else was there to mind. No one else had to be taken into account.

  It was a freedom I’d seized upon years ago, and no matter what was going on at home or in the shop, what or who was falling apart or crowding in, no matter who was in need or want at the time, I always gave myself at least one weekly drive. Sometimes, bad times in the past, I’d racked up as many as three hundred and fifty miles in one day, but, even so, it was one of the greatest rewards for the time spent.

  Usually on a workday I’d swing by the house to change and pick up Ben. He liked the ride; he knew the stops, the soup and sandwich diner, the state park with its smells to track in the spring, its leaves to burrow under in the fall, the overlook, Rae’s truck-stop cafe. Today, at the last minute, I’d decided not to. This was a private trip; I was driving to bury Nolan. I’d take Ben instead on a long after-supper walk, watch the strawberry sunset while he stalked shadows in the brush. I knew if I went by the house, he’d want to come along and I would be reminded of all that needed doing.

  It was time to feed the fruit trees, but I would do that Sunday. Sundays I was accustomed to working outside in the orchard and garden alone. Nolan had liked to spend the day dropping by to see cronies, maybe pitching a few horseshoes, watching sports on TV, shooting a couple of garage-door baskets. Then he’d take me to supper at the Mineral Springs Depot, where he’d see the same men again, eating out with their wives, and they’d talk across to other tables, catch up with each other again, and in this way make it through the weekends to Monday.

  Taking a break, I pulled off the road at the little diner that offered lunch for $1.75 and outside bathrooms. I liked to stop for a cup of coffee to drink in the car; or to stop with Ben so we could take a leak and stretch our six legs. There were a lot of old homes on the hilly streets behind the car, and at one time or another Katie and I had paid admission to the ones with historical markers, or knocked on the doors of the ones occupied, wanting to see inside them all. Curious what they had on their walls; how they’d fixed up their rooms.

  Back in the car, the grade of the road growing steeper, I decided to go first to Oconee State Park, and that made me wish I had brought Ben, that he was on the seat beside me, eagerly anticipating a romp.

  One of the treats of my drives was listening to the call-in radio shows, hearing the troubles of other lives told in strangers’ voices. Plus I got a lot of local color, of the feel for where people were in our neck of the woods. South Carolina was a complex place. It might be the only state in the country which was both for guns and for abortion rights, against gun control and against abortion control. Although it had a sort of logic if you thought about it: you mind your business and we’ll mind ours. The state confused outsiders and politicians, because the press and the rest of the media were hung up on some fixed idea of what was “liberal” and what was “conservative.” Operating on the mistaken idea that voting was along those lines. I often thought that the two political parties here should be called “Give Us a Hand” and “Butt Out.” Listening to the call-ins, I knew that people sounded as racist, sexist and provincial as they were thought to be; yet I also knew that, in practice, blacks and whites, men and women, now worked together to keep the outsider out with the same vigilance they’d once used to keep each other out. It was progress of a startling kind, if you lived here and if you knew where to look.

  Driving with the window open, my arm on the sill, I caught the big hour-long main event of the afternoon: gun control. The staple topic when local events were slow, and there was nothing on national news but natural disasters and general elections.

  The first caller did the kick-off speech on the constitutional right to bear arms. The second updated the numbers: more people were killed in vehicles every year than were killed by firearms, so why didn’t they come out with legislation for car control? The deejay was going along, having a good time, knowing that the majority of listeners were sick up to here with all the criminals running around loose. He suggested that, well, now, Canada had a tiny percentage of shootings and they had strict gun control. What did the next caller think of that? He thought that was because they didn’t have no blacks in Canada. Moving briskly along, the deejay asked the next voice, a woman, if she didn’t think that, to use an example, the terrible mass shootings in the cafeteria in Texas last fall weren’t due in part to lax gun control. She said she did not; that if the people in that cafe had had their own guns, you could bet your ass they’d have finished that killer off before he got a one of them.

  I turned off the radio. It was standard fare.

  I passed familiar names on dirt side roads, Apple Barn, Berry Farm, Bear Hollow, and turned right at the fork between Sumter National Forest and Oconee State Park. At the picnic area, I parked and got out to stretch my legs. I’d never taken a cabin here, but I thought that one of these weekends soon I would. They had kitchens—I could see the chimneys—or at least they had wood-burning fireplaces. How grand an apple- or cherry-wood fire would smell here in the pines high in the hills. Ben and I could walk and eat and pile up under blankets at night and have easy dreams.

  I sat at a weathered table, wishing I was in my old pants instead of my rust jumper, and opened the lid of the diner coffee. No one else was around on a weekday spring afternoon. The outdoors was all mine. I could see wild flowering bushes through the trees, and smell some faint heavy scent almost like magnolias. I’d held myself together so tightly while Nolan was dying, wanting to be there with him all the time, and, equally, often wanting to be far away. I’d not wished him to go so early, so quickly, a man not yet sixty, cut down (as they always said as if talking of a felled tree) in his prime. With time left he should by rights have had. I’d not wanted things settled between us by default.

  I THOUGHT BACK to how tickled Harriet had been to learn that both of us had got separate bedrooms the same year. She, in her rose-colored way, had put a romantic face on their move, hers and Knox’s. There’d been too much sharing of bath and bed, she said; it had got too ordinary. Then they’d given each other a bit of privacy, and soon they were having late night visits to her green satin room or Knox’s male quarters. What could I tell her except that it was another coincidence—Nolan and I had moved into different bedrooms, too.

  What I had not said, had not wished to tell, was that in our case it had been hurtful, bitter, frustrating, and had changed nothing at all for the better. This was—what?—eight years ago. I must have been forty-seven, Nolan fifty-one.

  What precipitated our decision to sleep apart was an accident, one of those chance incidents.

  I’d come home late; Katie and I had been going over the books, preparing for tax time. I’d run out of steam, and had decided to call it a night sooner than I expected. Nolan didn’t hear me come in; he was up on our bed, looking through a girlie magazine. He had his pants on, a drink on the lamp table—a hefty drink, clearly not his first—but was just looking. I was caught by surprise. I knew the skin magazines were all over the newsstands and the airports; I’d just never thought about it, had grown up without a brother in the house. I sat down on the side of the bed, relieved almost, thinking that here was a chance to say some of the things to him that I’d been too hesitant to say before. Sex was difficult to discuss; misunderstandings were too easy.

  I took off my shoes and hose and the rust jumper from the shop. It was about this time of year. (Perhaps that’s why his dying in March had had a painful echo to it.) I’d told him that I understood his looking, that all sex was a sort of regression to some degree. That the way it worked for me was different. That perhaps, now, we could do what he liked and what I liked, too. I undid my hair, which in those days was pulled back on each side with barrettes, and took off my white blouse.

  In my bra and panties, I told him, “
What I like, what I fantasize about, is getting out of the shower, still damp, my skin prickly hot, and being wrapped in a towel and carried to bed. Like a girl, you know?” I’d asked him, “Maybe you could do your magazines and then come wrap me in a towel and we could”—I’d stopped, watching his face, then gone doggedly on with it—“go slower than usual, do some things we haven’t done before?” I’d made it a question.

  Nolan had closed the pages and shoved the magazine under his side of the bed. “Don’t make a big deal of it, Sarah,” he said. “I was just window-shopping. I wasn’t planning to buy. Come on, let’s have a drink and eat. I was waiting for you.”

  I’d tried again to address where I was, later that week, while it was still fresh (after the skin pictures had gone from under the bed). “Take your time with me,” I’d said. “I like to go slow; I like to have time to let my mind get in the mood, get excited. I’d like to do it fresh from the shower. Will you wait? Then I’d like you to put your mouth on me, get me ready.”

  “Jesus H., Sarah, what’s got into you?” Nolan asked, embarrassed. “Can’t we just have regular sex without going into all that stuff? Can’t a man just have plain sex with his wife when he wants to without all this fuss?”

  I’d flown into a rage. “Why does plain sex mean you get to come at the speed you want, and I don’t get to come at all? Why doesn’t plain sex mean both of us having some? Why is plain sex just you thinking about your dick?”

  Nolan had got out of our bed, pulled on his pajama bottoms and gone into Fannin’s room. (Where were the children? Off at school? George at Sewanee, Fannin at Duke? They must have been. What did they think when they graduated and their parents took over their rooms, swapping things around, making the old master bedroom into a sitting room/guest room?)

  That had been a dreadful time between us. I’d been full of anger for days, weeks. But when I went for my Texas visit with Harriet in April and admired her newly decorated emerald bedroom, I’d kept my own counsel about our decision to sleep apart. Out of habit and temperament keeping my private life private.