Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  I LET MYSELF INTO Rooms of One’s Own. I was thinking of Harriet; everything reminded me of Harriet. I remembered her being hurt that I hadn’t named my shop Prints Charming. Her being shocked the first time she saw the sign SARAH COOPER AND KATIE PEGUES, PROPRIETORS. Saying, “But you’ve been Rankin now for almost twenty years. How can you call yourself Cooper, as if you never got married? Has Nolan seen this? What does he say? Why, Knox would have kitten fits if I suddenly dumped the Calhoun name and went back to Sloane. He’d give birth to cats.” And all the years of Harriet referring to “that girl” and Katie to “that woman” in the same tone of voice, neither understanding the other.

  While I was having my breakfast on the porch, the mail carrier had brought August’s Potato of the Month, SHEPODY, the tag on the burlap bag said. And I had to stop and close my eyes, thinking that the damn potatoes would still be arriving when Harriet was gone.

  I looked around the shop. The room, a corner space on Mineral Springs’s main street in the brief downtown, was large and light. It had two walls of windows, one that contained the counter where Katie and I sat, and one that was papered and covered in color photographs of all the rooms Katie and I had done. In the corner, where the windows met, we’d set out a round table, covered in sample books, with two armchairs for browsing. Even the ceiling made me think of Harriet, the old tin squares a reminder that we both lived in locations left over from yesterday.

  I was eager for her visit, yet dreading it at the same time. I was afraid of what I would see when she stepped off the plane in the Greenville airport, fatigued from transferring in Atlanta. Afraid I would see what I did not want to see.

  Will had talked with me about her. He’d looked at my notes, and then had tucked my drawing of the chest with its dried tomato and bowed heart into his wallet. That was in May. Since then, we had not said much about the small-celled tumor. I’d asked him why radiation and not chemotherapy; he’d said because my friend was not going to make it anyway, and radiation didn’t make you as sick. There was little else to ask.

  I knew Harriet would also arrive angry or, more likely, hurt, and that was my fault. I’d had to ask her to delay her trip for two days, to get her nonrefundable ticket reissued. It had been a harrowing month already, and it wasn’t over yet. First Fannin lost the baby, and then Rooms lost a client, which Katie had had to deal with all alone.

  Will and I saw each other as often as possible, and talked on the phone as little as necessary, and then logistics only. He calling to say he’d see me late or not at all. Me calling with news of some new crisis, to ask him to walk the dogs. We’d not even mentioned living together; it seemed too complex even to imagine. Requiring time and attention neither of us was ever going to have. But we’d each got familiar with the other’s already familiar home; we’d found corners, spots, spaces that could be moved into without crowding. When we were together, I let my answering machine intervene for me, surprised at how my callers resented it. Sometimes we’d be on the bed at my house, reading, in our robes, and Will would get a call on his beeper at the same time that my machine was speaking. These are the robots for Sarah and Will, we’d say. The new guard dogs of the age of technology.

  When Katie came in, I filled us each a mug of coffee from the thermos. I’d not only arrived early, I’d brought us donuts. We leaned over and bumped heads, saying “Knock on wood,” a new routine. Silly, a sign of stress.

  “What time does your friend arrive?” Katie asked. She wasn’t in her jumper and T-shirt, but instead was all dressed up in a brown suit with shoulder pads, a cream silk shirt, heels, and a pocket watch on a gold chain around her neck. She consulted her fancy timepiece.

  “Just before noon.”

  “We’ll have to close up; I can’t stay.”

  “I have the feeling you’re not headed for the country in those clothes.”

  “You’re right.” She rubbed her slender hands together as if warming them over her coffee cup. “I have a lunch date with a certain contractor.”

  I smiled. This was the last man in Katie’s life. This must be good news, I thought, or else she wouldn’t go. “So?”

  “So I don’t know, but I’m giving him a try. We invested close to ten years.”

  “Will it be hard to see him again?” I knew she’d had a difficult time when he’d opted for someone with less muscle, someone less enterprising.

  “I expect so.” Katie shrugged.

  “You don’t have to hang around.” I wanted to let her be on her way.

  “I have time.”

  We talked about my new client in Greer, a pretty Victorian town on the other side of Greenville. I’d been by the woman’s house last week and was going again after Harriet was gone. I’d found a nice print already of white morning glories twining across a dark blue background, very 1920s floral print, yet very contemporary. If she didn’t like it—the client, Thomason—we agreed I’d start again. There were metallic papers from the Twenties; that was a possibility.

  We finished the coffee and then talked about what was still on our minds, the client we’d lost.

  “Do you think Morrison really killed herself?” Katie asked me.

  “She did kill herself,” I said. We’d been so shocked. Her son, who told us, said she’d gone to sleep after taking an undisclosed amount of an unnamed brand of sleeping pill and not waked up.

  “I mean, intended to do it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, trying to sort it out. “I think people get into binds, straits they can’t get out of. They can’t see their way clear. So they throw themselves on the odds. Let chance decide. Perhaps, Morrison might have thought, Dexter Junior will check on me, maybe they’ll pump my stomach, maybe I’ll throw up the pills. Maybe I’ll sleep through eternity. I think people cast themselves on fate. I don’t know what to call that. Is that intention?”

  “Hey, are you talking about Morrison?” Katie asked, looking at me closely. “Sounds to me like you’re talking about that woman’s husband.”

  “Knox?” I shook my head at the idea. Surely not Knox, such a dandy, such a ladies’ man. Always a handkerchief in his pocket, always smelling of after-shave and barbershop. Surely a man light-years from depression. Still, he had that other woman. Could he have got drunk and called it close taking the curve, letting fate make the choice? God, what a thought.

  “Morrison was doing so much better than she had been,” Katie said, sad at losing a successful client, and a friend. “She was tickled to pieces with that upstairs sitting room with its cocoa-and-rose zigzag paper. And she had a big time with having a nice roomy space her son couldn’t invade.” She looked glum. “I can’t figure it.”

  “Harriet said Knox had made that curve every day for years, sometimes more than once. And he always drank.” I couldn’t bear to think of someone letting go of a life when hanging on to one was so difficult.

  Katie looked at her watch and stood. “I got to go.” She looked at me and said, “You know, we never got Morrison’s last payment.”

  “Is that right?” I thought that if Nolan had died in a crash, I’d have been sure there was some unacknowledged intent. He’d been so difficult at the last, snapping at the children on the phone. Flaring up at every crime report on TV. “They ought to be shot,” he’d say, or “strung up,” of someone who’d robbed a convenience store. “They ought to be deported,” of someone of a different nationality. “That’s what you get for letting everybody think this is a free country. Where do they get off? I paid my way; they can, too.” But that was after he’d been diagnosed, after he knew that something was eating his insides.

  I ran my hand over the pleasing matte finish of a white-and-coral wallpaper sample, wondering if Katie’s seeing her man again had anything to do with the recent loss of her client. Wanting to salvage something? “If you have lunch with your contractor,” I asked, not wanting to pry, “does this mean negotiations will reopen?”

  “Could be,” Katie said. “Could be it’s too late. There’s
a statute of limitations on caring. Both ways, I’m talking about. You can’t just relight it like a pilot light. It’s more like a brushfire. When the brush gets all burned up, there’s nothing left to light.”

  I watched through the windows as a man got out of an Olds in front of the shop. He looked up at the Rooms sign before he opened the door. A slim, nice-looking man, he had razor-cut fair hair and an expensive tailored suit.

  “I found this, Ms. Pegues,” he said, stopping Katie at the door. “In Mother’s checkbook. I’m trying to get everything paid off as best I can.…”

  Katie made the introductions. “Sarah Cooper, this is Dexter Morrison, Junior.”

  So this was Maisie Morrison’s boy, the one who’d been having all his friends over downstairs, the indirect cause of the lovely upstairs sitting room. Not, I hoped, of Maisie’s dreadful end. I held out my hand. “We were so sorry about your mother.”

  “It’s a shock.” He had a square jaw and wore one gold earring. “I haven’t started to recover. Do you think she—meant to? But how could you possibly have an idea. You hardly knew her. Who did?” He reached out and handed Katie a check. “Here—I guess she still owed you something? It’s made out to you. To this place, I mean. I couldn’t find a bill anywhere—”

  “Yes,” Katie told him. “It’s for us. Thanks.”

  “Sure,” he said, looking around.

  “Sorry we drank up all the coffee,” Katie said.

  “No, I can’t stay, really, Ms. Pegues. I just wanted to drop this off. I guess she owed it to you? There wasn’t a bill. There’s a lot of things you have to do when someone dies. You probably don’t know that, but there is—”

  “Thanks, Dexter, for bringing it by.”

  When he was gone, Katie handed me the check. “She wanted us to see this,” she said.

  I saw the neatly printed MAISIE B. MORRISON on the gray bank check and felt tears start in my eyes. It was almost like a message for us. Even after Morrison had lost her husband, when she came in as our client, she refused to take his name off her checks, insisting on signing them Mrs. Poindexter P. Morrison, Sr. She must have wanted Katie, wanted Rooms of One’s Own, to see that she had finally got her own account. “Ouch,” I said, looking at the signature.

  “I know. It gets to me.” Katie put the check down and then picked it up. “I don’t want to keep this, okay?” She endorsed it and slipped it in a printed envelope for EMILY’S List, an acronym for Early Money Is Like Yeast—a women’s political action group Mother had got her interested in.

  “Why do you think Dexter brought it by instead of mailing it?” I asked her. “Do you think he thought we’d give it back to him?”

  Katie said, her hand on the doorknob, “I expect he wanted to see somebody who knew his mother.”

  I was thinking about Harriet’s children, seeing them arrive somewhere, as Junior Morrison had done, stunned, puzzled, caught by surprise. I wondered if they were in any way prepared for what was coming.

  AT ELEVEN, I CLOSED the shop and aimed my car for the airport.

  When Fannin lost her baby and Harriet was due to arrive, I’d said to Will, “I can’t be with both of them.”

  He’d said, “Don’t try to think it out. Leave it to the bottom of your feet. In the war,” he told me, “the medics talked about triage. Sometimes you hear it still from old-timers like myself. Some are going to get well without you; some aren’t going to get well even if you try your damndest. Some can go either way; they’re the ones to work on.

  “In civilian life—I’m not going to call it real life, the comparison works the other way—but in civilian life, with plenty of anaesthesia and clean operating theatres and state-of-the-art pain-killers, you don’t think that way. Maybe when push came to shove we didn’t in the army either. You get a gut feel where you need to be. At whose bedside. Sometimes I’ll be standing there staring down at some face in ICU and I’m asking myself, What are you doing here? And then I’m reminding myself who’s around the corner and down the hall, and who’s on another floor. But there I am, talking to what seem to me to be deaf ears, nobody at home, eyes rolled back in the head. Then the patient will open his eyes and say, ‘You’ll get fallen arches standing on your feet all night, Doc,’ or she’ll raise her head, put on a flirty smile, and say, ‘You’re putting on weight, Will,’ and I’ll know I’m where I ought to be.”

  We’d been in Will’s downstairs bedroom on the four-poster, which made me feel as if we were in some grandparent’s room, which we were, in fact. It had been his grandmother’s house, just as I lived in what had been my grandmother’s. I was going to keep a flannel gown there when it was winter, a granny gown, for when the wind came down out of the mountains. There was even a mud room off the kitchen for wet galoshes (where had they and the word gone? with those grandmothers?) and mittens and scratchy outer clothing. I liked his house. I had never seen the secret side of it, the private rooms, its past, back when Nolan and I had come for the summer parties to which Will invited his married friends. I’d asked him about the judge; how she’d liked his house. “She didn’t care for the livestock,” was all he said.

  There was even a sauna, which he’d had installed in what had originally been an oversized cedar closet. A sauna? I’d been amazed. “Umm,” he said. “Why not? Dog people are Sybarites, didn’t you know?” So I’d learned to shower and go wet into the square fragrant hot dry room with its two benches, stretch out and cook my bones, and then let him wrap me in a towel and lead me to the four-poster. “Come winter,” he said, “you can warm the sheets for us.”

  In the end, I went to my daughter.

  I’d just come in from picking peaches when Bess called me. Out at seven in the morning in the pouring rain in my scruffiest clothes, a scarf over my head, getting drenched. I loved it when all the trees ripened in turn, and loved sinking my teeth into the juiciest fruit as I picked and tasted: the O’Henry, a sweet yellow eating peach; the white tart Georgia Belle; the dark luscious Monroe; the Indian pickling peach, fuzzy and white outside, red inside; the creamy Loring’s rosy pulp. I’d filled one basket and then another, watching the chill rain soak the throats around the trees, the branches overhead growing outward like raised arms.

  My feet squishing in the wet ground, I remembered when the children were little and I used to send them out with rolled-up newspapers to beat the trunks of the fruit trees, to massage them and get their sap running. How much fun they’d had as youngsters, two rowdy kids, pelting the bark, the dog (Rogers? No, Hardy it would have been) running at their feet. A few times Harriet’s two had been here also, all of them out together. Then all of them deciding when they reached middle school that they looked like dunces and weren’t going to be caught beating tree trunks anymore. But trees were like people: they grew tired.

  “She lost the baby, Sis,” Bess said. “She’s scared to tell you.”

  I sank down in the wicker chair, still wet, my feet going right out from under me. I felt like an ogre. “She was scared to tell me when she got pregnant.”

  How far along was my daughter? Four months, surely. The summer was a blur. Recalling it, all I could bring to mind had to do with Harriet. Tracking the radiation, listening to the reports with a sinking heart. Will sometimes rubbing my back while I talked late at night on the phone, the dogs on the rag rug by the window in my bedroom, their new favorite spot, where they could catch the first crack of daylight.

  “She’s pretty upset. She bled all over the floor.”

  “Has she been having trouble?” How could it have happened so suddenly?

  Bess’s voice had wavered. “I feel so guilty. She was spotting when she came to visit on the Fourth. But I didn’t know what to do. If it only has two legs, you know me, I’m lost.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I told my sister. Wondering who I was to be passing out pardon. I who should have told my grandmother that if she didn’t take care of little Bess I’d put ten of mother’s spiders in her bed. But I knew that all of us longed t
o shoulder blame; it implied we had at least some control over our lives. No one wanted to think that events or bodies simply went haywire. If you couldn’t blame yourself, then you blamed someone else. Was Harriet doing this? Saying to herself, If Knox hadn’t run around with that tacky size-ten woman then I wouldn’t be gasping for air? It was too unbearable to think that it didn’t matter what you did, that your body could betray you for no reason, a random attack, a derailed train. No wonder people went nuts over vitamins, exercise, cutting out fats, cutting out salt, all the regimes. It was an effort to prove you retained some responsibility for what happened to you.

  “She wants to see you,” Bess said, sounding just slightly left out. “I said I’d stay at the house with the boys if you came.”

  “Of course I’ll come,” I said. “I’ll work it out.”

  Later, I called Harriet, who was, as I feared, hurt and mad at having her long-planned trip postponed. “Can’t your sister take a break from romancing the roan to look after your daughter? Fannin practically lives with her anyway. I don’t see what you can do—”

  “Be there,” I said as gently as I could.

  I called my son-in-law, who said that Fannin would be in the hospital a day or two more, to make sure the flow had stopped and to get her strength back. He also said that since he spent all his waking hours there, he wanted his wife close at hand. He sounded unnerved and young.

  Will flew down the evening of Bess’s call and went straight to the hospital to have a talk with Johnny. “One medicine man to another,” he said.

  I called Mother, trying to picture her in her work clothes and boots, somewhere south of the 38th meridian in a locale known as Patagonia, which straddled parts of Chile and Argentina and had rain forests, tablelands, mountains and—spiders.

  “Shall I come home?” she asked.

  “Don’t even think of it.” My remorse over Time Lost for my mother made my words almost a shout. I heard her laugh lightly, as if reading my mind.

  “See if you can find some nice tropical lilies to send her from me. It’s impossible from down here—I’ll check with you in a day or two. And thank you, dear.”