by Lynne Hugo
Advance Praise for
Remember My Beauties
“In vibrant prose, Lynne Hugo tells a gritty, psychologically astute story of three generations in turmoil and the power of nature to heal even the most troubled hearts. Her characters are brave, flawed, real—at times disturbingly so—but she never gives up on any of them, and by the end of this inspiring novel, I shared her empathetic vision. A spare, commanding novel by a master storyteller.”
—Patry Francis, author of The Orphans of Race Point
“Lynne Hugo’s writing is beautiful and evocative, earthy and strong. The characters, the setting, and the way she handles tough issues with honesty, grit, and understanding all make for a wonderful read.”
—Laura Harrington, author of Alice Bliss
“This book helps us to know that when life knocks us to our knees, it is possible to get up and ‘walk on.’”
—Laura Munson, author of This Is Not the Story You Think It Is
“A character in Remember My Beauties is fond of saying, ‘Lotsa ways to be blind,’ but this wonderful novel also shows us there are many ways to see—many ways to see love, for instance, or family or forgiveness. I’ll be remembering the beauty of this novel for a long time to come.”
—Katrina Kittle, author of The Blessings of the Animals
This is a work of fiction. All characters are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Published by Switchgrass Books, an imprint of Northern Illinois University Press
Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb 60115
© 2016 by Northern Illinois University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
978-0-87580736-2 (paper)
978-1-60909195-8 (ebook)
Book and cover design by Shaun Allshouse
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hugo, Lynne, author.
Title: Remember my beauties / Lynne Hugo.
Description: DeKalb : Switchgrass Books, an imprint of Northern Illinois
University Press, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016005087 (print) | LCCN 2016010348 (ebook) | ISBN
9780875807362 (paperback) | ISBN 9781609091958 (electronic) | ISBN
9781609091958 (Electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION /
Family Life.
Classification: LCC PS3558.U395 R46 2016 (print) | LCC PS3558.U395 (ebook) |
DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005087
ALSO BY LYNNE HUGO
The Time Change
A Progress of Miracles
Swimming Lessons
Baby’s Breath
The Unspoken Years
Jessica’s Two Families
Graceland
Where the Trail Grows Faint
Last Rights
A Matter of Mercy
Contents
Acknowledgments
1—All the Queen’s Horses
2—I Am, I Said
3—Bloodlines
4—Lean On Me
5—Independence
6—The Right Thing
7—Flowers Smattered on a Tired Brown Landscape
8—Creek Crossing
9—Through the Looking Glass
10—In Beauty School
For Brooke
with my love
Acknowledgments
As solitary a passion and occupation as writing is, we get by with a lot of help from our friends. Debra Connor and Nancy Pinard, my first readers, were extraordinarily generous with time and useful ideas. Janice Rockwell gave the manuscript several close reads for clarity, providing immeasurable assistance and support. Dawn Bordewisch served as an invaluable consultant regarding addiction treatment and recovery. Lucinda Dyer, author of Back to Work: How to Rehabilitate or Recondition Your Horse, read the manuscript and provided expert information and suggestions regarding horse care and riding, as well as directing me to specific articles by equine veterinarians. David A. Rockwell, MD, helped me with medical information regarding glaucoma and rheumatoid arthritis. Finally, Jodi Duff, DVM, read the manuscript and consulted with me regarding horse care and equine medicine. I am grateful beyond words to each of them.
The following books were read and/or consulted in the preparation of this work of fiction:
• Horsewatching: Why Does a Horse Whinny and Everything Else You Ever Wanted to Know by Desmond Morris (New York: Crown, 1989)
• The Man Who Listens to Horses: The Story of a Real-Life Horse Whisperer by Monty Roberts (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999)
• Practical Horseman’s Book of Horsekeeping edited by M. A. Stoneridge (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983)
• The New Book of the Horse: Complete, Authoritative Reference for Every Horse Lover by Sarah Haw (New York: Howell Book House, 1993)
• Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie by Richard Manning (New York: Viking, 1995)
I also consulted the following websites and articles:
• HorseChannel.com, http://www.horsechannel.com
• “Tendon Injuries (Bowed Tendons) In Horses,” James M. Casey, http://www.equinehorsevet.com
• “Bowed Tendons: The Farrier’s Role in Prevention and Treatment,” Heather Smith Thomas, November 1, 2012, http://www.americanfarriers.com/articles/506-bowed-tendons-the-farriers-role-in-prevention-and-treatment
• “Standing Wrap How-To,” Laurie Pitts with Tricia Booker, Practical Horseman Magazine, February 2014, http://practicalhorsemanmag.com/article/standing-wrap-how-to-14725
• “Three LegIcing Techniques for Your Horse,” Barb Crabbe, Horse &Rider, http://horseandrider.com/article/eqlegicing1818-17850
Managing Editor Nathan Holmes, Marketing Director Lori Propheter, and Art and Production Manager Shaun Allshouse at Northern Illinois University Press have been wonderfully caring and responsive. An author couldn’t ask for better. Thanks also are due Director Linda Manning and Copyeditor Tracy Schoenle.
Special thanks again and always to Dr. Alan deCourcy for computer maintenance and rescue, which seems very important until I think of his constant faith, abiding love.
All the Queen’s Horses
TWENTY-SIX YEARS SINCE HIGH school. My hair has been a long jungle of gold the whole time and it’s not my hair that’s wrong. Now kitchen shears are poised just above my forehead while I pull a fistful straight up from my scalp. My eyes glitter like river rocks in the bathroom mirror.
The hand with the scissors wears the engagement and wedding rings from Wal-Mart Supercenter’s jewelry department. If you want, I tell myself, instead of cutting off your hair, you can take those off and drop them in the toilet. One half-carat total weight. Big deal. Who cares? Little glints around a fantasy. Little freaking glints. Big freaking fantasy.
But another divorce? The first one didn’t help. I’m the ball in one of those arcade games, ratcheted and battered between my parents and my daughter, two consecutive husbands, and now stepchildren. Something else has to change. Something that will make people sit back, shut up, and see that I have to be different. To save myself.
For lack of a better plan, I let my hands have their way.
Bangs, hardly an inch long, jut a path across my forehead, and my hands keep clear-cutting the forest of my hair. It drops into the sink in hanks the color of fall leaves. Some miss and drift to the floor. Like a jerky chainsaw team, my hands cut down one side, then the other, over each ear, and halfway toward the back of my head.
&
nbsp; It was my hair that Eddie fell in love with. At least at first. He always wanted me to let it loose when we made love, even if it got in our eyes and mouths. He’d wrap it around his hands and breathe in my scented shampoo and tell me it was beautiful, I was beautiful. Those were glory days of discovering all the treasure in each other that the world had carelessly overlooked. We were drunk on disbelief in our luck.
We’ve sobered up in five years. Now part of me lives here in our tri-level in town with the nice yard, with Eddie and his daughter, Chastity, an ironic name considering how she dresses—not that he sees it. The rest of me lives ten miles out on the farm with Mama and Daddy and the best, the remainder of our stable. Of all of them, the horses are the least trouble and wellspring of purest love. By pure, I mean uncomplicated.
I’d been ripe for the picking. Sure, I had great hair, but Eddie could have been smitten with my third toe and I’d probably have bought it. A year before I met him, my parents had started truly falling apart. I was living with Carley in an apartment on Marquette Drive in town. Carley’s father had solved his child-support problem by disappearing when she was three. I managed with a Novocain-for-the-mind job: data entry in an insurance company cubicle. With morning and evening trips to the farm, I kept my parents fed, their house and laundry in order, and the horses cared for. There were a hundred problems popping up and taking over like weeds in the vegetable garden. A nursing home was the obvious answer.
“That’s where you put people to die,” Mama accused me. What I couldn’t stand up to, though, were my father’s wet eyes. “The horses …” he said. “What will happen to my beauties?” It wasn’t a question but a moan of resignation and heartbreak.
How could he say such a thing to me? The horses are our connection: the corral, ring, and pastures our idea of an open cathedral, time with the horses our version of where two or three are gathered together. We’ve had the same experience—oh I know it used to happen to him, too—seeing the horses come in from the back pasture on their own even before I call, how caring for them in the dawns and twilights can feel mysterious and reciprocal, a sense that whatever life means, all that lives are in it together.
“Daddy, I would always keep the horses. They’re everything to me. For heaven’s sake, I bought Spice. He’s mine. But I love them all. You know that.”
“Okay” was his word at the same time he shook his head. No comfort on his face. I’ve never given him cause to wonder how much I love the horses, except that unlike him, I don’t put them before my family, regardless of what Eddie thinks. I’d have to do it all, or my father would never be peaceful.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You know what? I’ll keep you and Mama and the horses here at home. Carley and I will move in with you.” I’d always intended to keep the horses, barn, and pastures; my idea was for Daddy and Mama to rent out the house for income. The whole part about moving in to take care of them was impulse pure as honey and disaster thick as the same.
I did it, though, and it wasn’t the first nor the last dumb thing I’ve done for lack of a better alternative when I couldn’t stand the status quo any more. Carley sulked and glowered and made it clear that she’d rather bathe in horse pee than help. I set up our own apartment in the basement, which she called the bat cave.
“Give it a rest, Carley. There are no bats in the basement,” I said.
She reached for her purse and took out a small mirror, shoving it toward my face. “Take a look.”
Her real name is Carla Rose, and she hasn’t gone to charm school in the intervening years. But while she and I were living with Mama and Daddy, I could still harangue her off to seventh and then eighth grade. I’d get up early for our morning fight and fix breakfast, then arrange Mama and Daddy’s lunch and lay out their pills like little soldiers for the day. Tired before I’d even showered, remembered or forgotten a smack of lipstick, I sped to the office chronically a few minutes late. I lived for the sweet seasons when I could turn the horses out to pasture—no stalls to muck, no extra time allotted to throwing hay, scooping grain—and I could work each horse under saddle every day. For pleasure I’d ride bareback.
It was Eddie’s asking to come over to watch me ride that made me fall in love with him. He said the way I knew everything about horses was amazing, and his eyes adored me from under his thick brows and buzz cut. So I showed off a little. Instead of the jeans and the Western boots I’d taken to wearing, which were practical for barn work, I dug out the breeches and tall boots I’d kept from back when Charyzma and I competed in hunter classes. Carley must have appropriated my jacket and gloves, but I found the white show shirt and my helmet, and for all Eddie knew, the outfit was right. I set up a cavalletti and a low bar in the ring, first trotting Charyzma over the cavalletti and then, when she was happy doing that, cantering her around and asking her to jump the bar, which I set at two feet, not daring anything higher since I hadn’t kept up her jumps. I should have made the time. I could have set that bar at four feet, Charyzma had that much room to spare. She wanted to jump again, and so did I. Eddie inspired me. Back then, he cared about my Carley, too, although an irritated skunk would have given him a more pleasant reception. He said it was shameful how her father had deserted her, that he’d never do that. He was crazy about his own children, a true sign of a good man. The hole I’d dug for myself over Carley having no father, Eddie was there to fill. I admit there was exquisite electricity between us, and it was the first time I understood lust, but I trusted him, too.
When I told Carley that Eddie and I loved each other and wanted to make plans, she ramped up her opposition until it was a force of nature.
“You cannot marry that dork,” she yelled. “He wears overalls. He wears white socks and black shoes. I hate him. He hates me. I hate his stupid daughter. Chastity’s a slut.”
I couldn’t argue her last point or Eddie’s idea of dress attire. “Chassie’s only with him every other weekend. And Eddie does not hate you. He wants to love you and for us all to be a family.” I didn’t even bother to mention Rocky, Eddie’s third-grade son, because his ex-wife hardly ever let him come, always in some new uproar about child support, or she’d claim Rocky had Ebola and was representing Brazil in an ice hockey tournament, both the same weekend. “And here’s the thing, Carley. Eddie and I figure we can buy a house with both our incomes. You won’t have to live in the ‘bat cave’ anymore.” I put air quotes around bat cave but softened it with a smile. I can’t say the smile was entirely genuine, but I was trying. I thought she was just being fourteen, that special nastiness they save for their mothers. I hadn’t figured out that she was cutting school and forging my name on the excuse notes, or swiping money from my purse and her blind grandfather’s sock drawer.
She and I were in the basement at the time, my parents upstairs, doubtless eavesdropping on every word through the register, though I kept a hush on. I’d fashioned a nice place for us down there. A blue couch on a beige carpet remnant, a coffee table, and two end tables with lamps. Our own TV. Bright red-and-blue tapestry on the wall to hide painted cinder blocks. Silk plants, some red candles. A refrigerator and a microwave against the far back wall. The one separate room was Carley’s. An unused desk with good lighting, carpet littered with her clothing, a twin bed rumpled with pillows and comforter. There wasn’t much natural light, but we did have privacy. Still, Carley did nothing but complain as if she were being paid by the word.
But then, her neck reddening, she said, “And who’s gonna take care of Grandma and Grandpa? What about the horses? I wanna stay here.”
She was a pretty girl back then—still is, if you can get beyond the piercings, which were just for normal earrings at first. Now, barely six years later, it’s up to twelve in her left ear, seven in her right, and a new horror in her right eyebrow. To my mind, she looks like the victim of a nail-gun assault. And she’s taken to dyeing her blond hair black, which makes her fair skin look ghostly and cloudlike. She’s not yet found a way to mess up her eyes—big, an
d a good sky blue like mine—except to imitate a raccoon, courtesy of white eye shadow, black liner, and mascara applied to full theatrical effect.
My plan was to stay calmly rational with Carley while explaining the arrangements. Eddie and I had discussed it and been delusional enough to believe that would be effective. “They qualify for County Eldercare Health Services,” I said. “They’ll have an aide here four hours, every day. Meals on Wheels, too. I’m keeping them on that. I’ll come before work to give them breakfast and their morning pills, and Meals on Wheels will provide dinners. So I’ll be checking on them and taking care of the horses, of course, and Nadine says she’ll help with Grandma and Grandpa, too,” I said, knowing full well that the last was laughable but feeling the need for one more item to pile on the excellence of this plan.
“Oh right. Aunt Nadine. She won some daughter of the year award recently, didn’t she? She’ll be fan-tastic. So you’ll be doing it with your new lover while some country strangers are taking care of Grandma and Grandpa?”
“That’s county. County Eldercare Health Services. Your concern for your grandparents is touching. I just don’t know how I could get by without all your help.” I’ve never charged for sarcasm since it comes to me so naturally.
My calm and rational approach was derailing; I tried to fix it. “Baby, come here.” I opened my arms. “I didn’t mean that.” I wanted to cradle her the way I used to when problems required a Band-Aid and a Popsicle, when fun was blowing dandelion fluff around a melon sunset, making firefly lanterns, and driving into town for ice cream. I so miss how she loved me.
“Let go, honey,” Eddie always says to me. “Kids change.” But I’ll never stop hoping to get her back. I taught her to ride before she was old enough to start in 4-H. She has the gift. When she was eight, Carley raised Charyzma’s foal. She showed him for four years at the Kentucky State Fair. Her bulletin board spilled first-and second-place ribbons. Pot and cocaine never occurred to me while trophies were lining up like a shiny cavalry on her dresser.
“You don’t give a shit about anything but yourself,” she sneered, pulling out of my reach. “You just can’t wait to shack up with that asshole.”