The Lavender Hour Read online

  Praise for Anne LeClaire

  The Lavender Hour

  “The Lavender Hour tells a compelling story about how a very private and beautiful relationship becomes public and misunderstood. The characters are strong and memorable. This is Anne D. LeClaire's best book yet.”

  —ALICE ELLIOTT DARK, author of In the Gloaming and Think of England

  “In this utterly absorbing novel, Anne LeClaire expertly maps the terrain of love, loss, illness, and family bonds while focusing her compassionate yet unflinching eye on the truth and consequences of the hasty heart. She has created, in Jessie, a complex character who will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.”

  —MAMEVE MEDWED, author of How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

  “LeClaire packs this winning novel with resounding life lessons and a resonating set of romantic relationships.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  The Law of Bound Hearts

  “Once again, Anne LeClaire has given life on the page to characters we care about. Here is the work of a natural-born storyteller.”

  —JOYCE MAYNARD, author of The Usual Rules

  “A lovely novel whose characters surprise us with their humor and strength… LeClaire writes dialogue that could come directly from our own real lives.”

  —JOSEPHINE HUMPHREYS, author of Rich in Love

  “The Law of Bound Hearts unfolds with such precision and power that it kept me turning pages way into the night, spellbound.”

  —CASSANDRA KING, author of The Sunday Wife

  “A gripping, emotional intensity and depth of feeling highlight this poignant and lyrical novel, which illustrates how precious life is.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Recommended… LeClaire has crafted authentic characters and successfully portrays the power of forgiveness.”

  —Library Journal

  Leaving Eden

  “Tallie is a likable, energetic character, a smart girl with big dreams… Leaving Eden is a light, breezy novel about serious subjects. It's eventful, with a lingering death, a murder, a secret revealed, to say nothing of a makeover.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Anne D. LeClaire's wonderful new novel is that rarest of all treasures: a book that breaks your heart even as it makes your spirit soar. Just like life.”

  —SARAH BIRD, author of The Yokota Officers Club

  “Funny, heartbreaking, and deeply honest, Leaving Eden is an intensely moving novel about the complex ties that bind a mother and daughter together.”

  —KRISTEN HANNAH, author of Distant Shores

  “You won't want to leave Eden!”

  —RITA MAE BROWN

  “Anne D. LeClaire's latest novel is an evocative and moving story filled with women's wisdom. If you liked Entering Normal as much as I did, you'll love Leaving Eden”

  —JO-ANN MAPSON, author of Bad Girl Creek

  “Artfully crafted characters resonate within this emotional novel detailing one girl's ability to face the hardships of her life. This novel simmers with the diversity of small-town life—from the witticisms of the Tuesday senior citizen's club at the salon to the awakenings of a young girl's heart. Ms. LeClaire's ability to make the setting and its characters come alive makes the reader feel like Eden exists beyond the pages of this novel.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Tallie is an endearing character, and the Southern banter of the ladies at the beauty parlor where she works is pitch-perfect…. LeClaire's homey storytelling goes down easy.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Entering Normal

  “Exquisite… a beauty… If you love the feel of Anne Tyler's novels, then this has your name all over it.”

  —London Daily Mirror

  “It's an ancient truth, the axiom that tells us that what life does not offer us in the way of pain, we'll provide for ourselves. Anne LeClaire's fine, deceptively gentle new book, Entering Normal, takes that truth, shakes it, cradles it, and turns it on end…. This story of a life-changing friendship between generations is so full of risk and wisdom, I'm jealous that I didn't write it myself.”

  —JACQUELYN MITCHARD

  “A deeply affecting novel about the extraordinary ways in which ordinary people struggle to find their share of happiness and hope and love and connection—and ultimately succeed.”

  —A. MANETTE ANSAY, author of Vinegar Hill and Limbo

  “In rich and limpid prose, LeClaire shifts the point of view… focusing on the small acts that get us through the day, or the night, or not. A woman's book in the best possible sense, this will leave readers warmed and satisfied.”

  —Booklist

  Also by Anne LeClaire

  The Law of Bound Hearts

  Entering Normal

  Leaving Eden

  Sideshow

  Grace Point

  Every Mother's Son

  Land's End

  In memory of

  Morgan Keefe,

  David Doane,

  and

  Arthur Woessner

  The mere sense of living is joy enough.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  author's note

  ALTHOUGH CAPE COD and its towns are geographic realities, and specific places mentioned do exist, all the characters that people the pages of this book are creations solely of imagination and are not based on any individuals, living or dead. Jessie's story, too, is a conception only of this author's imagination and is not based on an actual incident.

  Acknowledgments

  ALL WRITERS KNOW that no book is written alone, and this -one is no exception.

  To Gina Centrello, Kim Hovey, Ingrid Powell, Rebecca Shapiro, and the stellar team at Ballantine, a multitude of thanks. To Allison Dickens, my gratitude for your honesty, support, wisdom, and your critical eye. I feel so fortunate to have landed in your editorial lap. And last, but a country mile from least, thanks to Nancy Miller.

  To Deborah Schneider, valued friend, champion, and agent extraordinaire, my gratitude is boundless. You deserve to have more than a room named in your honor.

  To all those involved in hospice who opened your hearts to me and shared stories that deepened my understanding of sacred territory I have not traversed, my deepest respect and gratitude. This book would not have been possible without your help, understanding, and numerous kindnesses. Thanks especially to Andrea McGee, Mike Walsh, Robert Chase, and Eileen Urquhart, hospice volunteer coordinator of the Visiting Nurse Association of Cape Cod.

  To Eunice Reisman, profound gratitude for your support and for sharing so generously with me your history and experience.

  During the period in which I was working on this book, whenever I needed information or knowledge, the writing muses sent the right people to stand in my path. I am indebted to each. To First Assistant District Attorney Michael Trudeau, the staff at the Barn-stable County Law Library, Lieutenant Robert Melia of the Massachusetts State Police, and Dr. Barry Conant, thank you for your generosity, your patience, and for returning my calls. The knowledge is all yours, any mistakes solely mine.

  To artist Anne Wilson, thanks for conversations about the use of hair in art. I also found the Collector's Encyclopedia of Hairwork Jewelry invaluable. And certainly the works of Dr. Bernie Siegel proved inspirational.

  To James Blake, thanks for the log entries from your transatlantic sail. I am in awe. And to Lyn Mendalla and Carlton Neuben, thanks for the stories.

  There exist on this planet havens for artists that provide time and space in which to create. I am especially indebted to the Rag-dale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst, Virginia. Throughout the years, both have blessed me with numerous writing fellowships. To the staf
fs of both, and especially to Susan Tillett and Suny Monk, I offer gratitude. It is not enough.

  Thanks, too, to the other writers who sustain and support me: Alice Elliott Dark, Jebba Handley, Ann Stevens, Virginia Reiser, Sara Young, Joan Anderson, Chris Leighton, Paula Sergi, and Jackie Mitchard. Because of you, I am a better writer.

  And to Hillary and Hope and Chris, my deepest love. Because of you, I am a better person.

  prologue

  I STILL GO back to that spring. As I recall that particular April morning, I see it clear. I watch myself as I walk through patches of snow toward a lavender door, my boots sinking into thawing ground, chewing a stick of sugarless gum, nervous as hell and wondering what I've gotten myself in for. It seems now as if I am remembering a different woman. And in a way, of course, I am.

  Memory.

  Mama told me that hard memories soften eventually. I trust that she's right. I mean there's just so much that can trigger a memory, set it reeling in motion, catch you off guard before you can provide against it. Just yesterday, while I was running on the beach, I thought I heard someone shout out his name. Luke. But when I turned, I saw it was only a young woman calling to her child and pointing toward a blue heron that soared overhead in glorious, awkward flight. “Look,” she called. One word, misheard, yet it was enough to bring me to my knees.

  The boy stared at me. “Mommy,” he said, “that lady's crying.”

  Memory.

  Faye says that the elderly and the dying live in their memories because it is less painful for them to look back than it is to look ahead. What I wonder is, what past is it that they return to? The poet William Matthews says the past is the little we remember.

  Not quite true. The past, the one we return to when there is nowhere else to go, is not the little we remember but the shreds we have bent and shaped and revised until they are formed into memories we can bear to recall. Prudently screened fragments we can live with.

  And even then…

  I REMEMBER that fall and the trial. Sitting in the witness stand while the DA quizzed me about the final day. Looking out over the crammed courtroom, past the only television camera the judge had permitted, scanning the faces of strangers, finding Lily, searching for Faye, thinking about the dark places sorrow can lead us into. Thinking about the glory and tenacity of love and of the consequences we pay for loving.

  I looked for Faye and thought not of the final day but of the first. The end from which the beginning followed.

  A spring snow. A lavender door. And, waiting inside, Luke.

  one

  A STATION OLDER than oldies was playing Johnny Lee's “Lookin' for Love in All the Wrong Places,” and didn't that make me laugh right out loud in spite of my high-wired nerves. My sister, Ashley, used to say this could be the title song of my life. Hard to argue with that. My romantic history was a string of jagged beads, each broken in a different way.

  I snapped off the radio—time to change that tune—but, of course, now that it had taken up residence in my head, it would be cycling through for the rest of the day. I checked the dash clock. Late. Late. Late. I could make better time on a banana-seat bike.

  The gray sedan in front of me, one in a long line of cars, inched along three degrees short of a dead stop. Back when I was a child vacationing on Cape Cod, traffic like this was a hassle reserved for summertime, but a shitload of change had occurred in two decades. Now roads were clogged nearly year-round, and each month, one more seasonal cottage held in a family for generations was replaced by a place so large, I swear it could exist in two time zones.

  I tailgated the sedan, as if that would speed things up. I was beyond late. No excuses. “Jessie Lynn, I swear you'll be tardy for your own wake,” my mama used to tell me. Of course, that was back when she could say something like that without looking like she wanted to slit her tongue and serve it for dinner, back before we all became painfully aware that such a possibility could actually loom on the visible horizon of my life.

  At one time, Lily used to treat promptness as something of consequence, along with matters like impeccable grooming and refined manners. Please, thank you, and elbows off the table were just the day care level. Back when I was a child idolizing her, I yearned to be exactly like my mama, but then, about the time I hit high school and commenced being a disappointment to her, I vowed I would never end up like she had, trapped in a small town, checking her roots for gray, her life consumed with tending to the needs of others. Well, couldn't the irony of it just cause a person to weep, for it was as if, in some weird way, I'd flipped lives with Lily. Here I was wearing twenty minutes' worth of makeup and heading off to care for a stranger while Mama was back in Virginia with her hair gone natural, preparing to sail across the ocean with a man named Jan, a semiretired dentist ten years younger than she was. Go figure.

  THE DENTIST was new on the scene, and for details, I relied on my sister, who called him “junior” and “the boy toy,” as if someone fifty-five could still be considered a lad.

  “So,” I said during one of our conversations, “tell me about what's his name.”

  “It's Yawn,”Ashley said.

  “ Y a w n?”I said.

  “Right,” Ashley said. “His family's from Finland. Or maybe it's Norway. One of those countries. Anyway, it's spelled Jan, pronounced Yawn.”

  “You mean as in boring?” Perfect. What was our mama thinking? “So what does he look like?”

  “He's shorter than Daddy,” Ashley said, which gave me a small satisfaction. But how short? Dustin Hoffman short? Richard Dreyfuss short? Or freaky short? I pictured Danny DeVito. Hervé Villechaize.

  I RECHECKED the clock and continued tailgating the sedan until I reached my turnoff. I was running a good half hour late, and my nerves were skinned and deep-fried by the time I finally arrived at the address in the file lying on the passenger's seat. I pulled up directly behind a maroon Dodge Ram, the kind of muscle truck that caused me to feel inadequate, its tires so oversized, it would require a forklift to hoist me up and into the cab. The kind that made me feel like Danny DeVito. I switched off the ignition and checked out the house. It was a full Cape shingled in gray cedar and featured a front door and shutters painted a showy lavender. A line of lobster traps was stacked along the property line to the north, and a boat was cradled in the side yard, slightly tilted, with a wooden stepladder propped against the gunwale. Someone had started to scrape paint off the keel but quit before completing the job. Except for that purple trim, the house and grounds were like a half dozen others in the neighborhood. I, of all people, knew it was possible for things to look perfectly normal on the surface while, hidden from sight, the extraordinary was in process, but still, even fully expecting it, knowing it, there was nothing to indicate that, inside that house, a man was dying.

  TO SETTLE my nerves, I unwrapped a stick of gum and popped it in my mouth, my mama's manners be damned. When Ginny Reiser, the hospice nurse, called me the night before offering to meet me there and introduce me to the family, I'd refused. Major mistake. I could have used some shoring up. As much to combat jitters as anything, I performed a last-minute run-through of the patient's file, although I had already memorized every detail. Luke Ryder. Pancreatic cancer. Age forty-five. Commercial fisherman. Divorced. (Which explained the lavender trim. Obviously the ex's decision.) One child, Paige Ryder, twenty-two. (Difficult; can be confrontational; substance abuse? was jotted in pencil next to her name.) Primary caregiver: Nona Ryder, seventy. Relationship: patient's mother. (Doesn't drive; no car, the case supervisor noted.)

  The path to the door was sloppy and rutted. There had been a spring snowstorm three days before, and my boots sank into the ground as I picked through the half-melted patches that spotted the way. I barely noticed. Echoing in the back of my brain was a sentence from the first morning of training.

  It is never easy to enter the world of the dying.

  Well, I knew that from experience. I'd had my own world turned wrong side up by death and disea
se. “Sweet Jesus, what am I doing here?” I said aloud. I caught a flutter of movement behind one of the curtains at a front window. Too late to cut and run. My grandpa Earl's advice echoed in my head: Don't worry about the mule going blind. Just load the wagon. I climbed the steps, chewing that gum like a cow hopped up on speed and hoping I looked more together than I felt. Just load the wagon. As I neared the door, a formless clutch of anxiety closed my throat, and I combed my fingers through my hair, lightly traced the scar that lay just behind my ear. Then I swallowed and stood tall, my mama's daughter after all.

  The woman who opened the door was dressed in a print cotton blouse, navy pants that had seen better days, and a pair of sneakers with slits cut for bunions, the kind of getup Lily wouldn't be caught dead in. But then again, who knew what my mama was wearing those days. For all I knew, it could have been floral print spandex.

  This woman was wrinkled and thin, with drugstore-kit-dyed hair and a bent body that signaled osteoporosis and spoke of a far-reaching history of heartache and hard work. Right then, that first time I saw Nona, she touched something in my heart, and I wanted to reach straight out and fold her in my arms.

  “You're Jessie?” she said. “From hospice?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sorry I'm late. I didn't allow for traffic.”

  She brushed away the apology. “I'm Nona. Luke's mother.” Behind her smudged glasses, her face was slack, fatigue revealed in every pore and line. “You're younger than I expected,” she said, although it appeared she wasn't going to hold that against me, for she stepped aside and allowed me in.

  I tucked the gum in my cheek and offered what I hoped was a reassuring smile.