The Testament of Harold's Wife
PRAISE FOR THE TESTAMENT OF HAROLD’S WIFE
“Grief can make a woman a little crazy, but it can also make her very entertaining! The Testament of Harold’s Wife is part romp, part suspense, but above all, a love story. I adored this fun yet poignant book.”
—Diane Chamberlain, New York Times–bestselling author of The Stolen Marriage
“The Testament of Harold’s Wife is a glorious—and unique—tale of tragedy, resilience, and one kick-ass grieving widow and grandmother. I laughed, cried, and cheered as Louisa talked to her pet chickens, splashed bourbon in her tea, hid ‘Glitter Jesus’ around the house, and wrestled with revenge. Louisa captured my heart, and I will never forget her.”
—Barbara Claypole White, bestselling author of The Perfect Son and The Promise Between Us
“At the center of this moving, transcendent novel is the unforgettable Louisa. Perceptive, wry, full of righteous fury and enlarged by deep compassion . . . I promise you will miss her when you turn the last page. The story itself—flawlessly written and genuine to the core—takes an unflinching look at how we survive shattering tragedy and pointless cruelty and continue to love the world. Its startling, life-affirming conclusion will haunt me for a long time.”
—Patry Francis, bestselling author of The Orphans of Race Point
“Perhaps the toughest and bravest way to survive tragedy is by bearing up. In The Testament of Harold’s Wife, after losing her husband and grandson, Louisa weathers catastrophe through hard-fought wisdom, humor, and revenge served cold—fueled by a side of hot bourbon. I never left her side as she proved reinvention is possible at any age.”
—Randy Susan Meyers, author of The Widow of Wall Street
“The Testament of Harold’s Wife is a richly told tale that explores the human-animal connection and the journey to get past tragedy. Louisa, the spunky, elderly narrator, delivers a tender hymn of hope and rebirth that stays with you long after the last page.”
—Kim Michele Richardson, author of The Sisters of
Glass Ferry
“Lynne Hugo’s delightful page turner, The Testament of Harold’s Wife, is fast-paced, unexpectedly poignant, and fun. Louisa’s utterly winning voice propels us at breakneck speed. As a woman who has seen it all and lost it all, Louisa will take her place in the pantheon of unforgettable characters. You may never see an older woman in quite the same way again. This gorgeous new book, with its swiftly moving plot and subversive humor, will stay with you long
after you have finished the final page.”
—Laura Harrington, bestselling author of Alice Bliss
and A Catalog of Birds
The Testament of Harold’s Wife
LYNNE HUGO
KENSINGTON BOOKS
www.kensingtonbooks.com
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR THE TESTAMENT OF HAROLD’S WIFE
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
1 - Larry
2 - Louisa
3
4 - Larry
5 - Louisa
6
7
8
9 - Brandon
10 - Louisa
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18 - Larry
19 - Louisa
20
21
22
23
24 - Brandon
25 - Louisa
26 - Larry
27 - Louisa
28
29 - Brandon
30 - Louisa
31
32
33 - Larry
34 - Louisa
35
36 - Larry
37 - Louisa
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2018 by Lynne Hugo
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.
eISBN-13: 978-1-4967-1669-9
eISBN-10: 1-4967-1669-8
First Kensington Electronic Edition: October 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1668-2
For Tara and the Hughes family
In memory of
Henry Mannix Hughes
July 7, 1958–March 26, 1971
Acknowledgments
It’s become nearly cliché to say that no novel makes its way to readers without the diligent effort of many people other than the author. But before that effort comes their belief and support, and I am so grateful to have been given that in generous measure.
Tara Gavin, thank you for reaching across the years, inviting my work, and raising it up with your insight, skill, and sensitive editing. Our conversations always inspire me. Diane Chamberlain, thank you for your friendship, for reading, and for introducing me to Susan Ginsburg and Stacy Testa at Writers House. I can’t imagine better, more responsive and caring literary representation.
First readers providing helpful feedback and suggestions on the manuscript were Laura Harrington and the late Nancy Pinard, both outstanding authors, along with Jan Rockwell and Alan deCourcy. Susan Ginsburg’s editorial note was a guiding star. Alan saved my computer from unnatural death on numerous occasions; technology is not my best friend. More than that, his encouragement and faith have nurtured me through multiple books.
I’d like to express my gratitude to the members of the Kensington Publishing Corporation editorial team, headed up by Steven Zacharius and Lynn Cully, all of whom were instrumental in the acquisition of The Testament of Harold’s Wife. I have special appreciation, too, for the people who have worked with such care on the preparation of the manuscript, especially Monique Vescia, copy editor, and Paula Reedy, production editor. Vida Engstrand, director of communications, and Lulu Martinez, communications manager, handle publicity with enthusiasm and creativity. Kristine Noble is responsible for the beautiful cover.
Grateful acknowledgment for permission to include his work is made to Tom Merrill, author of “Come Lord and Lift.” The poem first appeared in The Lyric in the Summer 1992 issue.
Amy, Beth, Jo, and (the deceased) Meg are based on real chickens of the same names raised by Dr. Diana Davis. The nuggets of experience that start a novel are so interesting sometimes. No, Diana’s not a farmer, she’s a university provost; the chickens have been known to wander into the house, and Diana does have a cat, too. Those are the only facts behind the novel, but I hope the story resonates with truth for my readers.
Come Lord, and lift the fallen bird
Abandoned on the ground;
The soul bereft and longing so
To have the lost be found.
The heart that cries—let it but hear
Its sweet love answering,
Or out of ether one faint note
Of living comfort wring.
—Tom Merrill
1
Larry
Sometimes in the shower he’d think of it. Or it would get going in his head at night if he got up to pee and didn’t fall back to sleep quickl
y. Like a movie rerun with no stop on the remote. Blinking and shaking his head sometimes worked, but he had to do it right away. If the movie got past the thud, the steering wheel fighting his hands, he had to let it play to the end to hear how he’d shouted, “There was a deer! It was a deer,” at the back of the do-gooder woman who’d stopped at the accident.
“Honey, what’s the matter?” LuAnn said once when he hadn’t known she was awake, and she went up on her elbow and wiped his face with her finger. “It’s okay to cry.”
“What the hell are you talking about,” he said, not a question. “Shut up, will you,” not a question, either. He’d been looking at porn to get his mind on better things, but then he long-armed the magazine under the bed, switched off his lamp, and shimmied down with his back to her. If he hadn’t, she’d have kept talking.
She’d made it worse saying that crap when he might have still been able to get it to stop. And then he’d had to let it play to the end again, to hear what he’d yelled, even though he’d seen the movie, hell, he’d made the damn movie, and he knew how it went:
A heavy thud, and then another, something recoiling off the hood. He jerked the wheel to an overcorrection back across the center line, off the shoulder. Get the truck under control, get it stopped. Goddamn, he’d dozed and hit something.
Prob’ly a deer. Rut season. They were all over the roads in the damn early dark. He’d never hear the end of it from LuAnn. Not his fault, dammit. He hadn’t had that much, not that much, he’d get Chuck to tell her.
Don’t just sit there, get out, check the truck. Shit. Front end a mess. Headlight and . . . oh Jesus. Jesus. What is that? Oh Jesus. No. No way. Don’t look. A random sneaker and papers is all that is.
Gotta be a deer, there’s deer all over the roads now. Rut season. Gotta be a deer. Truck ought t’drive okay. Get outta here, then figure what to do. Lose the empties outta the truck first, walk ’em t’the other side of the highway, other side, throw ’em in the brush. Lotta highway trash. Farther away. Don’t trip. Wipe ’em clean. LuAnn’ll see the truck. Probably look inside. Thinks she’s smart.
Okay. Cross back, get t’the truck. Go, steady. Keep your eyes open.
A long lull in traffic. Lucky.
He was just checking the truck so he could get it straight to tell LuAnn what happened.
Wouldn’t you know the damn do-gooder in a six-year-old blue Civic would pull up right then. “Are you all right? Oh my God! Did you get 911? Have you checked him? Where’s the other car?” Bitch freaking out, holding a cell phone to her ear, running toward what lay crumpled on the gravel shoulder of the highway, the sun bleeding all over the blackening sky by then.
“It just now happened. Call 911! It was a deer! There was a deer!” He yelled at her back, yelled it twice, then followed her.
He could make the replay finally stop if he turned up the volume on how he yelled it again, too, as he caught up to the woman with the cell phone, to get it right in his head: “It was a deer! There was a deer!”
2
Louisa
I am Louisa, Harold’s wife. Or I was. Now the last best friends I have are Jo, Beth, and Amy. The four of us still mourn Meg. I’m the only one who’s finished Little Women, but when we have tea out in the yard, I read it aloud to them from the battered copy I bought at the library sale. I have all the classics now.
They don’t care to hear more than a paragraph at a time, but so what? They’re beautiful, my friends, my comfort. My looks are closest to Beth’s, a brownish blond, but hers are wholly natural while mine are compliments of Miss Clairol. Amy is purely white but for a couple of stunning black streaks that also run in her otherwise cheery temperament, while Jo is a quick-eyed, pretty, russet auburn, like my sister down in Georgia. All of us are old, I suppose. My mind rebels at the word. Old is something that I once thought I’d never have to worry about because time took forever to pass. I won’t think about it now, and you shouldn’t focus on it, either. None of what’s happened had to do with age anyway. It was all set in motion by two selfish men, one of them my son and one a stranger to us both, neither more than half my years, so if you’re one of those people who think it’s youth that matters, you’ve been warned.
I thought about changing my name to Meg, after my husband killed her, which was right before he killed himself. That doesn’t sound good, does it? Well, it was quite the right thing to do. She was sick and it’s wrong to allow suffering. We all miss her terribly. I didn’t change my name, even though it would have made us a more coherent group again, because I thought my sainted mother would be upset. That’s an expression Mom used to indicate someone was dead, calling them sainted. My sister, CarolSue, and I say it now as a joke. But my son, Gary—a name I would surely reconsider if I had the opportunity since I’ve learned it means “spear carrier”—would claim his departed father is definitely not sainted because he died on purpose. He would say it as a black-or-white fact, too. After everything that’s happened, he cannot stand to look in the shadows. I’ll never be able to count on him to kill me when my time comes. But I can take care of myself.
* * *
“This is crazy. They’re chickens, Mom. They’re chickens, and they don’t belong in the house.” Gary had dropped by without calling and caught me having tea in the living room with the girls. It was raining outside, and much as I love them, I don’t sit in the rain to have tea. That would be crazy.
“They have names, son. Please be polite. You were raised better. Look, here’s my pretty Beth. Say hello, Beth. You know Gary.” Beth was already clucking quietly. She’s quite the conversationalist. “Gary, tell Beth how pretty she is. Notice how my hair is the same color as hers?”
“Mom, no, I came to check on you, see if you need anything. I’m not talking to chickens. I’m going to get them out of the living room and back into the coop. Besides, Marvelle will kill them.” Marvelle is a retired barn cat who looks like she’s wearing a fluffy tuxedo. She came to us complete with her unfortunate name. Once a living legend mouser, I brought her inside to the soft life after she quit caring what the mice did. As the words spilled from Gary, she was curled up under my green ottoman, ignoring the hens and him. I thought it gracious on my part not to point this out. Gary started to chase down JoJo, which was a terrible way to start since she’s the fastest, but I wasn’t going to tell him. He wouldn’t have a clue how to round them up anyway. All the farm has long leaked out of my boy, who no longer sees the life spark in creatures or feels its force in the land. You’d think, perhaps, that had to do with the way his son, Cody, died, because of that terrible drunken stranger, and Gary’s fault in it, too, but it had happened well before then.
“Technically they’re all hens,” I said, very calm. I crossed my legs at the ankles as if I were entertaining the Prince of Wales, not that Gary looked all that royal in those baggy khakis. “You know, your father never did get another rooster after Bronson died. The girls were past their prime. I’m thinking of enlarging the flock again now, though, and then I might get one. Do you think a rooster would understand if I name him Laurie?”
My son was not looking engaged in this subject at all as JoJo flew up to the hanging light fixture in the dining area to escape him. “Don’t you remember that male character named Laurie in Little Women? I read you that whole book—how old were you? Gary, please, will you please just sit? You’re getting the girls stirred up. There’s room next to Beth.” I pointed to the couch. “Move over, Beth.” Beth, obliging girl that she is, flapped her gold wings and half hopped, half flew up to the couch back on the other side. She couldn’t have possibly created more room for him without entirely abandoning the couch.
“Mom! What are those holes in the wall?” Gary, who’d backed off his silly chicken roundup attempt and started to sit when Amy advanced toward him in a menacing way—she and I like to play good cop, bad cop, and she’d certainly not appreciated his comments—hoisted himself back up, and scrambled behind my chair away from her. I had to crane my nec
k to see him finger two small holes chest-high in the wall to the right of his high school graduation picture.
Oh crap, I thought. Well, it’s my own fault. I could have fixed those a long time ago, and at least he hadn’t noticed the ones under the window. For a moment, I wished he’d notice that the walls need painting—once a cheery buttercup color, now they’re more like a dying dandelion—but on the other hand if he noticed he might do it, and that would mean he’d be here in my house, and we haven’t been getting along that well lately. He worries about me all the time now and it just brings out my worst side.
“Those have been there since last summer. Will you please sit down and have some tea?” I pointed to the china teapot in the cozy my mother knit. “Shall I get you a cup or a mug?”
“You know I don’t like . . . Never mind. They look like bullet holes. Do you have something to tell me?”
“For heaven’s sake. Were you raised on a farm or weren’t you?”
“This is hardly a working farm, Mom. The chickens don’t even produce eggs anymore. You need to get rid of them.”
“I don’t produce eggs anymore either, son. Are you going to get rid of me?”
“Mom!” he said, and put on his shocked look.
“You just don’t remember all we did on this land. Your daddy hoped you’d take over, but he always suppor—”
“Wait a minute. How did those holes get there?” Gary was raised not to interrupt, but he does regularly. I stopped talking entirely to make a point, but it didn’t sink in.
“That’s just a couple BBs,” I finally said, because he wouldn’t let it go.