Bonnie Fordice comes to live with her grandparents the summer she turns fifteen.

 

Her parents died in a car crash on the way back from their twentieth anniversary dinner, and she is too young to call it grief, even though that’s the word for the thing that lays down on her chest at night and gets up with her in the morning.

 

It’s 1969, and there is no such thing as counseling in southern Alabama, even though everyone really needs it, especially her grandfather, who cries in the barn when he thinks that he is alone. When she asks him about it, he says that she’s hearing the lowing of the cows. She wants to tell him that he doesn’t have to lie, but she doesn’t have words for that, either.

 

She starts taking long walks through the fields behind their house, desperate to fill the endless afternoons. Jimmy Murphy takes walks, too, when his father doesn’t have him in the fields or in the barn, and so she meets him on the path three weeks before school starts. He is fifteen, and he’s already hit his growth spurt, so he’s two heads taller than she is.

 

“You’re the Fordices’ granddaughter, right?” he says by way of a greeting.

 

“Yeah,” she says. The last people she’d talked to besides her grandparents were the mourners at the funeral.

 

“I’m real sorry,” he mumbles, and she hates that it is the first thing he knows about her.

 

“Me too,” she replies, the form-response that seems to please everyone.

 

“We live in the blue house by the pond,” he says, gesturing in the general direction of his home even though they are nearly two miles from it.

 

“Will you go to the high school?” he asks when she doesn’t reply.

 

“Yes,” she says. “I’ll be a sophomore.”

 

“Me too.”

 

He smiles, though she can’t imagine why. A sophomore is scarcely better than a freshman on the social totem pole.

 

“Have you gotten your schedule yet?” he asks.

 

She shakes her head.

 

“I didn’t know we were supposed to. My grandparents haven’t been on the PTA in a long time.”

 

He laughs, and she grins back, even though she half-wishes for a pocket mirror to see if her mouth had even made the appropriate expression.

 

He looks at the dented watch on his wrist.

 

“The school office is still open for another couple of hours. I can take you, if you want.”

 

Boys in the city would have asked such a question expectantly, but he looks a little bashful, like he expects her to say no.

 

“Sure,” she says, surprised at herself. 

 

*

 

The next year, he kisses her for the first time, and when he pulls away, she tells him that she loves him even though her friend Mary Ellen said it was unladylike to play your whole hand at once.

 

“I love you too,” he says, and she lets out a sigh of relief that she hopes he’ll interpret as a sigh of contentment.

 

Her grandparents find out, of course they do, and her grandmother says she’s too smart to bother with the boy from the next farm. She had been an equal mixture of surprised and delighted when Bonnie brought home endless straight A’s. She had quietly begun sending off for college admissions packets, which she left at the foot of Bonnie’s bed.

 

Bonnie insists that she can still ace biology tests and love Jimmy Murphy, but when she thumbs through the admissions packet for the University of Virginia, she cannot imagine Jimmy there with her.

 

Her grandmother finally concedes, telling her to invite him to dinner.

 

She does, and he comes wearing a faded button-up that she thinks might have been his father’s, and he is so nervous that he drops his fork twice.

 

“You’ve eaten over here before,” she says quietly to him when her grandmother gets up to retrieve the pie from the oven.

 

“I was just your friend before,” he clarifies, and she tries to stifle her smile as her grandmother returns with the pie, complaining that the oven had steamed her glasses.

 

*

 

The year after, they are seniors, and she wears his heavy class ring on a chain around her neck.

 

She is helping her grandmother shell peas at the kitchen island when the old woman pulls off her glasses and sets them on the counter.

 

“I need to say something,” she says. Bonnie shrugs, inviting her to say whatever it is.

 

“There’s life out there,” she announces. “There wasn’t when I was a girl, but there is now. I watch the news. You could be a doctor or a lawyer, not just some boy’s wife.”

 

“You and Pop are happy,” Bonnie says, accusatory. “And you were younger than me when you got married.”

 

“We were happy enough,” her grandmother says, spitting out “enough” like it is the bitter edge of a sour pecan.

 

“I want you to be something more than happy enough,” she says, and her eyes are shiny.

 

“I love him,” Bonnie says, sounding sullen and young, even though she means it.

 

As it turns out, love isn’t enough. Jimmy Murphy gets drafted right after Christmas, and when he asks her if she’ll wait on him to come back, she thinks of her grandmother’s vanquished dreams and of the bright smiles of the students on the postcard inside the admissions packet and tells him no.

 

*

 

The next time she sees him, she’s thirty years old, back from her job at a law firm to help her grandmother settle her grandfather’s affairs.

 

He’d dropped dead of a heart attack in the vegetable patch, and when the hired hand found him, his body was already cold.

 

Jimmy is driving a tractor, and he brakes when he sees her.

 

She doesn’t regret her choices, doesn’t despise the fact that she is the sort of woman her grandmother hadn’t known existed until she was gray-haired and it was too late.

 

But she is sorry that she had refused him, sorrier than she can ever say, sorriest of all when she goes on dates with other, more suitable men.

 

“Bonnie,” he says, climbing down off the tractor.

 

She realizes with a start that he is carrying a tow-headed boy in his arms, and she has to look away.

 

“Who’s this?” she asks once he is close enough that she has no choice but to look up.

 

“Mark,” he says, lifting the toddler’s pudgy hand as if to wave at her.

 

“He just turned one. I’ve got two older ones at home.”

 

Three children before thirty. She wonders if it would have been her fate had she married him, but even the thought is too much to consider, and she feels nauseated. 

 

“I don’t have any,” she says, as if it isn’t obvious, as if he hasn’t heard every mundane detail of her life from well-meaning, small-town gossips.

 

“You’ve done plenty for yourself, I hear,” he says, and he already has crows-feet at the corners of his eyes from squinting into the sun and raising children.

 

“Maybe I’ll make partner one of these days,” she says, as if the phrase has any meaning for a man whose only profession has revolved around planting seasons.  

 

“That would make your pop real proud,” Jimmy says, and the baby begins to cry.

 

“Yes,” she says, though she can hardly speak around the lump in her throat.

 

Yes, her pop had been proud, even though she had once heard him tell her grandmother that winning every case didn’t keep you warm at night.

 

It was true, but it would also keep her from weeping over a pail of beans when she is an old woman. She does not know which fate would be worse.

 

*

 

She sees him again when she is forty. She has come to bury her grandmother and sell the house, and for the first time, she feels alone in the world.

 

She had started sleeping with Dan Caruthers, three offices over, earlier that year, but they don’t go to dinner and they don’t talk about their feelings, so she cannot ask him to come to Alabama with her while she picks out a coffin and tries to pretend like the sight of people buying her grandparents’ things at an estate sale doesn’t bother her.

 

It mostly doesn’t. She lives in a townhouse and can’t keep it all, but she still had to excuse herself when she saw two men heft her grandmother’s armchair and carry it out to a flatbed pick-up truck.

 

Jimmy is alone this time, and he has his hands stuffed in his pockets.

 

“I was coming to pay my respects,” he says when he sees her, and she thinks suddenly of their first meeting when he had told her he was sorry about her parents.

 

“Yes,” she says, even though it isn’t exactly the right response. 

 

“Do you need anything?” he asks, and she finds the question almost ironic. Does she, the lawyer with money and accolades, need something from him, the farmer who had only left his home once, when his country called him? But still, she thinks, the question remains. 

 

“How are your children?” she asks, answering a question with a question.

 

“I’ve got four now,” he says. “I think that’s one more than the last time I saw you.”

 

She smiles a little.

 

“I guess everyone asks you that, huh? Always how the kids are, but never how you are.”

 

He looks stricken by her statement, and she wonders if she had crossed some invisible line.

 

“Something like that,” he finally manages.

 

“How are you, then?” she asks, too benumbed by grief and exhaustion to worry if she was making his discomfort worse.

 

“I’m all right. We had a good year last year. My oldest will be a senior next year.” 

 

She realizes that even though she’d asked him about himself, he is still talking about other people, about forces beyond his control.

 

She thinks about how many choices she has had in the twenty-two years since they went their separate ways, but this time, she does not feel guilty.

 

*

 

She comes back to spend the weekend in Alabama for no particular reason when she is sixty-one. She doesn’t have lovers any longer, likes to think that she’s too old for it even though she longs to be touched the same way she longs to take off the shoes that pinch her feet at the end of the day, the way she longs for two fingers of Scotch after a particularly bad day in court.

 

She’s been a partner at the firm longer than she was ever anything else, and she could retire tomorrow and never want for anything else, and while the idea appeals to her, she cannot make up her mind. She hopes the rolling hills will provide some clarity.

 

She does not, however, expect to see Jimmy Murphy, and she certainly does not expect to see his wife.

 

She can tell that the woman was blonde before she was gray, and she can also tell she’s sick by the papery look of her skin and the slightly yellow pallor lurking behind the whites of her eyes.

 

Jimmy introduces her as Bess, and she tells Bonnie how nice it is to meet her, and Bonnie can tell she means it. After another moment of polite conversation, Bess says she’s tired and will leave them to catch up, and she sets off alone. She does not look back, and Bonnie is unused to women who aren’t jealous.

 

“Is she sick?” Bonnie asks, wishing she could tread lightly around him for once.

 

“Yes,” he replies, a distant look in his eyes. “Liver cancer. The doctor said she’s got a year, maybe a little less.”

 

“I’m so sorry,” she says, and she is, is sorrier than he’ll ever know.

 

“Me too,” he says with a sigh, and she wonders for a moment if she looks as old to him as he does to her.

 

“The kids are taking it hard.”

 

She nods.

 

“She left us alone because she wants me to marry you when she’s gone,” he blurts, and he looks embarrassed immediately. “She’s been after me to find your phone number since the diagnosis.”

 

She doesn’t laugh, because she knows he’s serious, but she teeters on the edge of it for a moment. What would everyone at the firm say if she retired to come tend corn fields in the town where her grandparents were buried?

 

“I can’t even think beyond tomorrow, you know,” he says, and he’s rambling now so she does the polite thing and half-listens. 

 

“I do wills,” she says when he finally stops talking, and it’s not a complete lie. Like any lawyer, she can do wills, has done them before, even though much of what she’s done has been corporate law.

 

She reaches into her purse, fishes out a business card, and hands it to him. The soles of his hands are rough with calluses.

 

*

 

He calls her three months later. She’s eating take-out lo mein noodles from a carton and watching a documentary when the phone rings, and she pauses the television before she answers.

 

“Hello?”

 

“It’s Jimmy Murphy,” he says, and she sets the carton down on her coffee table, sticking the fork into the box delicately so that it won’t dump its contents all over her briefs. 

 

“How are you?” she asks, even though she knows he can’t be well if he’s calling.

 

“Bess is having a hard time,” he responds, and she wonders if they’ll ever have a conversation where he answers that question.

 

“Things have gotten worse,” he continues. “We want to draw up a will. How could we do that?”

 

She should tell them to visit Homer Maroney in town, but instead she says, “I can be on a flight on Friday. I’ll take care of everything.”

 

When she tells her assistant she’s flying down to Alabama, Marcia raises her eyebrows. She’s a 1L at the University of South Carolina, and she had a very impressive interview that made up for her very standard essay about the inspirationalism of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

 

“Would you like me to book your flight?” she asks politely. It’s her way of finding out where her boss is going without asking probing personal questions, and Bonnie sees it for what it is and appreciates it.

 

“I’d like for you to come with me, if you can get away. We’ll leave Friday after work and catch the red-eye Sunday night.  I’ll buy your ticket. There are some things law school can’t teach you.”

 

Marcia nods. “I can get away.”

 

*

 

Jimmy’s oldest son, Brady, picks them up from the airport at 11:30.

 

“I appreciate you coming,” he says as soon as they get in his pick-up truck, with backpacks instead of suitcases so that they didn’t have to check any bags.

 

“Jimmy’s an old friend,” Bonnie replies, and the corner of Marcia’s mouth quirks up. Bonnie had told her on the plane that they were going to draft a will, but she had left out the details.

 

“They gave Mom a year, but it won’t be that long,” Brady says, and Bonnie knew it already, knew that Jimmy wouldn’t have called had he had another choice.

 

“How old are you now, Brady? And your siblings?” she asks. 

 

“I’m forty,” he replies, but he isn’t sheepish about it in the way a woman would have been.

 

“Kristen is thirty-eight, Mark’s thirty-five, and Jill’s thirty-one.”

 

“Stairsteps,” Marcia says, speaking for the first time, and Brady nods at her in the rear-view mirror.

 

*

 

Bess doesn’t have any hair and the suggestion of yellow in her eyes is now full-blown, and she looks frail as she makes her way to the couch.

 

Marcia’s laptop is open on her lap, but Bonnie has a notebook and pen.

 

“Your part of the will is fairly straightforward, Bess,” Bonnie tells them, adjusting her glasses. “Should you precede Jimmy in death, he will inherit everything.”

 

“I’ll definitely precede him in death,” Bess says with a faint smile, and Bonnie is inclined to agree, though she does not voice it. Jimmy looks pained by her flippancy. 

 

“The real business of the will is what happens when you’re both gone.”

 

“We want Mark to have the farm,” Bess says. “He already does most of the work, and Brady and the girls have their own careers and their own lives, so they wouldn’t want it.”

 

Speaking seems to require great effort, and Bonnie wonders if it is because of the subject matter or her illness and quickly decides that it must be both.

 

“Do you want him to have everything in the house?” Bonnie asks, making a note.

 

“I want the girls to have my jewelry. There’s not much, especially since I’ve asked to be buried in my wedding band,” Bess replies, reaching over and touching Jimmy’s arm with the hand that wore the ring.

 

*

 

“They have so little,”  Marcia explodes the second they’re alone in their hotel room. “The farm is mortgaged, and one sister is getting a half-carat ring and the other’s getting a quarter-carat necklace.”

 

“And,” she continued, dropping her backpack on the double-bed nearest the window. “There’s no life insurance policy, and no one will ever write them one when she’s eaten up with cancer.”

 

Bonnie slips off her kitten heels -- one of her few concessions to her aching knees -- and massages the balls of her feet.

 

“Perhaps the truth is that they have so much more than we do,” Bonnie suggested gently. “I’ve got a BMW and three bank accounts, and if I died tomorrow, I’d have absolutely no one to leave them to.”

 

Marcia sobers. “I know that they have their memories. That’s what my mother would tell me, and they’re all clearly close, for all four children to come home when their mother’s dying and not have one second of bickering over who will get what. But it’s still…”

 

Bonnie thinks she is going to say “unfair,” the favorite word of twenty-somethings, but she doesn’t say anything at all.

 

“I was engaged to Jimmy when I was eighteen,” Bonnie says finally, breaking the silence as she rummages through her backpack for a bottle of Aleve.

 

To her credit, Marcia does not look surprised or smug.

 

“My grandmother told me that she wanted me to have something more, and I went off to college and didn’t look back, except for when I did.”

 

“You did find something more,” Marcia said, although she sounds less convinced now than she did when she’d railed against the injustices of blue-collar America. “You were the first female partner at the firm.”

 

Bonnie unscrews the cap of the bottle of water beside the tv and pours a splash of it into a paper coffee cup. She sips it and then drops the pills into her mouth, swallowing them.

 

“Do you think that’s more than what Bess did?”

 

Marcia huffs a sigh and peels off her dress pants, replacing them with a pair of plaid pajama pants. Bonnie’s been on work trips with young women before, finds it endlessly fascinating that they’ll change clothes in front of anyone when her entire generation was nearly-neurotic about baring their skin. 

 

“I mean, it depends. Would her children consider it more? Probably not. But is winning over a thousand cases objectively more? Yes.”

 

She sounds like a law student, like a feminist, like all the things Bonnie had been and still is.

 

“I don’t regret my life,” Bonnie clarifies, although it’s not exactly true. She’d slept with Dan Caruthers for almost five years, had sometimes closed her eyes and thought about how much better it would all be if she loved him or, unimaginably better still, if he loved her. “I just think we can’t have it all.”

 

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg has Marty and the Supreme Court,” Marcia replies, and she does not say it to be contrary, but the contrariness is there in her voice.

 

“And I’m sure she has plenty of private sadnesses that we don’t know about,” Bonnie says, and she flops back on her bed.

 

*

 

They bring them the finished copies of the wills mid-morning on Sunday, and Bess embraces Bonnie and then Marcia, thanking them profusely.

 

“How much do I owe you?” Jimmy asks, and he’s clutching a checkbook.

 

Bonnie shakes her head.

 

“Wills are easy. We’ve got it covered.”

 

He protests in the way that people protest when they know they cannot afford what they’re offering but are very polite, and Bess insists that they stay for dinner.

 

They stay, and Marcia can’t stop watching Bess and Jimmy touch each other on the other side of the table. She’s so obvious that Bonnie almost tells her to stop, but she realizes that Bess and Jimmy do not notice, and she lets the moment pass.

 

*

 

“I see why you wanted me to go,” Marcia says once they’re in the air.

 

*

 

Jimmy calls Bonnie a month later to tell her that Bess died in her sleep.

 

Bonnie tells him she’s sorry, too sorry to say how sorry she really is, and he says, just as she once did all those years ago, “Me too.”

 

*

 

Marcia comes to work at the firm full-time when Bonnie is sixty-five, and she takes it as her cue to retire.

 

She tells Marcia before she tells HR, over lunch at the Greek restaurant down the block, and Marcia takes a long sip of her Diet Coke before she replies.

 

“You know, I almost quit law school after we visited Jimmy and Bess,” she says.

 

“I’m sorry,” Bonnie replies. “That was not my intention.”

 

“I know. You just wanted me to know what I was getting myself into. I thought about it, and I realized that I wanted things that only the job could give me.”

 

“It doesn’t make it any easier,” Bonnie acknowledges.

 

*

 

Bonnie thinks of buying a plane ticket, of showing up on Jimmy’s doorstep and asking if he might come with her to Charleston, but she realizes it would be unfair. She cannot ask him to give up his whole life when she has been and is still so unwilling to give absolutely anything up at all.

 

She calls him, instead, and she feels silly when he answers because she doesn’t know what to say.

 

“I just wanted to see how you were doing,” she says. It isn’t a lie.

 

“I’m all right. Brady’s boy is coming to stay with us this summer, and Jill just had a baby. A little girl.”

 

She realizes again that he has never answered this simplest of questions, and for the first time, it does not make her lonely