The Stone Necklace Read online

  The Stone Necklace

  Pat Conroy, Editor at Large

  The Stone

  Necklace

  A NOVEL

  CARLA DAMRON

  Foreword by Patti Callahan Henry

  © 2016 Carla Damron

  Published by the University of South Carolina Press

  Columbia, South Carolina 29208

  www.sc.edu/uscpress

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Damron, Carla.

  The stone necklace : a novel / Carla Damron.

  pages ; cm. — (Story River Books)

  ISBN 978-1-61117-619-3 (softcover : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-61117-620-9 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS3604.A47S76 2016

  813'.6—dc23

  2015022501

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, and locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Front cover: Necklace designed by John Chapman; photographs by Keith McGraw (necklace) and Brandi Lariscy Avant (inset)

  It takes a village. The people of my village: Rachel Silver, Mary Jane Reynolds, Ashley Warlick, Daniel Mueller, Lauren Groff, Stephanie Thompson, Jane Schwantes, Heather Marshall, Betty Joyce Nash, Shelly Drancik, Sam Morton, Tim Conroy, Jonathan Haupt, Hope Coulter, the Inkplots, and the Queens University M.F.A. program.

  Special thanks to Patti Callahan Henry, Pat Conroy, Mary Alice Monroe, Ron Rash, and Lee Smith: writers who are as generous as they are talented. Also to my very, very patient family: Jim Hussey, Katie Damron, Ed Damron, Essie Mae Clark and Pam Knight. Thanks for putting up with me when I enter the crazed writer phase of things.

  In memory of Riley, who helped me understand Joe.

  The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

  Maya Angelou, All God’s Children

  Need Traveling Shoes, 1986

  Foreword

  We turn to story to show us how things feel, to understand our larger world, to see truth in fiction, and it is for all of these reasons that readers will turn to, embrace, and dwell in this novel, The Stone Necklace.

  Carla Damron delves deeply and wholly into the souls of her story’s characters. She doesn’t just write about them, but writes from them. She reveres her unlikely mix of protagonists, each representative in her or his way of our larger, shared experiences, as she shows with us with wisdom and grace that there are no absolutes in matters of the heart. When I met Carla, it became so clear to me that her experiences as a clinical social worker grant her uncommon insights about our convoluted journeys in being human, all to the benefit of her characters and ultimately to us as her readers.

  At first glance this is a story about suburban wife and mother Lena Hastings, as Lena opens the novel with her poise and charm, but also with her conflicted heart. She’s obviously suffered: breast cancer, a doomed affair, a strained homecoming to a daughter who is barely speaking to her, and a husband who is loving, but preoccupied and stressed out. Quickly we realize that this novel is about so much more than just Lena. This is about lives that might appear disparate at first, yet come together in the small crevices of life, the spaces where tragedy meets everydayness, where we must stand by one another or disappear altogether.

  Through their unique voices, we meet the other characters whose lives are intersecting in ways they can’t imagine. Guided by Carla’s skilled storytelling, we are the ones who know, we are the interlopers peeking into minds and hearts. We, as the readers, are the ones who see how the broken characters, most of whom don’t yet know each other or fully know themselves, are finding a way to live through illness, addiction, death, loss, and poverty while also coming to know joy and exquisite meaning.

  We meet Lena’s teen daughter, Becca, and feel her grief and anger over a sudden tragedy, her warring needs to accept and hate her mother. We see her desperate desire for control taking the form of self-harm. Her brothers, whom she misses and loves, come home during the crisis. Her world comes undone and we want to fix it for her, take her aside and tell her “all will be well,” but this is Lena’s job to do.

  Then we meet the young mother, Tonya, who was traveling with her toddler son when a car accident changed the course of her life. After the terrible wreck, which wasn’t Tonya’s fault, she must come to terms with a world that is nothing of what she’d dreamed.

  We unexpectedly come across a homeless man, Joe, who watches this family and these lives while battling his own demons and angels. Is he a madman, a prophet, a hero, a threat? We can’t know—until we do know—how his life could possibly have anything to do with the others. A homeless man trying to stay alive and stay sane; where does he fit with these suburban mother-and-child relationships and with the misfortune that unites these families? This is where Carla’s story becomes more than a story and takes us into that place where lives overlap in the hidden folds of our world—where the single thread of one life becomes braided with so many others as it helps give form, strength, and vibrancy to the richly layered tapestry of our shared humanity.

  The nurse, Sandy, watches over a few of the others while fighting her own battles of addiction and shame. Resisting authentic love, she will have to finally surrender and we feel it, all the way to our bones, when she says, “perhaps, recovery was this: bearing the unbearable moment.” Here she speaks for all of us and not just about drugs, not just about shame, but also about living, about returning to life from the brink of anything else.

  As the novel unfolds so does our understanding of human conditions, ones we might or might not have lived with or through. I have lived through breast cancer, and although this novel doesn’t deal directly with its more vulgar aspects, it does dent the heart of recovery and healing. In this way and so many others, this is a novel about truth, about the caution and compassion needed to know and to be our true selves.

  A southern city novel, The Stone Necklace also makes a character of its Columbia, South Carolina, setting. When Carla describes the river, “white froth boiled up as the rapids shot between rocks that protruded like smooth gray teeth,” we know we are in the hands of a deft storyteller. Carla wields this well-honed skill to tremendous effect throughout her novel. Yet what can prepare us for a line that moves us with emotional truth, a line like “This mourning had so many edges to it, but she’d learned over the days that fighting it gave it strength. Better to surrender. Always surprising to come out on the other side.”

  And it’s the same with The Stone Necklace—it is best to surrender, to be surprised, and to come out on the other side.

  Patti Callahan Henry

  CHAPTER 1

  Lena Hastings cupped her husband’s cheek to examine a ragged piece of tissue attached to his chin, the perfect blossom of garnet—no, crimson—against the white. “Doing battle with the razor I see.”

  She lifted the coffee carafe to pour him a cup, but Mitch went straight for the milk in the fridge, a sign that his heartburn had flared up again. She opened the plastic jar of Tums they kept by the sink and rattled two pastel wafers into his hand. He flipped them like coins.

  “Sleeping Beauty up yet?” he asked.

  “Hope so.” She glanced at the ceiling, listening for signs of life from Becca. She’d wait ten more minutes before calling out, hopeful that this morning would go smoother than the others.

  Mitch pulled his cell phone from his robe and set it by his place at the table. “I’ve left a million mess
ages for Phillip. Be nice if he called me back.” Mitch often complained about his work. Maybe if he wasn’t such a perfectionist. Maybe if he didn’t work himself into an anxious knot over every little thing.

  Out the window the maple and ginkgo trees, ablaze in reds and golds, shimmied in the autumn breeze. Lena should paint this tantrum of color soon, before the grass dulled completely to cardboard brown. She imagined the feel of the paintbrush, the swirl of shades coming together before she even touched the canvas. It had been eighteen months since she’d allowed herself that luxury, the last piece of normal life she had yet to reclaim.

  She returned to the table, a heavy colonial monolith from Mitch’s grandmother, surrounded by five sturdy chairs. Once, she had removed two seats and the center leaf, shrinking it from oval to round and freeing space. The change lasted a week. “It doesn’t feel right,” Mitch had said, and they extended the table again, and replaced the ladder-backs, as though their sons had never grown up and left home, and would bound through the kitchen door any minute to tussle over the last Toaster Strudel.

  Mitch tossed back a glassful of milk like it was a shot of tequila, wincing when he lowered it to the counter.

  “Honey, if you feel that bad, let Phillip manage things at the office,” she said.

  “I would if he was in town.”

  “Where is he this time?” she asked.

  “Bermuda.”

  This was a fight best averted. Mitch’s business partner had taken three vacations this year. And Mitch? Just the July beach trip and even then, she’d caught him huddled over work files and answering a dozen calls. She’d removed his wrist watch on day three. On day four, when she seduced him into three rounds of miniature golf, the man finally uncoiled.

  He thumped a fist against his chest, his face and bald head flushing pink as the inside of a conch shell. Maybe he really was sick this time, but it was hard to be sure. With Mitch, the sky was often falling.

  “You need to eat something. Let me fix you some toast.” She spread low-fat margarine on two slices of whole grain bread because it was the one thing Mitch could eat with a turbulent stomach. For their daughter Becca, it was plain yogurt. And for Lena: chicken broth. How many gallons had she consumed last year? Too many, but she had survived both monsters: the cancer that didn’t kill her and the chemo that almost did.

  Lena heard movement from upstairs and glanced at the clock. Ten until eight. She’d give Becca a few more minutes. Things went smoother if Becca arrived without sounding the alarm.

  The vibration of Mitch’s cell phone disturbed the cutlery. When he answered, she could tell the caller wasn’t Phillip because Mitch didn’t say “About damn time” or “Where the hell have you been” in a tone that would be half-playful, half-not. Instead, he spoke in his realtor voice. “I understand. I’m concerned, too. It would help if you’d tell me—” He carried the phone out of the kitchen.

  Just as Lena rose to summon her, Becca appeared in the doorway, her jeans hanging from her too-narrow hips. Her long brown hair, still wet from the shower, dripped down her baggy tan sweater. She looked vacantly around the kitchen as if she hadn’t entered it a thousand times.

  “Morning, sunshine. Want some cereal?” Lena asked like she did every morning.

  “I’ll get it.” Becca hurried to the pantry for the Special K and to the cabinet for a measuring cup. Exactly one-half of a cup made it into her bowl. Lena crossed to the counter for a banana and handed it to Becca, who broke off a third to slice into her cereal.

  Lena glanced out the window again. The dappled light through the trees made lace patterns on the patio. Beyond, that one stubborn foxglove, its flowers like droopy lavender bells, stood in defiance of fall. This was what she should paint. The sun would be at the right angle in another hour, so once she got Becca and Mitch out the door, she could unearth her easel from the garage. She would set up beside the crape myrtle. Maybe today she could do it.

  Becca poured skim milk into her bowl. No sugar. She took a bite, crunching with her mouth partly open, a drop of milk slithering down her chin, but Lena didn’t comment. “Want me to fix you a sandwich for lunch?” Lena asked. “I made chicken salad.”

  “I’ll eat in the cafeteria.”

  Lena wanted to say, “Make sure to eat your vegetables and finish the milk,” but that would prompt a Becca tirade about the “suck-factor” of cafeteria food, and thwart Lena’s hope for a drama-free breakfast table.

  A few minutes later, Mitch reappeared, the cell phone gripped in his hand. He glanced down at the toast on his plate but didn’t touch it.

  “Who called?” Lena asked.

  “One of Phillip’s clients. Annoying bastard’s pestered me for two days,” Mitch said.

  “Try the toast,” she said. Maybe Lena would have time to go by the school and get the supplies she’d left in the art studio. Had they kept them after all this time?

  “What are your plans for today?” Mitch asked.

  She took a deep breath, unsure why she needed courage to say it. “I think . . . I think I may paint.”

  “Really?” Mitch gave her his most dazzling and private smile.

  “Are you going back to school?” Becca’s quiet voice contradicted the glare she sent Lena. Maybe the hostility was deserved, but Lena needed no reminders. She wore her sins like a stone necklace. If only Becca had inherited her father’s gift for forgiveness, but she was more like Lena—neither would erase the damage done.

  “I’m not going back to school,” Lena answered. Not even for what she’d left behind.

  “Well I think it’s great that you’re painting again.” Mitch squeezed her hand. “About time.”

  Yes, it was. Had she kept the cadmium blue? The fine-bristled brush?

  “Is that all you’re having for breakfast?” Mitch asked their daughter. “Want my toast?”

  “I’m fine. I’m full. Leave me alone,” Becca growled. Fighting over what the child put in her mouth never accomplished anything. They had survived her other phases. This, too, would pass.

  “At least finish the banana,” he said.

  “She can take it to school,” Lena said. Once Mitch finished dressing and Becca’s ride came, she’d scoot them from the house. A blank canvas awaited her.

  MITCH FOUGHT FOR BREATH as he climbed the stairs to dress. It felt like something hot and furry had climbed inside his chest. Lena didn’t take his health problems seriously. Of course, her battle with breast cancer last year had raised the bar on what it meant to be sick. He might feel like a semi ran over him, but how did that stack up against a mastectomy, radiation, and gut-wrenching chemo? Her cancer trivialized everything else. Sometimes, it even trivialized him.

  He found more Tums on his dresser and tossed another into his mouth. Spats, Becca’s cat, hopped up on the chest and nudged his hand for a stroke. How was it that Spats became his cat? He’d been a gift for his daughter’s twelfth birthday, a little black and white blur who chased shadows and slept curled up beside Becca’s head. A year later, as Becca busied herself with other interests, Spats had turned his devotion to him, and he’d never liked cats. But Spats was a comfort now. And had been during Lena’s illness, those countless days when she was so sick, when there had been nothing he could do to help. Spats would stretch himself across his lap every evening, and Mitch would fold himself into the cat’s warmth and purr, as calming as the trickle of a brook. Give Spats a stroke and all was right with the world. Spats didn’t ask the impossible of him.

  Mitch tucked his shirt into the trousers, straightened his tie—“Republican red” his younger son had called it—and ran a polishing cloth over his Oxford shoes. A final glance in the mirror: an errant eye brow hair he smoothed with a finger. He checked the phone again before easing it into its holster. Phillip had been confident the strip mall deal would go through, that their profits would cover all the recent losses, but the client’s escalating calls worried Mitch. They’d sunk too much into this. Of course, it was partly Mitch’s fault;
he’d been absent from the business during Lena’s illness, leaving Phillip without adult supervision. That their future depended on this sketchy deal did not help Mitch’s indigestion.

  When he went back downstairs, he found Lena and Becca continuing their mother-daughter stalemate expressed by spoons slapped in cereal bowls and itchy silence. At times like this they mirrored each other: the same angular cheekbones, the thin lips pressed tight. Becca had grown into a moody child, but Lena said all teenage girls were like that. Thank God the two boys had been easier: Scouts, then sports, then college. Sims: married, a successful banker, with a kid of his own. Elliott: a jazz guitarist in New York. Good boys. Boys to be proud of.

  Lena moved to the window and stared out. “Joe’s here.”

  At first Mitch didn’t see him. As big as Joe Booker was, he could almost be invisible standing beside the magnolia tree in the garden, broad shoulders hunched, head down. Mitch had met the homeless man three years before in the graveyard of his church. Joe proved handy with a rake and kept the small cemetery immaculate, so Mitch hired him for yard work. He waved through the window and Joe met him at the back steps.

  “Thanks for stopping by. Leaves are getting deep.” Mitch didn’t get too close—Joe didn’t like that—and waited for the sequoia of a man to look up.

  The slow lifting of his head made his dreadlocks curtain much of his midnight-dark face. “Gotta get to the breakfast line now. Be back this afternoon.”

  This could be a problem. Becca returned from school at three, and had an irrational fear of Joe—something he’d told Lena they needed to work on. “Add it to the list,” Lena had answered.

  “I’ll be done before your girl gets home,” Joe added.

  Relieved, Mitch reached for his wallet and pulled out a twenty.

  Joe shook his head. “Too much.”