Fate Havens

Praise for Fate Havens

"For fans of Olive Kitteridge, these beautifully written, intertwining stories will quietly slay you. Precisely detailed yet elliptical enough that we slip ourselves and our own experiences into the cracks and are at once immersed, watching the characters wrestle with familial and domestic obligations and making hard choices between lives of bondage or of freedom and transcendence."

–Karen Essex, internationally bestselling author of Kleopatra and Leonardo’s Swans

"In Fate Havens, author Mary Bess Dunn chronicles the despair of white middle-class Southern women who came of age in the aftermath of World War II. Told in a linked story cycle, the book describes the prison of respectability into which these women are born and how their impossible dreams are slowly blunted and tamed. As husbands, children, and friends come and go, can these women settle for the uneasy comfort of their lives? Dunn is a gifted writer whose insights pinch hard. Keenly observed and achingly poetic, each story sparkles with dangerous truth."

–M.M. Buckner, award-winning author of War Surf,

Watermind, and other novels

Mary Bess Dunn’s short story collection takes off in 1958 in a Nashville cul-de-sac, setting up the premise for the interconnected stories that develop through three generations of women. Dunn gets the Everywoman voice right: the things that break our hearts, the things that make our hearts race.

–Phyllis Gobbell, author of Silver Falchion winner

Treachery in Tuscany

"Fate Havens, an amazing collection of short fiction, focuses on Roslyn and her family, as traditions change, leaving some people behind, while others depart gleefully from those same traditions. These intimate portraits expose one southern family’s triumphs and failures, loves and losses with a delicate, often lyrical touch that allows the reader to experience the kaleidoscope of emotions that comprise the life examined. Each story is told, not through the sweep of monumental events so much as with the smallest of gesture, word, and thought, surprising readers in the end with their accumulated and heart-piercing universal truths."

–C.F. Stice, author of Always Yours: Memoir of an Adopted Child

and Darla Dreaming at the Carnival with Elvis

Mary Bess Dunn delights with sharp detail, unexpected turns of phrase, and richness of character and dialog. Read of women dissatisfied with the choices they have made, and of the men who love them. Their stories will haunt you for days and months on end.

–Rita Welty Bourke, author of Kylie’s Ark:

The Making of a Veterinarian

Exquisitely drawn tales of the fate we all face. Hope vs. reality. Love vs. aloneness. The desire to connect vs. the lonely human journey. Brilliant, insightful, and touching, Mary Bess Dunn’s new book of linked stories leaves the reader thinking about the meaning of his own choices, her own life. A beautiful, insightful volume you won’t soon forget.

–Jennie Fields, author of The Age of Desire

FATE HAVENS

STORIES

Mary Bess Dunn

Copyright © Mary Bess Dunn 2019

All rights reserved.

ISBN print: 978-1-7336816-1-2

ISBN ebook: 978-1-7336816-2-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019916346

Versions of stories in this collection have been recognized by or appeared in the following publications:

Under A Different Sun was nominated for a Pushcart and published in Gertrude in 2011.

Color of Hope was published in The Smoking Poet in 2010.

Hats We Wear was published in Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine in 2010.

Storm was published in Folly in 2011.

Roots was published in Verdad in 2010.

No More Doing Harold was honorable mention in New Millennium Magazine in 2010.

Fate Havens was published in The Alembic in 2012.

What It Takes was published in Stone’s Throw Magazine in 2009.

Certain Kind of Mother was published in Amarillo Bay in 2013.

Staying Alive was published in Quiddity International Literary Journal and Public-Radio Program in 2011.

Window Seat was published in Pembroke Magazine in 2014.

Closet Tales was a finalist in the 2016 New Millennium Awards for Flash Fiction.

The stories in this book are works of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people or events is coincidental.

Other than brief excerpts for review, no material from this book may be reproduced in any medium without written permission from the author. Please send your permission requests to the publisher at the address shown below.

Distributed by Smashwords

Ebook formatting by ebooklaunch.com

Publisher, Lystra Books & Literary Services, LLC

391 Lystra Estates Drive, Chapel Hill, NC 27517

[email protected]

Contents

Worthy

Closet Tales

Under a Different Sun

Color of Hope

Roots

Storm

To My Son

Hats We Wear

Fate Havens

No More Doing Harold

Pending

Window Seat

What It Takes

Certain Kind of Mother

Staying Alive

Notes of Gratitude

Worthy

It is a fall morning in a Nashville suburb in 1958. Roslyn Hansen Meyers, no longer a newlywed or a new mother, understands that this house—their new house on a cul-de-sac of new houses—will have to do.

Roslyn wipes the bread with mayonnaise while the bacon burns, then reaches in her pocket for a smoke. She bites her lip, longing for the Lucky Strike that isn’t there. The bacon spits as she moves it from the pan to a square of paper towel. She wants this morning over, but first things first.

At the whiff of Old Spice, she checks her watch, but knows it’s 7:10. William strides in, so handsome in his suit pants and blue shirt with the navy tie she bought at Mallernee’s for Christmas.

I feel a draft. He frowns toward the window she’s opened just a crack. William is a stickler for keeping the house closed tight. No use paying to warm the outside, Roslyn repeats to herself. She steals a breath of fresh air before reaching over the sink to tug the window shut.

William unlocks the back door and Roslyn watches him march deliberately down the drive. He walks without looking at the yard, where she’s planted pansies and yellow chrysanthemums, or the sky, which hints at rain. She wonders if the neighbors think he’s handsome.

William picks up the newspaper and reads it as he returns to the house. The kids trail in, first ten-year-old Ruth, her curly hair tamed with gold barrettes, then Billy, taller than his sister but younger by eighteen months. William joins them as they take their places at what he often teases is this strange round table she’s convinced him to buy. He props the paper against the table’s even stranger lazy Susan.

Look here—they’re coming out with a musical about the war. South Pacific!

A musical? Like with singing and dancing? Billy asks.

That’s where you were during the war, right Daddy? Ruth asks.

My war was in the Philippines—West, not South, Pacific, William says.

Roslyn senses the children’s interest in their father’s war is strained, but whenever he pulls out the photos he took as an army photographer, their willingness to look seems genuine enough. Once she overheard Ruth bragging to a friend about the scrap of Japanese flag showcased in their den. Daddy’s souvenir, she explained, the sun with a bullet hole in the center.

Everyone eat up, Dad’s dropping you off. Roslyn wraps two bologna and cheese sandwiches in wax paper, then packs them with apples in paper lunch sacks.

Finally, jackets, lunches, book satchels, and milk money are all in place. After a flurry of hugs and kisses, Roslyn’s little family is out the door.

The house is not exactly quiet. There are layers of sounds, though none suspicious. A package is waiting under Roslyn’s bed and she is puzzled at her own reluctance to open it. She stacks the dishes in the sink and grabs a cloth to wipe the table. Through the window over the sink, she sees fists of gray clouds hovering.

She’s just walked into the den when the phone rings.

I saw the postman leave a big package yesterday. It’s Mildred, the neighbor who’s been in on Roslyn’s secret from the start.

Yes, yes. Roslyn wants to sound excited. It arrived, but I haven’t opened it.

What? Why not?

Well, I wanted to see it myself before I shared it with the family. Standing before the fragment of Japanese flag, framed and sealed under glass, she begins to dust. What if it’s not what I’d hoped? What if it’s ugly? The flag’s bullet hole, easily visible through the airtight glass, is rimmed in a crimson darker than the sun itself. Blood, she has assumed, though never asked. I’m being silly. I’ll go open it now.

But she doesn’t go right away. She abandons the dust cloth, begins to stack a jumble of newspapers neatly on the side table beside the row of Reader’s Digests and the small collection of aging literary journals received as consolation for her rejected poems.

Finally, she makes her way to what she thinks of as the master bedroom. She pauses to admire the room’s freshly painted royal-blue walls, the four-poster bed, side tables, dresser, quilted spread with matching pillow shams, all in the Colonial style and all complementing her grandmother’s Queen Anne chair. Though the room doesn’t quite capture the homey romantic essence depicted in Ladies’ Home Journal, it’s getting there.

Roslyn kneels beside the bed, then reaches under it to retrieve a parcel about the size of her largest cookie sheet; she lays it on the bed. It was stamped with Special Delivery, addressed to Mrs. William Meyers from Family Tree Designs, New York, N.Y. New York City! Imagine!

You never knew what you’d find on a matchbook cover. Pocket games or magazine ads. Mostly drawing lessons. But on that day six months ago, she saw the ad for family trees: hand-painted on parchment paper, ready for display, large enough for the most prodigious family.

As she was often reminded, Roslyn and William came from kinfolk ripe with stories. Names. Faces. Places. She would hold onto their history by ratcheting up her mother and grandmother’s tradition of displaying ancestral photographs on the bedroom wall. Roslyn’s royal-blue wall would host photos as well as a family tree to show the fruits of every generation as far back as she knew and as far forward as she could rightfully record.

She said as much to Mildred, sitting on the front porch stoop, sharing the flyer she received back from the company, and going on about how significant such a purchase would be.

Rubbish, Mildred chided. You bought the thing because it’s sumptuous—those fancy leaves and gold paint will add a little class to your décor!

Roslyn appreciated Mildred’s blunt response—even liked her for it. How was she to know what drove Roslyn to need such a concrete display of her family’s roots? Mildred wouldn’t know. She couldn’t. As no one could, except for William, and even he lived as if theirs was a storybook romance. He returned from the war, they met and—after too few years of college, three for him, barely one for her—had to quickly marry. Things happen so fast, so heartbreakingly fast. The wedding expected of any Memphis banker’s daughter was executed in short shrift, the move to Nashville—out of town—just as swift and just in time, for what could easily be explained, seven months later, as baby Ruth’s premature birth. Ten happy-ever-after years ago.

She had to smile now, imagining what she’d say to William. Confiding how the moment she read the ad for a family tree she knew she had to have it. Yes, it was an extravagance, but he mustn’t worry. She knew where she’d get the money. She’d give up smoking. Use the cash saved to invest in the family. Her little contribution to their future, she’d say, and he would shake his head in wonder.

Now she jerks open the top seam of the package to find, tucked in a cloud of tissue paper, the family tree of her dreams. The thick parchment paper with its delicately drawn watercolor design is beautiful, but for reasons other than feathery leaves and gold-threaded boughs. Black-inked calligraphy heralds Granny Hansen, Papa Meyers, Great-great-grandfather Richard Lee Meyers—on and on, a plethora of names, relatives all. And there she is, Roslyn Hansen Meyers linked to William DeWitt Meyers, Jr., with their offspring Ruth Alice and William DeWitt III on branches below. But it’s the sight of the empty branches—placeholders for what surely will unfold as her children’s children take their rightful places in family lore—that brings tears to her eyes.

She doesn’t mean to cry, but the weight of it all is hard to ignore. She holds the image up to the light. It will need to be framed. Captured under glass. She shudders, her fingers tremble, and then she lays the thing back into its tissue-papered sheath. Hands tighten into fists. She listens, hoping for a distraction—for the phone to ring or the neighbor to knock—any distraction will do.

It’s been months since her last bout of what-ifs, but today,