Exclusive: Fate Havens Excerpt

Hats We Wear

I don’t go to the steeplechase anymore, but when I did, I bought a new hat each year. Except that last year. That time, I wore the hat Yvonne had worn the year before. Black, tightly woven straw from Nordstrom, not thin and reedy like my Target brand. Her hat, with its swooping brim and single silk gardenia, was a hat of substance.

I was forty-three that May, balancing Yvonne’s hat on my head like the dictionary I practiced with when I was twelve. As we hiked along a gravel path and climbed the hill with Nashville’s finest, I told myself to pull my shoulders back and stand up straight. Yvonne and Harold, her husband of five years, led me past the sprawl of people sitting on the hill, past the bank of bleachers, through an arbor gate to our box seats.

Harold set the cooler of wine between his cushioned white wood chair and Yvonne’s. “Ruth, there’s your buddy,” he said, nodding toward a red-faced, balding man in green suspenders and a straw boater hat. It was Senator Akins, as always, in the box adjacent to ours. Each year, in silent protest of his voting record, I ignored him.

“Morning, sir.” Yvonne stepped in front of me. “I was just saying to Harold how steeplechase wouldn’t be the same without you and that hat of yours.”
He tipped his brim. “Why thank you, little missy, thank you kindly.”
“Such a gentleman,” Yvonne whispered when he turned away.

I longed to sit down, but we stayed standing to see who we could see and what they wore. The late-morning sky bowled around us like a glass paperweight. Voices lifted and fell. Hounds, darting between the horses’ trailers, yelped.

The favored horse that year was Malcolm’s Mix; the favored fashion, polka-dotted linen. I wore linen, too, but striped, and Yvonne forgave me. I was what Harold called her commie-hippie friend, the absentminded professor whom they toted along with the cooler or the knapsack of cheese and crackers.

I was used to being toted—to Harold’s mother’s for dinner, to Sunday brunch at the club, to the occasional charity ball. I told myself I went to be with Yvonne. We’d been friends since our first marriages over twenty years ago to crew-cut men who loved us like their fathers loved their mothers and couldn’t understand why we were sad.

We left our husbands and pursued different lives. She raised Labrador retrievers, I raised a daughter, she sold computers, and I went back to school. We both did well. She made a lot of money and found a high-class man; I coped with mothering, taught teacher education, learned to kayak, and took up jogging. We called ourselves best friends.