Shelby Hearon

We all tell lies. Husbands assure wives that yes, as a matter of fact, that black dress looks very slimming on you; mothers tell children that no, I don’t play favorites between you and your sister—I love you both with equal amounts; kids look up at fathers and in very slow, very careful voices swear that I have absolutely no idea who broke your one and only limited collector’s edition Dale Earnhart memorial plate, but I know one thing: it wasn’t me, Daddy. Through the wonderful magic of lies, we can wriggle our way out of the tightest, stickiest of situations. And oh what fun it is when we don’t get caught!

Ella, the charmingly-frazzled heroine of Shelby Hearon’s novel Ella in Bloom, has been lying to her parents for many years now, fabricating a life for herself which she only dreams of inhabiting. In letters back home to Austin, Texas, Ella describes for her mother scenes of country club life where she wears white linen dresses and eats crustless sandwiches at garden parties. In reality, Ella is a single mother barely scraping by with a series of housecleaning jobs in flood-drenched Louisiana. It’s a happy life, really—she’s got good friends, a wonderful teenage daughter named Birdie who plays the cello, a nice but non-committal suitor who takes her out once a week, and—most of all—she has her roses, “redolent old roses blooming against a weathered low brick wall�€? which she tends with the obsessive care of a lover.

Still, it’s not a life of which her mother—a slow-to-praise, emotionally-constipated woman—would necessarily approve. And so, Ella paints a better life for herself in the letters to her mother. But it’s a lie which preserves their relationship and keeps things on an even keel for Ella—it’s the only way she could ever hope to compare to her “perfect,â€? older sister Terrell, the much-favored sibling who Ella both loves and envies. As Ella says, “You never get over being the younger kid.â€? Terrell married into success and money (her husband Red was once a childhood friend of Ella’s), while Ella ended up leaving home when opportunity knocked her up, courtesy of Buddy, one of Terrell’s rejected suitors. Buddy’s a louse who meets an untimely end, leaving Ella forever destined to be a “young widow from Louisianaâ€? in her mother’s eyes.

Years pass, Terrell blooms while Ella wilts. But still Ella has nothing but love and admiration for Terrell:

After all, your sisters or brothers, whoever you had, were the people who went down the same road with you all the way. You came into your parents' lives after things had already happened; the people they'd once been were gone and the people they were you couldn't really know. And it must be the same with your children. You were already set when they showed up, you were opaque to them, they were in another time zone from you. But siblings, they were on the same boat, in the same car, skating down the same sidewalk from the start.

Then, one day, Terrell calls from Texas and asks Ella for a favor: tell Mother that we’re spending the weekend together there in Louisiana, make up an itinerary of places we’ll visit, restaurants we’ll eat at. Meanwhile, Terrell has a clandestine rendezvous with a lover she refers to as Mr. Emu because he raises the birds on a farm. Ella goes along with the charade, even taking pictures of the places they never visited, fabricating menus of restaurants where they never ate. Then Terrell is killed in a plane crash. Only Ella knew that she was flying to meet her lover.

But, as Ella would say, all this is background. The novel begins several months after Terrell’s funeral when Ella is invited home to Austin for her mother’s birthday. It’s a trip that’s fraught with fretting for poor Ella: Where will she get the perfect lemony-yellow linen dress? How will she survive her mother’s subtle-but-lethal method of comparing her to her dead sister? How can she possibly face Terrell’s husband, Red, knowing what she knows?

Don’t worry, dear reader…many good things are about to come ripe in season for Ella. And what joy it is for us to be along for the trip as Hearon crafts Ella’s mid-life crisis in such loving, lyrical terms. This is Hearon’s fifteenth novel and she’s in her fortieth year of writing. But, to my shame, I’ll confess I’ve never heard of her before the publication of Ella in Bloom. Surely I must have been living under a rock somewhere.

It’s practically impossible to resist the author’s light-as-moonlight touch as she plunges us into the heart and soul of this thoroughly engaging character. You’ll be rooting for Ella from page one where, in discussing the qualities of roses, she uses the term remotancy, “a lovely, lingering word meaning to flower again, meaning possessed of a second chance to bloom.â€? Surely, Ella has that second chance (the book’s title is a dead giveaway, of course) and we hope against hope that she’ll finally learn to make peace with her mother, to finally step out of her sister’s shadow and to find happiness in her love life at age forty-three.

Ella in Bloom is a smart, funny, at times suspenseful novel about the ties that bind (and gag). Itâ€Â��s a story about how families resist change and how they lie to one another just to preserve the status quo. But mostly, it’s about second chances, about growing seasons which come to us late in life.

It’s not necessarily a perfect book—at some point near the last third of the 259 pages, the story starts to waver and droop, as if Hearon is taking too much of her sweet old time with the tale. We wish Ella would hurry up and get on with it already as circumstances force her to make big decisions and she spends many pages waffling. Scenes start to feel redundant, there are some loose ends and Hearon probably could have done a bit more pruning to keep things moving along.

But, really, these are minor quibbles in my otherwise enthusiastic praise for this graceful, effortlessly-written novel. Naysaying Ella in Bloom is like saying your whiskey’s been watered down by melting ice cubes. Don’t worry, Hearon refreshes our drinks, giving us another slug of the good stuff in the closing chapters when all good things come home to Ella’s roost. If you don’t leave this book with a big ol’ grin trembling at the corners of your mouth, then your heart must surely still be a tight, unblossomed bud.… (more)