I was named Jolene before the song existed. Years later, at one of our many family reunions, someone on my father’s side told me I was named after an old girlfriend of his. I never met the woman, and I never asked my father whether it was true. My mother was only 19 when she had me, the first of four, so she probably had no idea why he insisted on that name. For years the family story was that it came down to Jolene or Clarabelle, after my mother’s grandmother. I don’t know where my middle name, Gwen, came from, but my full government name does roll off the tongue when said out loud. Or makes me cringe, if my mother was the one saying it.
A few days ago my oldest daughter sent me a photo from her trip to Orlando: a light brown T-shirt with “Jolene” scrawled across it, paired with leopard print pajama pants, which she knows I hate. That picture brought it all back.
I was 12 or 13 when the song came out. Being a teenager, you can imagine how that went over with my peers. It did not matter how many times I told them I had strawberry blond hair and brown eyes and would never do anything like what that song suggested. Over the years I got used to family and friends belting it out whenever it came on the radio and I was within earshot. One year I went so far as to dye my hair auburn, but I could not, at the time, find green contact lenses that would work over dark brown eyes.
Somewhere in all of that I came to truly appreciate the spirit of this tiny woman with the high, giggly voice and the rather large upper section. She had an unfailing spirit, and she inspired me for decades to give it a go, because you just never know what could happen.
I still don’t belt out the infamous song. I do sing loud and proud to “9 to 5” and “Islands in the Stream.” I have watched all of her movies several times and enjoyed them for exactly what they were, pure entertainment. I never made it to Dollywood, and I’m sorry about that now, but I have long admired her business ethics and practices. She put her money where her mouth was, unlike some.
On the afternoon of August 25, first my granddaughter and then my oldest daughter texted me the news of her passing. I was shocked and sad to my core. May she finally rest in comfort and peace, surrounded by her loved ones, in the big next dimension.
She gave the name Jolene a reputation. Here is where I decided Jolene got to grow old.
Jolene had not chased Earl Tolliver in forty-one years. This was a fact known to Jolene, to Earl, to God, and to absolutely no one else at Magnolia Pines Senior Living.
She was seventy now. The auburn hair everybody used to go on about came out of a box called Autumn Ember, applied every third Tuesday by a stylist named Brandi who drove in from Murfreesboro and charged extra for the roots. The eyes were still green, though one of them had a cataract scheduled for October. The voice was still soft, which at Magnolia Pines mostly meant people asked her to repeat herself.
She had moved in the previous spring after a fall in her kitchen, a fall she blamed on a throw rug and everyone else blamed on the fact that she was seventy. Her daughter had done the paperwork. Her daughter had also, in the box marked Emergency Contact, written her own name, her own number, and then, in smaller letters, “Please do not call her ex-boyfriends, she has several.”
That was fair.
*** She met Earl again on her second day, in the dining hall, over meatloaf.
He was seventy-eight. He had two hearing aids, a cane with a duck’s head on it, and the kind of face that had once been handsome in the way a barn is handsome, which is to say from a distance and in the right light. He was working a crossword, and when she sat down two tables over he did not look up.
Jolene knew him immediately. Not because of the face. Because of the crossword. In 1975 he had done the crossword in her bed on a Sunday morning with the same little grunt every time he got a word, and she had thought at the time that it was charming and had later revised that opinion.
She did not say hello. She ate her meatloaf.
Earl finished his puzzle, folded the paper, looked up, saw her, and said, loud enough for the whole room, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Then a woman at his table put her fork down very slowly.
*** The woman was named Ruth. Nobody at Magnolia Pines had known that for very long, because for the first month Ruth had simply been “Earl’s wife,” and then people had learned her name, and then, after the incident in the dining hall, everybody just called her “her.”
Ruth was seventy-four. She had been married to Earl for forty years, which by any reasonable arithmetic meant Earl had been Ruth’s husband for eleven times longer than he had ever been anything to Jolene. This arithmetic had never once comforted Ruth.
Ruth had a story, and the story went like this. Once, a long time ago, before she and Earl were married, there had been another woman. Earl had talked about the other woman in his sleep. Ruth had heard him. Ruth had gone and found the other woman, and Ruth had begged her, actually begged, standing in a Piggly Wiggly parking lot in 1974 with her purse in both hands, to please leave him alone. Because she could not compete with that hair and those eyes and that voice. Because the other woman could have any man she wanted. Because Ruth could not.
The other woman had said, “Honey, I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”
Ruth had not believed her then. Ruth had not believed her for fifty-two years.
*** “She’s here,” Ruth said to Earl that night, in their double room on the second floor, in the tone people use to say a tornado is here.
“Who’s here?”
“You know who.”
Earl took out his hearing aids and put them in the little dish on the nightstand, which was his way of ending a conversation. Ruth talked to the back of his head for twenty minutes anyway. She had been married to him long enough to know that some of it got through.
*** Here is what Jolene actually wanted from Earl Tolliver in her seventieth year: nothing.
She wanted her crossword, which was a different crossword, from a different newspaper, because she did not want to end up beside him doing the same clues. She wanted the water aerobics class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, because her hip liked it. She wanted the Thursday shuttle to Walmart, because Magnolia Pines stocked one brand of hand lotion and it was not the one she liked. She wanted bingo, not because she cared about bingo, but because the woman who ran it had a laugh like a screen door and Jolene found it soothing.
She did not want Earl. She had not wanted Earl since roughly the third time he explained a football game to her that she had been watching with her own eyes.
But here is the thing about a small building with a hundred and twelve residents and one dining hall. Everybody sees everybody. Earl was in the pool on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, because his knees liked it. Earl was on the Thursday shuttle, because Ruth would not let him drive. Earl played bingo, because Earl would play anything with a card in it.
And every single time, Ruth was somewhere with a view.
*** The first time Ruth cornered her was in the hallway outside the beauty parlor.
“I know what you’re doing,” Ruth said.
Jolene, whose hair was wrapped in a towel and smelled strongly of Autumn Ember, said, “I’m getting my roots done.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do not.”
“You were in the pool. In the lane next to him.”
“There are three lanes, Ruth.”
“You could have taken the far one.”
Jolene considered this. The far lane was next to the ladder, and the ladder was where Mr. Pettibone got in and out, and Mr. Pettibone had a habit of losing his trunks in the water, and nobody in the far lane ever came out of the pool without a story. She had chosen the middle lane on purpose. She had chosen it to avoid seeing a ninety-one-year-old man’s backside, not to be near a seventy-eight-year-old man’s front.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
She did not take the far lane. She did notice, at Wednesday’s class, that Ruth was sitting in the observation chairs with a paperback she was not reading, and that when Earl’s flutter kick brought him within four feet of Jolene, Ruth turned a page so hard it tore.
Something in Jolene, something that had been sleeping for a very long time, opened one green eye.
*** It was not that she wanted to be cruel. Jolene had never been cruel in her life. That was the whole problem with the story people told about her. In the story she was a temptress. In real life she had been a twenty-year-old bank teller who got asked out a lot and said yes about a third of the time, and the third she said yes to had included Earl Tolliver for one summer, and then she had said no, and then she had gotten on with things.
But it was something, at seventy, to find out you were still somebody’s villain. It was a little bit like being told you still had all your teeth.
So she did not change lanes.
She did not skip the shuttle.
And at bingo, when the caller said “O-69” and half the room tittered like seventh graders, and Earl said “That’s my birthday” to no one in particular, Jolene said, “I know,” and did not look up from her card, and across the room she heard Ruth inhale like a woman stepping on a nail.
*** The escalation was gradual, the way things escalate when everybody involved has a nap at two.
Ruth started saving Earl a seat in the dining hall with her purse and then moving the purse whenever Jolene entered, so that she and Earl could face the door. Jolene started sitting where Earl could see her, which was most places. Ruth started asking the kitchen staff whether Jolene was on the list for the Friday fish fry. Jolene started attending the Friday fish fry, which she had previously skipped, because the fish was frozen and the fry was theoretical.
Ruth signed Earl up for the men’s Bible study on Tuesday mornings. Jolene had no counter for that. She let them have Tuesday.
Ruth took Earl on the shuttle to the Baptist church on Sunday. Jolene did not go to the Baptist church. She went to the Methodist one, in the other shuttle, and she could not have told you whether she went for God or for the fact that it left at the same time and Ruth had to watch her get on.
And through all of it, Earl did his crossword.
*** “Do you know what she’s doing?” Ruth said one night, in the dark.
Earl had taken his hearing aids out, but Ruth had waited until she heard the little click of the dish, and then she had waited some more, and then she had reached over and turned on the lamp and handed them back to him.
He put them in. “Who.”
“Jolene.”
“What’s she doing.”
“You know what she’s doing.”
Earl was quiet for a while. Then he said, “Ruthie, I have known you fifty-two years. I have been married to you for forty of them. I have been to two of your sisters’ funerals and I sat through both of them without complaining once, and I complained plenty about the eulogies later, but not once during. I put your mother in the ground and I didn’t say a word about how she talked to me. I have eaten your tuna casserole every Lent of my life. And in all that time, I have never once, not one time, gone anywhere near that woman.”
“You talked about her. In your sleep.”
“In 1974.”
“I heard you.”
“I was twenty-six. I also talked about a Chevelle I couldn’t afford. You didn’t go find the Chevelle in a parking lot.”
Ruth turned off the lamp. She lay there for a while. Then she said, into the dark, “It had a very good engine.”
*** Jolene’s daughter called on the second Sunday of the month, the way she always did.
“Are you making friends?”
“I have one friend and she runs bingo.”
“That’s a start. Mom, the front desk said there was some kind of situation.”
“There is no situation.”
“They said a woman named Ruth asked them whether you were allowed to attend the fish fry.”
“Everyone’s allowed to attend the fish fry. It’s a fish fry.”
“Mom.”
Jolene looked out the window. Below her, on the walking path, Earl was doing a slow lap with his duck cane, and twenty feet behind him Ruth was pretending to look at a bird.
“Sweetheart,” Jolene said, “do you remember when you were in eighth grade and that girl told everybody you’d kissed a boy at the roller rink?”
“I did kiss a boy at the roller rink.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What’s the point?”
“The point is you were the most interesting girl in that school for one solid month and you didn’t have to do a thing.”
There was a long pause.
“Mom, are you being the roller rink girl?”
“I’m seventy years old,” Jolene said, “and I’m allowed.”
*** It came to a head, as things at Magnolia Pines usually did, on the Walmart shuttle.
The shuttle held fourteen and there were sixteen who wanted to go, so the driver, a boy named Tavius who was studying to be a respiratory therapist, made the last two share the bench seat in the back with a bag of returns from the crafts room. The last two were Jolene and Earl.
This was not Jolene’s doing. She had been sitting in the third row. Ruth, on boarding, had spotted her, marched to the third row, and physically sat down in the space beside her, all but in her lap, so that Jolene had to stand and move, and the only place to move was the back.
Ruth had not thought this through.
By the time she realized it, Tavius had pulled onto the highway and there was nothing to do but sit sideways and watch her husband and the other woman ride to Walmart on a bench seat with a bag of yarn between them.
Earl did not say anything to Jolene for the first six miles. Then he said, “How’s the hip.”
“It’s a hip.”
“Mine’s the knees.”
“I heard.”
“You did all right, after. Your daughter and all.”
“I did fine.”
“I always figured you would.”
Jolene looked at him. He had gotten old. Everybody had. But he had gotten old in a way she recognized, like a house she had lived in once and driven past since.
“Earl,” she said, “does she know I never wanted you back?”
“No.”
“Have you told her?”
“About once a decade.”
“And?”
“And she’d rather have the story.”
Jolene thought about that all the way to Walmart. She thought about it in the hand lotion aisle. She thought about it standing in line behind a man buying forty pounds of cat litter and nothing else.
Then she went and found Ruth in the greeting cards.
*** “I’m seventy,” Jolene said.
Ruth held a sympathy card in front of her like a shield. “I know how old you are.”
“I have one good eye and a hip that predicts rain. I dye my hair out of a box. I have not been on a date since the Clinton administration.”
“Which one.”
“The first one.”
Ruth lowered the card an inch.
“I never wanted him, Ruth. Not after that summer. He explains football.”
“He does explain football.”
“He explained it to me while I was watching it.”
“He does that.”
“I know he does that. You’ve known for forty years that he does that. I knew in about six weeks.”
Ruth was quiet. Somewhere a toddler was screaming about a balloon.
“Then why,” Ruth said, and her voice went strange, “why are you always there. The pool. The bingo. The fish fry, you never came to the fish fry before.”
And Jolene, who had planned to say something kind, found herself saying the true thing instead.
“Because you were watching.”
Ruth stared at her.
“Fifty-two years, Ruth. Fifty-two years you’ve been looking at me like I’m the most dangerous woman in the county. You came and found me in a parking lot. You begged me. Do you know how many people have begged me for anything? I’m a bank teller. I have a daughter who calls on the second Sunday. I have a friend who runs bingo. And I have you, looking at me across a dining hall like I could still walk off with a man if I put my mind to it.” She took a breath. “It’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in twenty years, and you’ve never once said it out loud.”
Ruth put the sympathy card back in the wrong slot.
“You were,” she said finally. “The most dangerous. You were.”
“I know I was.”
“Your hair.”
“I know.”
“He said your name.”
“I know.”
“I couldn’t do anything. I stood in that parking lot and I couldn’t do anything but ask.”
“I know,” Jolene said. “And I said I didn’t know who you were talking about. And that was a lie. I knew exactly who you were talking about. I just didn’t want him anymore, and I couldn’t figure out how to tell you that in a way you’d believe.”
Ruth nodded slowly. She had the sympathy card back in her hand. She did not seem to know it.
“He really does explain football,” she said.
“He really does.”
*** They rode back to Magnolia Pines in the third row, side by side, and Earl sat in the back with the yarn and did not seem to mind.
It should have ended there. In a better story it would have.
But Magnolia Pines was a small building with one dining hall, and the next morning the woman who ran bingo, whose laugh was like a screen door, leaned over to Jolene at breakfast and said, “So is it true? Did you finally get him?”
Jolene looked across the room. Ruth was sitting with Earl, cutting his sausage, and she was looking back, and there was something in her face that Jolene had never seen there before. It was not fear. It was something closer to a question.
Jolene thought about the parking lot. She thought about being the most dangerous woman in the county. She thought about how quickly, at Magnolia Pines, a person could go from being a story to being a woman with a hip.
She picked up her coffee.
“Honey,” she said, loud enough for the room, “I’m working on it.”
Across the dining hall, Ruth put down the knife, closed her eyes, and let out a breath she had apparently been holding since 1974.
Then she went back to the sausage, and Earl went back to his crossword, and Jolene went back to hers, and the whole room leaned in, and nobody, not one of them, had ever been so happy to be lied to.
*** Brandi from Murfreesboro reports that Jolene has switched from Autumn Ember to a shade called Foxfire, which is one number redder. Ruth was seen at the front desk asking whether the observation chairs at the pool could be moved closer. The request was denied. She brought her own.
If your name is Jolene too, I would love to hear your story in the comments. We have all earned one.
“Jolene at Seventy” is an original work of parody fiction, written on August 24, 2026, the day before Dolly Parton’s death. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Dolly Parton, her estate, or the rights holders of the song “Jolene.” No lyrics from the song appear in this story.
