
"Pawleys Island is imbued with a vivid sense of place that is so appealing that readers may want to pack up the book and head to the Carolina coast." ---The Boston Globe
Catapulted from her home, her marriage, and her children, artist Rebecca Simms has come to Pawleys Island to hide from herself. Little does she know that on this "arrogantly shabby" family playground, she'll encounter three people who will change her life: a wise and irresistible octogenarian who will pry her secrets from her; a gallery owner who caters to interior decorators and, heaven save us, tourists; and a retired attorney from Columbia who's complacent in her fat and sassy life until Rebecca's stormy advent.
With characteristic humor and a cast full of eccentric and wonderfully lovable characters, Dorothea Benton Frank brings us a refreshingly honest and funny novel about friendship, family, and ﬁnding happiness by becoming who you are meant to be...
"A great summer read as could only be written by a Southern belle." ---The Sunday Oklahoman
"An endearing look at hope and friendship...Take it to the beach." ---The Tennessean
"Fans of author Dorothea Benton Frank will love [this] novel... The book is humorous, the customs are generations old, the characters are ones the reader wants to be around, and the locale ﬁts them perfectly." ---The Charlotte Observer
continued . . .
pawleys island 
Dorothea Benton Frank 
PAWLEYS ISLAND
TANGLED
PROLOGUE
WELCOME TO GALLERY VALENTINE
MEET MISS OLIVIA
REBECCA IN THE MORNING
THE SANDS OF PAWLEYS
DIGGING THE DIRT
GIVE ME A RING
CIRCLES
REBECCA TAKES THE CALL
Pawleys Island
"Frank's absorbing narrative manages to feel both authentically Southern and universally empathetic."
---Publishers Weekly
"Shifting ﬁrst-person narratives invite you into this charming southern isle that, behind its decorum, is the kind of place that you don't go unless you want your life shaken and stirred...Compulsively readable...Will appeal to fans of both Fannie Flagg and Larry McMurtry's Terms of Endear ment. A true southern comfort." ---Booklist
"Frank weaves history and legends of ghosts into her narrative as she depicts the charms of her coastal setting. Delivered in a conversational style and told from several points of view, Frank's lyrical prose is reminiscent of fellow Southern writers Pat Conroy and Anne Rivers Siddons. Her characters are vibrant and captivating [and] the story is told with humor." ---The Tennessean
"Her Lowcountry Tales share a winning pop-ﬁction recipe: mixing comedy, romance, and quaint local color in a ﬂavor that's saucier, and just a tad saltier, than Jan Karon's Mitford series . . . Fans won't be disappointed." ---Star News
"A leisurely novel peopled by likeable characters, as well as one over-the-top villain. It's perfect beach reading."
---The Boston Globe
"Pawleys Island provides wisdom, comedy, mystery, [and] romance. But I swear this is more than a beach book. It is incredibly entertaining while not neglecting its lessons on friendship and personal struggles ...Her love for the Lowcountry offers a true representation of life along the coast."
---The Columbia (SC) State
Shem Creek
"The self-proclaimed 'Geechee girl' once again sets her story in the steamy, salty, sea islands of the Lowcountry, following the literary paths of authors Pat Conroy, Anne Rivers Siddons, and Cassandra King." ---Savannah Morning News
"Rich in the charms of small-town South Carolina."
---Publishers Weekly
Isle of palms
"As light and gratifying as a sand dollar just washed to shore." ---The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"[A] page-turner." ---St. Petersburg Times
"Dorothea Benton Frank is the bad girl of Southern ﬁction--- the bad, bad girl. Her books are funny, sexy, and usually damp with seawater." ---Pat Conroy
sullivan's Island
"Dottie Frank's take on the South Carolina Lowcountry is tough, tender, achingly real, and very, very funny. Sullivan's Island roars with life." ---Anne Rivers Siddons
"One heck of a beach book... Frank keeps you reading compulsively." ---The Charlotte Observer
plantation
"Effortlessly evokes the lush beauty of the South Carolina Lowcountry while exploring the complexities of family relationships..." ---Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Think Terry McMillan meets Rebecca Wells by way of the Deep South and you'll be barking up the right bayou."
---The Mirror (London)
Titles by Dorothea Benton Frank
pawleys island shem creek isle of palms plantation sullivan's island
s
A Lowcountry Tale
b
BERKLEY BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Ofﬁces: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This is a work of ﬁction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used ﬁctitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2005 by Dorothea Benton Frank. The poem "Tangled" by Marjory Heath Wentworth used by permission of the author. Cover design by Joni Friedman. Cover photo by Jack Alterman. Interior text design by Kristin del Rosario.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions. For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 1-4295-1325-X
BERKLEY® Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014. BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. The "B" design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
This book is for the beautiful woman who redeﬁned the term sister. Lynn Benton Bagnal
We return to hear the waves rolling onto the beach one after the other connecting us like blood.
We were listening long before we came here, remembering wind spinning salt through interrupted sunlight.
This is a place where dreams return as ﬁsh bones tangled in seaweed.
Whatever sorrows come are folded into the sea, rinsed clean and kept--- unbearable secrets.
---MARJO R Y HEA TH WENTWO R T H
South Carolina Poet Laureate
Acknowledgments
There are so many people to thank whose patience, good ideas and expert advice made this novel possible. First and foremost, I'd like to extend my gratitude and love to all the wonderful people of Pawleys Island and the surrounding area. You live in one of the most charming and magical spots the Lowcountry has to offer, and I thank you for allowing, encouraging and helping me to place this story in your backyard. I have tried to include some local folklore here for the amusement and ediﬁcation of my readers, and if those details are incorrect or fall short of expectation, it is entirely at my feet.
I owe the largest debt to Tom Warner and Vicki Crafton of Litchﬁeld Books. They loaned me volumes of historical reference material, took me all over Pawleys Island to feel its unique character, squired me around plantations, answered my questions with patience and grace and tried to give me local color not found in other printed material. Most important, they honored me with their friendship and fed me some extremely fabulous meals. I adore you both. But you know that. Thank you, Tom and Vicki, from the bottom of my pea-picking heart.
Special thanks to Lee Brockington and the late Eugene B. Chase Jr. for their excellent edition of Stories from the Porch, and for his ﬁne book Pawleys Island Historically Speaking and to the Pawleys Island Civic Association. They were very useful and inspiring and contain wonderful information and stories for anyone interested in the true history of the area.
To Frances Graham MacIlwinen, whose generosity and graciousness know no peer, please accept my warmest thanks.
Marjory Heath Wentworth, South Carolina's Poet Laureate, has done it again! Everyone should know that Marjory wrote her fabulous poem "Tangled" just for this book, and here's the kicker: She did it without ever having read a manuscript of Pawleys Island. If you have the patience to slug your way through my story, go back and read her poem again if you want a crisp example of Jung's whole concept of collective unconscious. Or maybe it's just that old spooky Lowcountry magic raising her mysterious head, grinning at us. Whatever the case may be, Marjory's poetry is the perfect reﬂection of my storytelling, and Marge? Girl? You blow me away! I thank you for your friendship and the tremendous generosity of your beautiful, creative mind. And folks, she makes a wicked good (Marjory is originally from Maine, after all) chocolate pecan pie! I think that recipe came from one of Nathalie Dupree's amazing cookbooks, and if you don't own Nathalie's Comfortable Enter taining: At Home with Ease & Grace, you should go buy it right now. Hey, Nathalie! Anyway, Marjory and Nathalie are two of the greatest women I know, and I am forever grateful for being allowed into their lives.
And speaking of gratitude for being in someone's life even in the slightest way, I thank the following: Roger Pinckney for his fabulous spirit, Antoinette Kuritz and John Hamilton Lewis, Ann Ipock, Bill Doar and most especially the wonderful Nancy Rhyne, whose stories about Alice Flagg and the Gray Man fascinate and inform.
Always and forever Pat Conroy, Cassandra King and Anne Rivers Siddons. Special hugs to Ronda Rich, Josephine Humphrey, and my hurricane girlfriend, Mary Kay Andrews.
Love to my wonderful writer friends of Montclair, New Jersey, Pam Satran, Debbie Galant, Deborah Davis and Benilde Little. I owe y'all the ﬁne southern delicacy of ice-cold Cokes in bottles with a little bag of Planters peanuts thrown in---better than a MoonPie and an RC Cola any day! I'm just so glad I know you.
Next there are the legal minds. Robert and Susan Rosen, Claudia Kelly, Sabrina Grogan, Larry Dodds and the great Judge Bobbie Mallard---I owe the Judge a Coke with a scoop of ice cream! Thank you all for your wisdom and advice and for trying to make this knucklehead understand what life is like in a court of law. Okay, folks, I didn't go to law school like Grisham. And divorce laws are different in almost every state by one little detail or another. In writing class, the ﬁrst thing they tell you is to write what you know. I have butchered that rule in this novel, and I apologize to the entire legal profession of the world for any glaring mistakes. I'm sure there are more than a few. To them I offer this small consolation: in this story the attorneys wear white hats.
How can I ever thank Ted and Alice Harrelson? All the stories you told me soak these pages with visions of life on the Waccamaw River. And the beautiful afternoons we spent together, walking the breathtaking grounds of Arcadia are emblazoned in my heart. The egrets! Great heavens, the egrets! Thank you so much.
I owe huge thanks and cold Coca-Colas to many others such as Betsy Altman of Pawleys Island Real Estate for her guidance and advice. Betsy, you cannot imagine what a difference our brief meeting made to this story. And also to my cousin Charles "Comar" Blanchard Jr., who did twenty-eight million favors for me and my family all year so I could make this deadline and still have a normal life---well, normal such as it is deﬁned by the Franks. But, hey, Comar? You are the best thing that ever swam our gene pool, bubba, and all the Franks love you, especially this one.
Thanks to Richard H. Moore of Coastal Carolina University for his help in identifying the double-breasted cormorant. Thanks to Chris Skodras from Sam's Corner at Pawleys Island for continuing to sell Cokes in little bottles and sausage biscuits. And huge thanks to Louis Osteen, the gracious and esteemed proprietor of Louis's Fish Camp for sharing your ﬁne taste and your tasty ﬁnery with all of us---I wish you all good things. Don't even think about a visit to Pawleys Island without a reservation for lunch or dinner there.
To my great friends, who appear as characters in this story, please tell everyone that this is pure ﬁction and the use of your name is intended merely to tickle your funny bone: Adrian Shelby, Mary Ann O'Brien, Everett Presson, Anice Geddis Carr, Frank Del Mastro, Karen Tedesco and Frances DuBose. Thanks and I love y'all!
To Amy Berkower and my ﬁrst mentor, even though he never knew it at the time, Al Zuckerman, what can I say? I love y'all to death! And Sandi Mendelson? Isn't it time to go to the Lowcountry so I can show it to you? Thanks y'all for everything!
To the team at Berkley Publishing, starting with Leslie Gelbman, the epitome of what a publisher should be. Leslie? I am so grateful to you and always will be. Here's our ﬁfth Lowcountry Tale (which, by the way, is borderline Lowcountry territory, depending on who you ask!) and I still can't believe how many wonderful things have happened to me since you came into my life! Kissing your footprints, still! And I always will! Seriously.
And then there's Gail. That's Ms. Fortune, my editor extraordinaire, with the eye of a wizard and the heart of a saint. There's nothing I can say to express my appreciation and gratitude to you. Five books! Five! Here's to ﬁve more! We rise together, honeychile!
And always to Norman Lidofsky, Ernie Petrillo, Sharon Gamboa, Don Rieck, Patrick Nolan, Trish Weyenberg, Don Redpath, Rich Adamonis, Joe Crockford and Ken Kaye---y'all could teach the world of sales a thing or two! Always, thanks to Joni Friedman and Rich Hasselberger for the fantastic cover for this book! And of course, a most dramatic curtsy to my dear and precious friend of extraordinary talent, Jack Alterman, the artistic jewel of Charleston, who, with the soul of a true southern gentleman, arrested the quintessential photograph for this cover---wow! I want to crawl in that hammock and read! Man, I love you! But extremely! (In the most correct way, of course.) And Liz Perl and Heather Connor! My knees are calloused from praying for your good health and everything else! Love you, love you!
Oh, gosh, golly, gee whiz! I love this part of my life when a book is ﬁnished and I get to thank people! (Even though no one probably reads this except ...I don't know. Oprah? Yeah, sure.)
Okay, still carrying on here. Can we talk about the booksellers for a moment? Last summer, when I was on tour in August for Shem Creek we had ﬁve hurricanes. Not one, not three---ﬁve. They were horrible. I wasn't worried about my book sales as much as I was about book readers and those sol diers in the army of the written word who braved the elements to open their stores so the customers could swim in. It was intense. I just want to say thank you in the most serious way to all of you. You know why, and I regret all the many inconveniences caused by the weather and my inability to whip it into submission. Talk about a rough tour? Thank God, I'm a May book this time! And believe me, I will come to every store I can and sign books for you until I can't sign any more. More than anyone, I owe you all the most, and I know I can never repay you for your support except with my respect and admiration. And you have that for sure. Hugely.
Especially Patti and Avery and all the team at Barnes & Noble in Towne Centre in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. I still miss Buzzy, but he's alive and well in Queens! Hooray! And the amazing team at the Waldenbooks in Charleston. And all the grand folks at Bay Street Traders in Beaufort and I could go on and on to the High Point Literary League and the Hilton Head Women's Club, and SEBA, and all the Friends of the Library organizations who asked me to come and run my mouth. Are you kidding me? These people are better than family when it comes to support!
Speaking of family, I've got a big and gorgeous one to thank. First the obvious cast---my sister and brothers. Huge thanks to Ted and Joanne Benton of Winchester, Massachusetts, Mike and Jennifer Benton of Irving, Texas, Bill and Pat Benton of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina---thank you for loving me and asking your friends to read my work. To my only sister, the unbelievable Lynn, and her truly incredible husband, Scott Bagnal, of Edisto Beach, South Carolina, you know how I feel about you and how deep this river runs. But most of all to Peter, Victoria and William, who truly are the lights of my days and nights---never doubt that I love you with my whole heart.
Victoria? She's away at college. Honey? Are you wearing a sweater? Let me tell the world this: there's no one like Victoria Frank. She is beautiful, passionate, brilliant, talented and fall-down funny. And she supports me like crazy when the going gets tough.
William? He's ﬁnally a little taller than his father, smarter than anyone in the house and the kind of superbly intelligent young man who can become anything he wants. I don't know a teenage boy with a bigger or more beautiful and loyal heart.
And before closing, another word on loyalty. Debbie Zammit, who came blasting from my past to help me write a book each year, is the best kind of friend a girl could have. Some know that Debbie and I once thought we ruled the world of acrylic sweaters in the garment business in New York. Without nitpicking, talk about lofty aspirations? Um, that's a yarn joke. Ah, well, point is, this book never would have made it to print this year without her. So, Debbie? I owe you and I thank you profusely for everything.
So shoot me. I'm sentimental and don't care who knows it.
Contents
Prologue 1
Welcome to Gallery Valentine 4
Meet Miss Olivia 15
Rebecca in the Morning 28
Abigail Says, Nothing Could Be Finer 41
The Sands of Pawleys 53
Digging the Dirt 66
Give Me a Ring 75
Circles 85
Abigail's Got Game 99
Rebecca Takes the Call 110
Rebecca! Bothered by Gnats 119
Abigail Says, Truth Be Told 134
Burn This! 146
Tighten Up 157
Show and Tell 169
Rising Tide 184
Stormy Weather 206
Mediate 219
All Rise 233
The Details 247
. . . And I'm the Lawn Mower 258
Peanut Gallery 274
Home Fires Burning 290
Rebecca and Gaston Would Like to Chat 310
Paradise and Pawleys 328
Abigail's Closing Statement 336
Epilogue 348
s
PEOPLE have secrets. Everyone does. And, at one point or another, many people say they would like to run away and start life over in a place where no one knows their business. I know that I have felt that way. More than once. And I am no stranger to disaster, and most certainly no one would ever call me a coward. Coward or not, sometimes you just want to slip away into the night.
What drives us to that point? Did you do something horrible? Or, did something horrible happen to you?
Maybe you just feel like you need some anonymity. You have endured all the questioning, opinion-giving and gossiping humanity you can bear. It's time to strip away everything, all the clutter and noise, and look at your life, how it got to that point and ﬁgure out what you intend to do about it. At least, that's how it was for me.
When my tragedies occurred and getting through the days felt like pulling a wagon of bricks that was missing a back wheel, the only choice was to move back to Pawleys Island and attempt to put everything in perspective. I should have packed a seat belt. First, I met Huey Valentine. Huey, one of the most wonderful men who ever lived, befriended me and eventually gave me the swift kick I needed to put down my golf clubs for a while. That kick came when Rebecca showed up and Armageddoned the pattern of self-indulgent complacency that ordered my shallow and insigniﬁcant life, which in all my precious stupidity, I thought I was enjoying. Yeah, I thought it was fabulous---okay, it wasn't fabulous and I knew it. But it was usually better than bearable, and to be frank, until she appeared, I couldn't think of any better way to occupy my time. Golf and tennis. Tennis and golf. A party here, an opening there. Pretty shallow and useless.
I didn't think I had much in common with Rebecca until the divorce was all over, only to discover we had everything in common; we were simply at different stages in our lives. If her parachute hadn't landed on Huey's doorstep, I'd still be treadmilling in my sandy island rut. And if we all weren't there to engage Huey's mind, his life would have been one narrow garden path slowly tiptoeing back to the eighteenth century.
Here's the other lesson I've learned. You only see what you want to see and believe what you want to believe. I'm not talking about the Gray Man or Alice Flagg, Pawleys Island's most famous walking dead residents. No, no. This goes back to my eyes and those of my Pawleys friends. I thought we were all lonely and making the best of it, and we were to some degree. But my vision was warped. I was everyone's mother; Huey was my chaste and antiseptic spouse; Rebecca was our daughter. Huey belonged to me, and Rebecca did too. Wrong!
What we all taught each other was stunning and, honest to God, life altering. But here's the thing. I will never accept that these changes could have come about any place but Pawleys Island. Sure, you've heard about the handmade hammocks and the pristine beaches. You've seen gorgeous pictures of the sunsets and the marsh teeming with wildlife. But you don't know Pawleys until you've been there and experienced its tremendous power. It is only a tiny sandbar south of Myrtle Beach and north of Georgetown. But be warned. It is there that the Almighty Himself would like to engage you in conversation and redirect your soul. Listen to me: for all the jokes I make, this time I'm not kidding.
If you're happy in your misery and determined to remain so, don't ever go to Pawleys. If you do make the trip, be on guard. Truth is coming to get you, and peace isn't far behind. But it all comes at a price. You'll have to be the judge of whether it's worth all the hullabaloo.
This is how it happened to me.
One
s
I looked out across the dunes and up and down the beach. Another gorgeous day. Blue skies, billowing clouds and the sun rising with the mercury. Eastern breezes rustled the palmettos and sea oats. Sun worshippers by the score had accepted early invitations to assume the lizard position. They were scattered and prone, armed with coolers, beach chairs, novels, visors and canvas bags of towels, toys and lotions, littered all along the edges of the Atlantic in both directions. They looked like clusters of human solar batteries recharging themselves in drowsy warmth. The waves rolled in low murmurs of hypnotic suggestion, washed the shore and pulled away.
The weather that day seemed without guile, but I knew better. As soon as the hands of time crossed noon, Mother Nature would bellow the ﬂames of hell's furnace, blowing unspeakable heat all over the Lowcountry, and the sensible lizards would retreat to shade and hammocks until later in the day. The others would fry, fooled by the breeze and lulled into a comfortable stupor by the ocean's song.
Let me tell you something, honey. You'd never catch me in a swimsuit smelling like cocoa butter and fruit, sticky with salt and sand, half catatonic and dehydrated from exposure. No. I had better things to do with my time, like feeding Huey. Or playing golf in that same sun. It was the lying around part that was a problem for me. Besides, who needed to see me in a bathing suit? I assure you, no one.
But back to my current priority...feeding Huey.
After his call, I picked up sandwiches from The Pita Rolz and drove over to his gallery in the Oak Lea Shops. He had been practically breathless on the phone, but private-audience breathless drama was pretty much Huey's modus operandi.
"Abigail! Darling! Drop everything and come! You must meet Rebecca!"
"Who's Rebecca?"
"Our savior! You'll see!"
"Well, we could use a savior..."
"And, would you be a dear and bring us some lunch? Just tuna for me, on rye, but only if it looks fresh, and turkey on white bread with mayonnaise for our darling girl, and of course get something for yourself. My treat."
Huey Valentine had not missed a meal in all his ﬁfty-ﬁve years. I had to laugh. When Huey got excited, he thought about food. When he was depressed, he thought about food. What can I say except that Huey was well fed. I imagine the least insulting but most accurate term one might use to describe Huey's appearance would be portly, but in a way portly suited his entire demeanor, which, when in the company of close friends, grew a shade larger than life itself.
Huey was the consummate southern gentleman, an aristocratic Nathan Lane, never rude to anyone's face but felt no remorse about a wicked comment to me about others, especially tourists.
You could set your wristwatch by Huey. He was never late for an appointment or a dinner party. He wrote thank-you notes on his Dempsey & Carroll ecru hand-engraved stationery that was so stiff, folding it cracked it like an egg. And he always used an ornate fountain pen, signing with the ﬂourish of John Hancock. Speaking of John Hancock, Huey Flagg Valentine could probably trace his ancestry back to Charlemagne's grandparents. Evergreen, the plantation where he lived with his mother and houseman, had been in his family's name since ﬁfteen minutes after the land was claimed for King Charles II.
I had never seen him dressed in anything but all white, summer and winter, and yes, he wore a hat. But not to affect a grand attitude so much as to save his balding head from the terrors of melanoma. Everything about him was stylish and elegant. He couldn't help it. All those generations of social grace and good taste were imbedded in his DNA.
I just adored him. Everyone did.
It was on Huey's arm that I had gladly attended every party, concert, dinner or gallery opening for the past three years, since my return to Pawleys Island.
Life was so strange. I thought I was going to move into my family's house and write my memoirs, but I was slightly embarrassed to admit that all I had done was exercise and slide in and out of social commitments with Huey. It wasn't the worst thing, really. I mean, heaven forbid that I had a little fun. Besides, the thought of reliving my past through writing it all down? Well, let's just say that I had yet to arrive at the moment where I felt comfortable enough to play with my inner gorillas. They could wait. In any case, I questioned the real value of an autobiography because it seemed like vanity in the extreme. It wasn't like I abandoned a career as a backup singer for the Rolling Stones and that my writings would become the latest zeitgeist on sex, drugs and rock and roll. Frankly, my therapist recommended that I give writing a whirl, saying it might be good for an exercise in closure. Instead, I had closure with everything else---my frantic law practice, my marginal personal life and my nice expensive therapist. I simply closed up my house in Columbia and came back to Pawleys just to think about things.
I imagine you could say I'm a lucky woman, at least in terms of inheritance and assets. My mother died when I was very young, and then Daddy ﬁnally gave up the ghost after a short bout with leukemia six years ago. Since I am an only child, the house on Pawleys came right into my hands. The old rockers, the creaking ﬂoorboards, the tongue-and-groove walls, the ancient kitchen and the claw-footed bathtubs were all mine. The only changes I made were to add a furnace, a fresh coat of paint, window boxes of ﬂowers and new screens. Oh, and I did update the bathroom and kitchen ﬁxtures but that had to be done--- you know how salt corrodes everything in its path.
If you looked twice at my house you would scratch your head wondering why I loved it so much. Anyone with a developer's eye would want to knock it down and replace it with a home with central air-conditioning and heat and, probably, God forbid, wall-to-wall carpet, an in-wall vacuum system, doorbells and every other invention of the twentieth century. No thanks. I still preferred ﬂoors I could sweep, friends calling out to announce their arrival over the roar of the ocean, and I could not have cared less what mysterious wonders the damp air performed on my hair. Once I crossed over that causeway, leaving the mainland, the plantations and the Waccamaw River, the world ceased to exist.
On very hot nights I used the ceiling fan in my bedroom because I loved to hear the waves at night and the birds in the morning. And I loved the memories. If I closed my eyes, I could hear my mother's gentle voice, negotiating with Philemon, the creek man and an island institution during my childhood. He had a bucket of fresh ﬂounder and another one of shrimp, and from them Momma would buy our dinner.
I could see us at the table, Daddy telling Momma how delicious the meal was. Later I would squeeze in between them on the porch swing, while Momma sang sweetly and I drifted off to my dreams. When you lose a parent at a young age, those few memories you have are more precious than any single ring or necklace left to you. Whenever I was here, even alone as I am now, I could stand where they once stood and somehow in the magical workings of the Pawleys Island salt air, I could bring them back to me. For that and for a thousand other reasons too, I would never sell this house or leave it for too long.
Daddy inherited our home on Myrtle Avenue from his father, and his father inherited it from his mother. Our family's Pawleys Island history went back almost as far as Huey's plantation origins. Somewhere around the time Mr. Lincoln freed the slaves, Daddy's father's mother's husband hauled it in sections (we think) to this parcel of land from Butler Island and put it all back together. If you were inclined to inspect the underside of this great relic, you would still ﬁnd the mortise-and-tenon joints with pegs.
When I was a girl, Daddy and his friends would ﬁx cocktails and go under the house to have a look, reappearing later, amazed by nineteenth-century building skills. It was no doubt that her meticulous construction kept Miss Salt Air from ﬂying to Kingdom Come during Hurricane Hugo, our most foul visitor of 1989. Oh, she got her bonnet blown off (lost the roof ) and there was water damage to be sure, but Daddy brought a team of men up from Charleston and raised her from the dunes to new and digniﬁed heights on sturdy pilings of brick.
Anyway, it's the island, really, that spins the spell. The house helped, but the most compelling reason for my return here was to languish in great peace as opposed to despair. For all of my life, any time spent here made everything right.
I could stand on the porch and breathe in with all of my lungs, exhale my troubles in a whoosh, and the breezes carried them away. My shoulders dropped back to their natural position. I moved differently, slowly but with deliberateness. I slept soundly remembering all my dreams.
That seemed to be the general consensus of everyone on Pawleys Island. It's a simple retreat for some and a spa for the soul to others. One thing is certain: it's unlike any other place in God's entire creation.
Even Huey agreed with that. As much as the Waccamaw waters ﬂowed through his veins, on many evenings I had seen the look on his face when we shared the end of day, watching the moonrise over the Atlantic. You can't paint this, he would say. And he, who possessed the heart and soul of the artist, was right.
With that statement, Huey claimed a corner in my heart, which until then had been under lockdown. So, if Huey said, Drop everything and come meet our new savior, I dropped everything and did as he asked. I bought lunch and drove my old Jaguar sedan right over to him, cursing the entire United Kingdom over their wimpy air-conditioning.
I pushed open the door and spotted him right away by the framing table in the rear of the gallery. Huey was the Rosetta stone for body language. His hands were in midair, whirling with excitement, and he shifted from one foot to the other. He turned at the unobtrusive musical sound of the automatic doorbell, saw me and rushed to my side.
"There you are! Come! Say hello! Let me help you with that!" He took the bag and cardboard tray of iced tea from me, delivered two air kisses to my cheeks, stood back and smiled. "Did they have decent tuna?"
"Huey, baby? The tuna is life altering. I watched them make it, which is what took me so long." The tiny brunette was waiting patiently with her portfolio opened, and what I guessed to be her work was spread all over the counter. "You must be Rebecca."
She extended her hand to shake mine. "And you must be Abigail. But please call me Becca. My friends call me Becca."
"No! No! No!" Huey said, researching the contents of the sack of food. "You must be Re-becca! We cannot deﬁle the great name of Rebecca. I'll get plates."
"Didn't anyone ever call you Abby?" she said to me, looking for some support.
"Over their dead body," I said. "My parents named me for Abigail Adams."
Huey placed three plates on the counter and began unpacking lunch. "Abigail Adams was one of America's ﬁrst feminists, you know. She was always giving John the business about the inequality of education between men and women."
"Oh," Rebecca said.
"Well, it makes sense today too," I said. "People used to think that education was wasted on women because they wound up staying home with children. Of course, I'm not sure how an education could ever be wasted." What an inane thing for me to say, I thought.
"You can say that again," Rebecca said.
"Anyway, this generation of women works. And not necessarily because they want to." Another pearl of genius from me, but people said vapid things to each other just to put the other at ease.
"You can say that again too!" Rebecca said.
I took the plate from Huey and eyeballed this diminutive Rebecca, thinking that if she agreed to agree with every word I spoke, then surely there was an exalted position available for her in our little tribe.
If that sounds egotistical, let's get something straight right now. The last thing I needed in my life or even in the periphery of my life was someone telling me I was wrong, what was wrong with my politics, what was wrong with the world. I knew what was wrong with the world. Everything. I had seen enough of what people did to each other and I just didn't want to deal with it for the foreseeable future.
"So where are you from?" I said.
"Charleston," she said. "I came up here to see if I could sell some of my work."
"Abigail. Look at this."
Huey had closed her portfolio so that a ﬂying crumb of tuna or a splotch of mayonnaise wouldn't ruin anything, but he reached down and pulled up one of her paintings. He ﬂipped back the parchment paper cover and there it was: the classic watercolor of two children, a boy and a girl, playing by the edge of the shore on a beach. I had seen hundreds of them, and all of them were cures for insomnia.
But this one was profoundly different. The sky and the water looked as radiantly alive as the sandpipers pecking the wet sand and then running from the waves. But the children, their backs to the viewer, seemed to be a thousand miles away. And you got the sense that while they were probably siblings, that they didn't want to play together or that they were tremendously unhappy for some inexplicable reason and preferred to live in their misery alone. The scene was haunting and bothersome, but I couldn't stop looking at them. I wanted to rush inside the painting and save them. I turned and looked at Rebecca.
"It's very powerful," I said.
"Children aren't always happy, are they?" she said.
"No, they are not."
"Rebecca, darling? We have a show opening tomorrow and I was just thinking..."
"Huey!" I said. "Her work isn't framed, and besides . . ."
"Oh! Gosh!" Rebecca said. "I can make frames if you have the material..."
"Rebecca? Sweetheart? You make frames?"
"Yes, in fact, I am told that, well, I'm rather good at it. I mean, well, I don't mean to brag..."
"Stop! Humility is unﬂattering, especially for an artist of your talent! You need some attitude, girl! Seriously!"
We all had a giggle at that, but Huey was right. This mouse had to stop squeaking.
"Huey, I..."
I was trying to speak, but when Huey got his engine in gear, there was no stopping him.
"Sweetheart. You ﬁnish up your sandwich, and then I want you to have a look around in the storage room. There's enough material back there to hang a frame around Georgetown County, including the new waterslide at Myrtle Beach."
Huey sniffed and I knew it was because of the waterslides, putt-putt courses and all manner of NASCAR contraptions that had been erected under the guise of entertainment but reeked of crass commercialism. And that, my friends, was the scathing difference between genteel plantation living, the arrogant shabby of Pawleys Island and the wild consumerism of Myrtle Beach. All that said for the antielitist dart throwers in the crowd, Huey the King Snob liked nothing better than a round of putt-putt followed by a snow cone dripping in tutti-frutti syrup.
"The former framer was recently relieved of his duties," I said, thinking I would speak to him when Rebecca was out of earshot.
"I ﬁred the nitwit," Huey said. "What a pathetic simpleton! He drove me crazy. Didn't he ever hear of measure twice, cut once?"
"Apparently not," I said.
Inside of a minute, Rebecca, who was slightly confused as to why she should inspect the inventory of framing materials when she had come to Huey's gallery to sell her work, balled up the remains of her turkey sandwich and went to the storage room to sniff around like a good dog.
"So what do you think?" Huey said in a conspiratorial whisper.
"Huey Flagg Valentine! I think that Sallie Anne Wood will deﬁnitely scratch your eyes out! I know I would! You can't promise someone a one-woman show and then just sort of casually have another show going on at the same time! It's unethical!"
The opening, which was the following evening, was a one-woman show for Sallie Anne Wood, an established egomaniacal diva artist from Charleston.
"Listen to me, Abigail Thurmond. Sallie Anne Wood has had a thousand shows. She'll sell enough to make her happy tomorrow night. Right? Look. I cannot resist Rebecca's work! I don't know why, but I sense an urgency in Rebecca and I think she needs us. I mean, you must agree, Rebecca's work is rather astounding."
"It is that."
"God! I wonder what she could do in oil! She'd be biblical! Rebecca at the Well! Great thundering Zeus! I remember that from the show at the Chagall Museum in Nice. Women of the Old Testament! Matriarchs in Search of Motherhood! I wish you had been with me then..."
"Me too. Huey? This is still a problem, you know. You cannot possibly expect Sallie Anne to walk in here and be happy to see Rebecca's work hanging in the same gallery on the same night as her opening! And, Huey, I know you would not enjoy the cognizi of Litchﬁeld and Pawleys calling you an opportunist, now would you?"
"I can sell everything Rebecca can paint. Every blessed last piece. And you know it."
"Framed or unframed. But, Huey? Darlin', we hardly know this child! Are you hiring her to be our new framer? She's an artist, for heaven's sake! Don't you think she will be insulted?"
"I'm going to ask her if she'll be the assistant manager of my gallery."
"And who is the manager? You?"
"Okay! I'll make her the manager! Happy?"
"Oh, Huey, Huey, Huey. If you really want this puppy, then I know you'll have this puppy one way or another. Lord help Rebecca! She's falling down the rabbit hole and doesn't even know it."
Tw o
s
MY darling son, Huey, bought me a corsage to wear to his opening tonight. I don't have the heart to tell him that it's old hat to wear a corsage these days, so I made him a boutonniere. I picked one perfect gardenia from my own garden, added a sprig of rosemary and wound them together with ﬂorist's tape. When I pinned it to his lapel I confess that I became a little weepy, remembering all the times I had pinned them to my late husband Chalmers's lapel, and, oh well, he's been dead for a thousand years and who cares about that anymore? Life goes on whether you like it or not.
The reason I chose a gardenia was because Huey is so sweet, but the rosemary is to remind him to never forget to love his mother. You know, in Victorian times, brides would give rosemary sprigs to all their family and friends. Even though she was leaving to start a new life, a sprig of rosemary let them know she would never forget them. Don't ask me who started that bit of foolishness. I simply couldn't tell you. There are so many traditions to honor that it just wears me out.
The reason I was looking forward to this opening was that I was to meet the young woman Huey has been raving about, this girl Rebecca, an artist from Charleston. Huey hired her just like that! Doesn't even know who her people are! It just seems to me that when you have someone handling your money, you should know all about them. But that's my boy. He gets an idea that he wants thus and so to be thus and so and the next thing you know, it's thus and so. In all my eighty-four years, I have never met another man so determined to have his own way. All right, eighty-six years, and it's no one's business.
My job tonight is to get the poop on Rebecca because my Huey can't stop ﬂitting around long enough to do it himself. He's just like a bumblebee in a garden of blooms, darting from one budding beauty to the next. Ah well, that little weakness in his deportment is also why he's so good at selling paintings. Huey just loves people and artists most especially. Probably because, and I mean this in the most charitable way, it's all my Huey can do to draw his breath! Oh, Lordy! That's a little art joke, you know.
After I looked at all the paintings, I had to agree with Huey's enthusiasm for Rebecca's work. Poor Sallie Anne Wood was sure to have a pebble in her shoe when she arrived and saw Rebecca's paintings all hung in the framing area. Huey was clever to install them in the rear of his gallery, well distanced from the show he had put up for Miss Wood. But even though he had repainted the front walls in Ralph Lauren's new ivory metallic paint and had special lighting adjusted for each of Miss Wood's canvases, it just didn't help one ﬁg. Miss Wood was a ﬁne painter, a competent artist to be sure, but Lord have mercy, did the world need another painting of a beach path with palmettos?
Rebecca's watercolors grabbed you and held you. Period. End of story. And Sallie Anne Wood's work was lovely but it would never keep you up at night. Well, I hoped there wouldn't be a catﬁght between the two of them. You know how artists can be. I would simply ﬂatter Miss Wood to pieces when she arrived and hope for the best.
So after I had my little tour, Huey and Byron, his houseman, propped me up here in this chair like the reigning queen. I don't like to get knocked around, and heaven knows, there must be two hundred people expected here tonight. Why in the world I would want to meet all these people eludes me, but Huey insists that I am his good luck charm, so I haven't missed an opening since he started up this business. I try to be gracious, but so many people! It is a little annoying, and besides, these days I feel a little more tired. I keep telling him that my get up and go got up and went. He just smiles and asks me what color my dress is going to be so he can go waste his money on another corsage.
It certainly would be nice to have a little something to drink.
I turned to see Huey approaching with a young woman on his arm. It had to be Rebecca, so I sat up straight and smiled to meet her while giving her the once-over in a way that could not be detected as a once-over.
"Mother?"
"Yes, dear?"
"This is Rebecca Simms. Rebecca, this is my mother, Miss Olivia."
"Well! I am so pleased to know you," I said. "Huey has told me all about you."
"And he's told me all about you! I am so happy to meet you too."
I took her hand and held it for a few moments. She did seem like a very nice person, so tiny, like a Dresden ﬁgurine. She had a nice watch and no manicure.
"Huey? Be a dear and bring your mother a little glass of sherry, won't you? Then I can have a few minutes with Rebecca. Come sit by me!"
Rebecca smiled, sat down, and Huey winked at me as he walked away.
"Now, then. Tell me all about yourself! Where are your parents from?"
"My parents? Oh! Um, Manning. My family is from Manning. My father was a farmer---cotton and soybeans--- and my mother, well, I didn't know my mother very well."
"Oh! I am so sorry. Was she ill? Did she pass away at a young age?" I took the glass from Huey, thanked him and fastened my attention on Rebecca's face. She had very pretty blue eyes, and if she tweezed her eyebrows, one might even notice them.
"So that's pretty much the story about my mother," she said.
"Oh! I'm sorry, dear. You'll have to pardon me. I was just thinking you had the prettiest blue eyes I've seen in many a day. Yes, you do. Now please indulge me and tell me again about your mother."
Well, don't you know she told me that her mother had stayed on her father's farm just long enough to get her out of diapers? She left town with a cigarette salesman and ran off to Spartanburg and then Santa Fe, New Mexico. It broke her father's heart but at least the hussy had the consideration to leave a pantry ﬁlled with hundreds of mason jars of bottled string beans, corn, tomatoes, chow chow, bread-and-butter pickles and two kinds of jam---peach and strawberry. Her mother died of a lady cancer before Rebecca was twelve, not that she ever did the poor child a lick of good as a role model, and her death? Well, it served her right. Jezebel.
"My! Goodness! Gracious sakes alive! Some people in this world . . ." I just shook my head and she nodded in agreement.
"It's the truth. I don't know how some people live with themselves."
"So then your daddy raised you?"
"Well, I guess, but my grandparents moved in and helped. They were wonderful people. My daddy worked by his father's side every day, and then there was a drought that lasted for four or ﬁve years. Daddy saw that he couldn't support us with what the farm was bringing in, so he quit farming and rented the land to somebody else. Finally, my granddaddy retired and my daddy opened up a Tastee-Freez and ran it for years. He would laugh and say there was more money in corn dogs and push-ups than there was in a zillion acres of cotton."
"And he never married again?"
"No. No, he didn't. I think he was so embarrassed by what Momma did that he swore off women forever. Manning is a pretty small town, you know."
"Yes, but it's so lovely. I can remember trips with Chalmers, going up Highway 301 when all the wisteria was in bloom...It was just breathtaking."
"Yes. It still is, I imagine."
"Rebecca?"
"Yes, ma'am?"
"You are a very talented painter. I'd wager a bet that every single one of your paintings walks right out the door tonight. When Sallie Anne Wood gets here and sees them she's going to, well, the poor dear. Let's just be very nice to her."
"Don't worry, Miss Olivia, I'll just reach down in my psychoanalytic bag of tricks and ﬁx her right up!"
"What? Psychoanalytic bag of tricks? Whatever do you mean, child?"
"Oh, a thousand years ago, I got my Ph.D. in psychology from Carolina. I worked in HR for Wal-Mart for a year, but then I married Nat and the babies started to come and that all went out the window...You know what I mean?"
"Rebecca? Would you mind reﬁlling my glass? I am so parched tonight!"
"Oh! I'm sorry! I should've noticed!"
She hopped up and left me in a dither. HR? Who was Nat? What babies? Huey told me she was living in a condo at Litchﬁeld Beach! He didn't say a word about her having a husband and family. Had she run off and left them like her mother did? I reached in my purse for a mint and tried to compose myself. I knew I was getting worked up and even though that fool doctor at the Medical University in Charleston said I was ﬁt as a ﬁddle, I knew that getting riled wasn't good for my heart. Mercy! A husband and children! Do you see what I mean about my Huey? She might be a good painter, but she also might go crazy and shoot the place up! Oh! My stars, Olivia! The girl's not a crazy person! Yes, I had developed the unattractive habit of talking to myself out loud, but you can tell me about it when you've reached my age and not before. Now, where was I? Well, here she comes with my drink and it was time for me to gather myself together and get to the bottom of it.
"Oh, thank you, Rebecca!" It looked like she was going to leave again so I said, "Now sit here with me for few minutes."
"Actually, Byron wanted me to help him."
I patted the seat and she sat.
"Let him open all the wine bottles himself! That's what he gets paid for! I want to hear about your husband and children. Are they here with you at Litchﬁeld?"
"No. Oh, Miss Olivia, it's a long and complicated story and I don't think you would really want to hear it. Honestly."
"Rebecca? I am so glad I still have my hearing that I'd listen to a politician! And let me tell you this. At my age, I have heard just about every story there is to tell. You cannot shock me." I put my drink down on the table and folded my hands in my lap, indicating that I expected to hear her full story.
"I feel awful that I might burden you with my mess on a night like this."
"Come on now, I'm not getting any younger."
"Well, all right then." She took a deep breath and blurted it all out at once. "Just ten days ago, the day after my children left for their summer camps, I was served with a summons for divorce and a complaint alleging that I was an unﬁt mother. The next week I found myself in court and the judge granted full custody of the children and the house to Nat. So I packed up my watercolors, which Nat and the children made fun of all the time, and came to Litchﬁeld to stay in my friend's condo until I could get my brains together. That's the story. The kids are in camp, Nat's in the house and I'm here."
She shrugged her shoulders, her chin began to quiver and her eyes became bloodshot and watery. She didn't make a single sound, but the tears spilled over her eyelids in a ﬂood, washing right down her face and neck. My heart just sank. I felt like crying too. It was inconceivable that this talented, soft-spoken, genteel woman before me was an unﬁt mother. She was a precious girl and that man of hers had done her dirty. And why had I made her reveal herself? Oh! Sometimes I was so nosy. There I had been thinking that she was going to swindle my Huey and the fact was that she had been swindled out of her own home and children. I reached in my purse and handed her my handkerchief.
"Thank you. I'm so sorry. I just don't know why or how it even happened. I never saw it coming. One day I was sewing name tags in my children's socks and the next day I was...my whole life was gone."
She took a long breath and I wondered what in the world I could say to her. There had to be more to the story. I knew that much. I felt perfectly wretched.
"Rebecca. Dear child. You must say that you will forgive me. I am so deeply sorry that I pried into your personal life. I had no right to do it. And I had no idea you had suffered such a tragedy. I just wanted to know who you were. Now, you go wash your face and let's just forget about our discussion for the rest of the night."
The gallery was beginning to ﬁll with guests. That considered, it seemed to me that the best solution was to sweep the whole business under the rug for the night and deal with it in the light of day. She went to the powder room and to help that bossy boots, Byron, and I went to ﬁnd my Huey. He was easy to spot. After all, he had been shopping in the husky boys department at Belk's since he was twelve years old, bless his heart.
"Mother! Come say hello to Sallie Anne Wood!"
It was small comfort that her mother had not named her Sandy. Or Sandal. Or Cherry.
"Hello, my dear," I said and extended my hand to her, which was a peculiar habit of the younger generation. In my day, a lady never shook hands. To begin with, we wore gloves, thank you. "Congratulations on your beautiful show!"
"Oh, thank you, Miss Olivia, and it's lovely to see you again."
"And to see you also . . ." No sooner did the words tumble from my lips than she began to scout the room, her eyes drawn to Rebecca's paintings in the very rear of the gallery. There was going to be the devil to pay, I thought, and then decided to keep an eye on her. She released Huey's arm and began to work her way toward Rebecca's work. I took my boy's arm and pulled him down so I could whisper in his ear.
"I have to...I have to speak with you, son," I said. Well, he could tell that I was upset, and so we slipped into his ofﬁce for a moment, closing the door behind us.
"Mother? What ever is the matter? The gallery is ﬁlled with..."
"Huey? Don't reprimand me! I know exactly what is and what is not occuring on the other side of that door! This is of the utmost importance or else I would never have asked you..."
"Oh, I'm sorry, Mother! Of course! Tell me what it is. Please."
He took a deep breath and I looked up at him and thought here is my unmarried son, who, for his own reasons we do not discuss, will never give me grandchildren. Would he possibly be sympathetic to Rebecca's woes? But when I told him the story as I knew it, he reacted as I hoped he would.
"Miss Olivia?"
I loved it when he called me that because it meant we were in it together, whatever the it happened to be at the moment.
"Yes?"
"Here is what I think. I think we don't have all the facts. And most importantly, I refuse to allow you to become all upset over this until we know what has happened to her. But I agree with you. It doesn't sound right or seem right. Rebecca? Unﬁt? No, no. Can't be. When this evening is over, we will have Rebecca out to the house for dinner. Maybe tomorrow night. And then we will speak to her without all these distractions. If what you say is true, it is time for our Miss Abigail to come out of retirement. It's that simple."
I was so relieved, just so relieved. I just nodded my head and thought that one more sherry would be very nice. Huey opened the door and led me back to my chair. Sallie Anne Wood was working her way through the crowd, took Huey's arm and led him away to Rebecca's paintings. Her hair was in ﬂames---well, not literally, of course. I strained to make out her words by lip reading from across the room, which was a difﬁcult task as there were people in the way.
Byron brought me a tiny glass and put it by my side.
"What's happening, Byron?"
"Miss Wood's a little bit furious, I think. But don't you worry yourself, Miss Olivia. Huey can handle her." Byron was a nice man, really. Well, at least he was solicitous. I drained the miserable little thimble of a drink in one sip and looked over at Huey and Sallie Anne. She was waving her arms and carrying on like a banshee and my poor Huey was staring at his shoes, just letting the prima donna rant and rave like she was Monet's little sister. People nearby were watching them from the corner of their eyes and smiling at her public display of displeasure. She was well within her rights to be provoked with Huey, I will admit that much, but Huey's lapse in judgment did not excuse her own bad manners. No one, but no one, was going to dress down my boy in public.
"Give me your arm, Byron, and help me up this instant!"
"Yes, ma'am!"
I went right up and stood in between them, putting my hand on Huey's arm in a show of support.
"Now, see here!" I said and looked her square in the face. "What's all this fuss about?"
"Ooh!" the diva said and started to turn on her heel and ﬂounce away, but I stopped her.
"I don't think I can quite believe my eyes," I said.
"What?" she said, spinning back to face me.
"Mother!" Huey said. "I can handle..."
"Hush! Now, Miss Wood, were you about to turn your back on me and walk away? Is that possible?"
"Well, I..."
She became very ﬂustered, little bits of her spearmint LifeSavers-- scented spittle ﬂying in every direction. I imagine little old ladies didn't take Sallie Ann Wood to the woodshed very often. Wood to the woodshed? Perfect!
"Sallie Anne's upset with me, Mother and I don't . . ."
"Huey! Hush, son!" I took a deep breath and looked back to her face for an explanation. "Well, Miss Wood?"
"I'm sorry. This is supposed to be a one-woman show and it's not," she said. "I have never been so humiliated in all my..."
"Oh, psssh! Settle yourself down and stop hufﬁng and pufﬁng! What is there to be humiliated about? Huey, how many of Sallie Anne's paintings have you sold?"
"Eleven! And six more are on hold! I mean, Sallie Anne, don't you think that's incredible?"
"Son, that is incredible! Aren't you pleased, Miss Wood?"
"I want another ten percent for this outrage and a feature article in Myrtle Beach Magazine."
"Done!" Huey said.
"Christmas issue!"
"I'll try," Huey said.
Sallie Anne took a deep breath and smiled as wide as she could, revealing some rather dilapidated dental work. "It's a pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Valentine!" She walked away, her sense of self-importance fully restored.
"Ridiculous woman," I said for Huey's ears alone.
"You were wonderful, Mother."
"Anytime, son." Let's face it, Sallie Anne Wood wasn't the ﬁrst bully I'd dealt with on my son's behalf.
"Come, let me get you a victory drink."
"Well, all right."
Huey poured me a healthy portion from his private stash and helped me take my seat again. I drank it all up like a good girl, and I declare, the gallery had become so warm and comfortable that I drifted off to sleep and unfortunately into a terrible dream that a soldier from the north was trying to kidnap me and take me away. He said he wanted to marry me. I was too young! He said it didn't matter to him. I was terriﬁed.
I cannot leave my family! I do not want to go to Connecticut! My daddy would die if I left the plantation! What? Unhand me! You brute! If this is what Yankees are like...I will throw myself in the river! I swear it!
I felt someone shaking my arm and looked up into Rebecca's face.
"Miss Olivia? Are you all right?"
The gallery was nearly empty. I had slept through the entire party.
"Of course! Of course!" I straightened myself and smoothed my hair, which had become a little tangled and was no doubt in disarray. "It's time for me to go home."
"Huey is very happy," she said.
"And why is that?"
"Well, he sold several of my paintings and almost all of Sallie Anne's."
She helped me to my feet and I ran my hands over the skirt of my dress, thinking I must have been some sight. Suddenly, I remembered what Rebecca had told me earlier. Then along came Abigail and Huey. Abigail so sophisticated in all black and Huey so angelic in all white. It made me choke up a little to think they would probably never marry. They were a study in opposites, which is probably why they so enjoyed each other's company. People were always drawn to that which they did not possess.
"Miss Olivia? Let me take you to the car," Abigail said. "We are closing up now."
All at once I became quite provoked with my son.
"Huey! Huey! How could you let me sleep like that? In front of all those people?"
"Mother? You were so comfortable and even smiling in your sleep! And besides, I didn't know you didn't want to rest!"
Sometimes Huey tried my patience, I can tell you that.
I took Abigail's arm and turned back to Rebecca.
"Rebecca? I like you, sweetheart and I think your husband has done a terrible thing. A heinous thing! We simply cannot let him get away with this! I think I might have to cut a switch and go down to Charleston and tan his hide!"
Abigail, who didn't know a thing but soon would, looked at Rebecca and said, "Honey? You don't know Miss Olivia and I have no idea what's she's talking about, but when she starts talking about cutting a switch, you may as well head for high ground! Looks like we're in for the storm of the century."
Three
s
NAT was gone long before we separated. The happiness in his eyes ﬂickered, faded and went blank. It just went blank. My perfect family began to fall apart.
Do you know how there are conversations, disagreements and even verbal slights that wound you so badly you remember everything about them? The mere thought of them evokes a sweat. You recall the heaviness of the blue denim shirt you were wearing, or you can still smell the chicken you were roasting. You can envision the dirty dishes in the sink and feel what the temperature was. You relive those kinds of memories in a physical power surge, and all the knots you felt when they happened are suddenly alive and in your present.
In the days Nat loved me, he would glide through the door in the evenings, happy to be home. How was your day? Where are the kids? What's for dinner? Oh! Wait till I tell you what happened! No! I'll save that for later! Anything in the mail? How are you? Let me give my wife a kiss...
For years, we spoke the same words, asked the same questions that ﬁlled the air of a thousand homes in Charleston. Dusk would settle in, covering us in its delicious glow of contentment. Another day of work was ending and we were all safe and with each other. We would have supper, clean the kitchen together as a family. Then Nat and I would put the children to bed. Most nights we would watch a movie or read together, turning in before midnight, sleeping like spoons.
One day, without warning, the pot-stirring hag slipped through the walls and began to skulk in our shadows. Nat began to miss dinner all the time, claiming business reasons. He went to every Clemson football and basketball game and took the children, not me, saying he needed some time with them alone to make up for all the weeknights he was out. I hated football anyway, so at ﬁrst I didn't mind. But over time, they returned from Birmingham or wherever the Clemson team played and communicated with references and inside jokes that didn't include me. Sami covered her walls in Clemson sports memorabilia---pennants, programs, posters---and she announced that her life's ambition was to be a Clemson cheerleader. Evan was going to be a quarterback.
I became the target of constant criticism. My small ﬂaws became large issues. The issues became irreconcilable. The air turned rancid and its stench blew and hissed in my direction on the breath of Nat and the children.
Like any mother, I urged Samantha and Evan to do their homework, pick up their clothes and put them in the hamper, put their glasses in the dishwasher and turn out lights when they left a room. Nat used to say, Do as your mother says. Somewhere along the line he began to ask me why I nagged them so much. Eventually he said these things knowing the children heard him. Wipe up the counter, Sami became You'd better wipe up the counter, Sami, or SHE will go completely crazy.
The children started calling me a nag, and Nat would say nothing. Later I watched his lips curl into a smile as they hurled words and insults at me I never would have spoken to anyone.
They say that domestic abuse starts with sarcasm, then yelling. Next the shoving begins and then one day it's a slap, then a punch. Women are murdered all the time because rage goes out of control. Nat raged over nothing. He began to say things like, This is my house and I can act any way I want. I would reply, There's no place in a civilized world where you or I can act any way we want. His grumbling increased in exponential leaps with each rebuttal. Soon we were barely speaking. Then the pivotal event occurred.
One day this past spring I put together a barbecue for the kids and their friends. School was almost out for the year. I was grilling what seemed like hundreds of hamburgers, slipping them in buns and arranging them on trays. The yard was crawling with youth, calling out to each other as they jumped in and crawled out of the pool. Sami was wearing a bathing suit that I thought was too skimpy. I just didn't think that a ﬁfteen-year-old girl needed to wear an underwire padded bra top with a teensy bottom that barely stayed tied on the sides.
Every time I would ask her to tighten her bottom, Nat would snicker at me. It was very hot and humid and the heat from the grill made the outdoor cooking almost unbearable. I became fed up with him and his snickering and lost my temper.
"What's so funny?" I said.
"You. You're funny. Don't you realize she doesn't give a shit what you think?" He moved his face very close to mine and said in a low voice, "No one does, Becca. No one."
"Know what, Nat?" I whispered back to him. "You're a shit."
I could see that little vein in his forehead start to twitch, the one that twitched when he got angry. I didn't think he would do anything crazy because we were surrounded by teenagers. I was wrong. He picked up a hamburger, still hot from the grill, and pressed it into my face with a shove.
"Nat!"
"You repulse me," he said and walked away.
You repulse me.
Those words would bang around the inside of my head forever.
From that moment on, we were ﬁnished. Our intimate life ceased to exist. But I wouldn't give up. I begged Nat to make love to me, and when he gave in, he treated me like a whore. I had hoped that kind of closeness would bring some apology or some words of regret from him. But he never said a thing. When I ﬁnally said, Why? he looked at me with a blank face and said, You're pathetic. The sadistic pleasure he took in insulting me in the most vulnerable moment was stark and plain. Still, I didn't understand why it was all happening. What had I done? I would lie there in a pool of my own tears, and he would leave the bed in a silence of inexplicable disgust to sleep in the guest room.
I would have done anything to hold my family together. I made their favorite meals. They said dinner sucked. I asked them if they'd like to watch a movie, that they could use pay-per-view and choose anything they would like to see. They said no way, they had other plans. No matter what I did or what I offered, it was refused and refused callously with everything from eye rolling to snide remarks. By the time Sami and Evan left for their summer camps in Maine, I just held my breath waiting for Nat to deliver the hand grenade. He did not disappoint.
I came to Pawleys Island as soon as I could and not just to escape the gossip. Like any small city, Charleston's drums would beat with a jungle-like fervor when there was news of a domestic blowup. I could only guess what people were saying about me. After all, what kind of a mother loses her children? Her home?
A bad one. An unﬁt one.
That's what kept me up at night. Had I become like my own mother? I would call you a liar if you repeated this, but the truth, the deep ugly truth, is that in some secret part of my heart, I was relieved to be out of there. I felt so weary and bruised from playing all the mind games with Nat. My children had broken my heart into thousands of pieces. They said they hated me. My own children hate me. Can you imagine such a horrible thing? All I had ever done was to love them and try to be a good parent and they hated me for it.
I had never slapped them or abused them in any physical way. Their clothes ﬁt and were clean, pressed and neatly put away. Every afternoon I greeted them with snacks---some cookies or brownies---when they came home from school. I never made personal plans for anything until I knew that their needs were met. I had been den mother to Evan's Cub Scout troop and class mother for Sami at least three times, and I had taken them to Sunday school without fail to be sure they received a religious education. I made beautiful birthday parties for all of them and holidays were out of a magazine.
I volunteered for everything to try to distinguish our family's reputation. I had been an ofﬁcer in the Junior League and chaired committees for the symphony and the museum. I had done everything I could to make them happy and to set a good example. They hated me.
Anyone would have wanted to run away---at least, that's what I told myself. Litchﬁeld Beach was the perfect escape for me.
My old roommate from Carolina, Claudia Kelly, was the closet thing I had to a best friend. My friends in Charleston were carpool friends, soccer game parents---but that's what happens when you're raising children. Claudia was the only friend who had survived all the changes in my life. Even though she lived in Atlanta and had a very busy practice in plastic surgery, we still managed to stay in touch and to see each other at least once a year. The condo I was staying in at the Crescent was hers. She had always said, Use it! Use it! So, with the subpoena still in my hands, I had called her from outside the courtroom. She was as completely surprised by Nat's shock-and-awe campaign as I was.
"Becca! That's outrageous! How can he get away with this?"
"I don't know," I said.
She said, "You'll go to the condo at Litchﬁeld and stay there. Don't tell the son of a bitch where you're going either. Let him explain to everyone where you are. I'll come down as soon as I can and we'll ﬁgure this out."
I knew that there was nothing anyone could do. It seemed to me that Nat had somehow sewn up the whole deal before I even knew what was afoot. The only people he would have to explain my whereabouts to were the parents of our children's friends. Most kids were away at camp, so I wouldn't be talking to their parents until school started again. And, of course, there was his dad, Tisdale, but I was guessing that he already knew. Funny. I hadn't heard from Tisdale in weeks. Yes, he probably knew.
I was pretty damned depressed but hiding it quite well, or at least I thought I was. In the tradition of sailors surviving stormy seas, I seized Claudia's port. I knew that the sight and sounds of the ocean would make me feel better. I didn't know a soul at Litchﬁeld. I would not be bumping into people day and night who would say, Oh, Becca! I heard! We are so sorry! Is there anything we can do? You knew in the pit of your guts that all they wanted was a tidbit of juice they could rehash over a gin and tonic with their spouse that night. It may be human nature to behave so disingenuously, but I wasn't ready to face them.
My plan, as I was driving from Charleston to Claudia's condo, crying so hard I could hardly see, was to dive into painting. Hopefully I would ﬁnd some kind of a job to keep myself alive and fed until I could sort out my life. And there it was: Huey Valentine's gallery, right on Highway 17, sitting there like Christmas morning. I had seen the sign that said Oak Lea and Gallery Valentine listed among the tenants and pulled over.
Did I have an inkling that they didn't sell little statues of shrimp boats made from shells with little peg-legged captains on the bow? No. Did I know that it was a legitimate art gallery? No. Did I know he needed a framer? No. Luck! What a wild card. I had often thought about luck. Pretty arbitrary. It was better not to depend on it.
I was still adjusting to the idea of selling my work and Huey's excitement over it. And Abigail's. Last night's opening had been your basic baptism by ﬁre, but I somehow had managed to survive the craziness. I was bone tired, I'll admit that much. The muscles in my arms ached from making so many frames.
I was late getting dressed and gathering up other watercolors I hadn't taken to show Huey the ﬁrst day. It must have been ninety-ﬁve degrees and it was just early morning. The air was oppressive and the sun was a burning laser. Just a glance into its face made my eyes stream water.
I decided to turn on the car and let the air conditioner run for a few minutes to cool it down, and then I would drive to work. The worst part of the car was that it had dark charcoal leather seats---a gift of torture from Nat. You don't know what hot is until your bare legs have been stuck to dark leather seats in a car that's been baking in the Carolina July sun.
My steering wheel, not my seats, had been special ordered in beige leather because the standard one was black. Forget black steering wheels, unless you're a criminal and want to have your ﬁngerprints removed. Just like folks in Minneapolis preheated their cars in February, we precooled our cars in July.
When the cars cooperate and start, that is. My car was as dead as Kelsey's cow, whoever Kelsey is or was. Not a sound came from the dashboard area when the key was turned. I must have tried it ten times, and nothing. When I started to perspire and could feel that the hair on the back of my neck was already sopping wet, I gave up and ran back inside to make an air-conditioned call to the gallery.
"Huey?"
"Rebecca? Sweet angel? Are you on the way?"
"Yeah, well, I was, but my car won't start. I don't know what's wrong. It was ﬁne yesterday."
"Listen to Uncle Huey. Don't fret. Abigail is coming here in thirty minutes. I'll call her to pick you up. And I'll get Byron to see about your car."
"Oh! Thanks! Huey, seriously, thank you so much!"
I hung up realizing I was on the verge of tears. It had been so long since anyone besides Claudia had offered to do anything for me that I choked up and wanted to cry. What did that say about my mental state? Pathetic.
My cell rang moments later and it was Abigail, saying it was no big deal and she was on her way.
"Precious place!" she said, when I opened the door.
Precious? Where did she live? The Taj Mahal?
Crisp described her manner and her dress. She was wearing black Bermudas, a starched white sleeveless shirt, a black alligator belt and a black-and-white visor in the tiniest check print. Although she had on black sandals, I suspected that somewhere in her car there were a pair of black-and-white golf shoes. I watched as she glanced at the row of photographs of my children.
"Thanks. It belongs to a friend of mine from Atlanta."
"Three bedrooms?"
"Yeah, and a great view of the ocean," I said. "Come see."
I put my portfolio against the back of the sofa and opened the curtain over the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. We stepped outside into the breeze, and Abigail leaned over the rail.
"Too bad we can't bottle the air," she said. "We could all retire tomorrow."
"Isn't that the truth? This apartment is pretty far from the beach, but the view still takes my breath away. Especially at night."
"I'm sure. Well, we'd better get going. Huey My Love is waiting for his Coke."
"Coke?"
I slid the door back and locked it, not that anyone was going to scale the building and burglarize the place.
"Don't you drink Coke for breakfast?" Abigail said with a laugh.
"Uh, no. When I was a kid I did, if I could get away with it."
"Well, our Huey has a Coke for breakfast every day. Sometimes two. Only in little glass bottles."
I grabbed my portfolio and closed the door behind her. "Well, in this sweltering heat..."
"Sometimes he puts peanuts in them and calls them lunch!" As we stepped into the sun, the heat hit us full force. "Whoo! Gonna be a thousand degrees today! And genius that I am, I'm playing golf!"
"I never understood golf," I said. "Especially in the summer... unless you're in Scotland or something..."
"You don't play golf?"
"Uh, no. A little tennis but that's about it."
She just looked at me, shook her head and added my lack of appreciation of golf to the list of many things that I thought she and Huey intended to change about me.
Sure enough, I spotted an expensive pair of black-and-white spectator, ﬂapped and tasseled golf shoes in the backseat. Obviously, Abigail had money. Besides her Jaguar and no visible means of support, on the three occasions that I had seen her she had been dressed and accessorized to the hilt. I wondered for a moment why someone as together as Abigail was happy to trot around with Huey. Why wasn't she married? Where did her money come from, and what was her house like?
She blasted the air-conditioning, turned down the radio and backed out of her parking space.
"I really appreciate this," I said. "My car was ﬁne last night."
"Glad to help! I'm stopping at Sam's Corner. Want something? I'm dying for a sausage biscuit."
"Sure. Do you mind if I just wait in the car?"
"No problem. Want a Coke?"
"Diet?"
"Sure."
I reached in my handbag to get a dollar and she stopped me.
"Don't worry about it. I'll start a tab."
She smiled at me and disappeared inside the restaurant. Sam's Corner. The parking lot was always crowded. I guessed all the locals got their breakfast there, The Eggs Up Grill or the Litchﬁeld Restaurant. Unless you did fast-food drive-through, which was totally disgusting to me. I mean, there wasn't anything in the world like McDonald's french fries when they were right out of the hot oil. But breakfast? I'd rather go without than eat plastic cheese, rubber eggs and greasy sausage on a gummy biscuit.
Abigail returned in minutes, and we made polite conversation all the way to the gallery. When we arrived, Huey was in a bit of a dither, arranging the sold paintings in stacks along the wall, taking notes in his book.
"Good morning!" he said. "Did you bring your car keys?"
Abigail kissed him on the cheek, and I handed him his Cokes and my keys. "Abigail bought you several since it's so hot," I said.
"Bless you, angel!"
He took the bag, disappeared into his ofﬁce, where he kept a small refrigerator. I went to the framing area, where I thought I would be spending most of my day, unwrapped my sausage biscuit and took a bite. It seemed like a normal moment until I looked up. Abigail and Huey were staring at me.
"What?" I said. "Is something wrong?"
They looked at each other, unsure of where to start.
"Spit it out, Huey," Abigail said.
"Okay, okay." He took a drink, draining his ﬁrst Coke of the morning.
"Want another one? I'll get it for you..."
He shook his head. "Listen, Rebecca, sweetheart. My mother told me that you have a Ph.D. in psychology and that you have a husband and children in Charleston. And that your husband was given custody and the house. Are you in some kind of trouble? I mean, is there something we can do?"
I was stunned. But Pawleys Island was no different than Charleston. People talked. I couldn't even respond to him. I didn't want to talk about it.
"Listen to me, Rebecca. Byron is coming to pick up your car and take it to the garage where I get mine ﬁxed. They're very fair and do excellent work. I want you to come for dinner tonight. Come out, spend the evening with us and we will try to help you straighten this mess all out."
I was furious. My disaster was my disaster, no one else's.
"Rebecca?" Abigail said.
"What?" My face was red hot.
"You aren't the ﬁrst woman who ever had this happen to her. I'll make you a bet."
"What?" I said again.
"I'll bet you my Rolex that your husband has a girlfriend and that's why he wanted you out---so he could move her in. I'll bet you my diamond studs that he did this to avoid paying alimony and child support. And I have never met your husband, but I'll guarantee you that he's more arrogant than Donald Trump."
A girlfriend? Avoid alimony and child support at the expense of my relationship with my children? Would Nat do that? Would he? I had never thought of Nat as scheming or diabolical until that moment. Since I'd left, I had driven myself nearly insane trying to ﬁgure out why he didn't love me anymore. But then maybe he did love someone else and I'd been too blind to see it.
"What time is dinner?" I said.
"Always at eight," Huey said.
"I'll pick you up," Abigail said.
"Fine," I said and I felt all the blood drain out of my face. "Thank you."
All kinds of things were spinning around in my head. I had come here to avoid gossip and now my problems were scheduled as the main topic of conversation for the night. Part of me was very angry---I didn't want to relive the battles simply because they felt a need to know about them. I thought introspection was futile.
They were meddling. I didn't want to be the cause célèbre for a little group of people who had too much time on their hands. I just wanted to work, support myself and be left alone to paint. Was that too much to ask? Did a paycheck entitle Huey and then Abigail to the lurid details of my marriage? I never should have opened my big mouth.
Four
ABIGAIL SAYS, NOTHING COULD BE FINER
s
WHY I consented to play nine holes when the heat index was somewhere in the stratosphere was anybody's guess. Maybe some optimistic sliver of my postmenopausal brain still thought I was a young girl and that a good sweaty round of golf in the blazing sun would be rejuvenating. But to tell the truth, the heat left me dizzy and slightly nauseous. The day had been hot and sticky like you cannot believe.
Rebecca was on my mind as the hours ticked by. I knew she was smoldering from our prodding and I understood why. She thought her personal business was hers alone, and technically she was right. However, and this is the big however, she didn't know us.
There is so much to be said about power and its correct usage that it's all but impossible to choose a beginning point for the discussion. But let's just say this. I was not the kind of woman who could stand by with my mouth closed and watch a bloody crime unfold. And Huey was not that kind of man. We didn't bring home kitties from the rain, but whenever we could stomp out a wrongful ﬁre, we did. We dispensed plenty of unsolicited advice for the good citizens of our community who, believe it or not, actually thanked us. On occasion. Well, not often.
There are all levels of transgressions that people commit against each other. In Rebecca's case, it was one of two things. Either Rebecca had been so thoroughly demoralized by her husband that she had somehow been fooled into believing the courts had done the right thing. Or Rebecca was an unﬁt mother, a concept that we absolutely could not swallow. I was coming in on the side of bamboozle. The courts had made a terrible mistake, probably based on trumped-up evidence or hearsay or some campaign gone awry. Huey had taken the ﬁrst step in helping her by giving her a job.
We had liked her right away. Her talent was rather astounding. She ﬁt a need in the gallery for a framer, and I would have advised Huey to give her a try, which he did before I could even articulate an opinion. As her employer, there was no reason why we---that is, Huey---shouldn't know a little more about her. Despite its global fame, Pawleys Island was a small town. It would be better for her when the inquiring minds asked questions, and we knew they would, if we knew what to say. If someone new moved to Pawleys and Fate plopped them in the spotlight, as it had Rebecca, then the residents of Pawleys and Litchﬁeld were going to want to know every detail about them.
We were a little worried. For all we knew her ex-husband might be a lunatic. Pawleys Island was just a short drive from Charleston, and who could say what form his anger might take? People committed crimes of passion every day, and far-fetched as it may sound, Huey and I didn't want to be caught in the middle of some risk to our personal safety---that is, if there was risk. Who knew? So the pragmatic side of us wanted to know and the humane side just wanted to be helpful.
I thought about all this as Rebecca and I drove in near silence to Huey's. She was on her guard, and so was I. I had a CD playing of Ella Fitzgerald singing great crooner music to try and put both of us in a social state of mind.
"I think I would have enjoyed living in the forties," I said, trying to lighten the air. "Life was so much more civilized."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, men were gentlemen and women were ladies. People were modest about themselves. I mean, they knew what they were supposed to do and how they were supposed to act. Life now is so, I don't know, loose."
A pithy pause ensued.
She ﬁnally said, "That's true, but I don't know if it was really any better then. There was polio and TB."
"Polio and TB? Heavens to Betsy, girl! What a thing to think of! What about the good things? Like the fashion? All those padded shoulders and platforms? And women worked in real jobs..."
"And got pushed out of the workforce after the war. It just seems like we're smarter today. But they did have great shoes. And cars."
I smiled and glanced over to her. She was smiling then. I said, "Love the cars, the clothes and the music. But I'm not sure we're any smarter."
I could see her head swinging in my peripheral vision, weighing the question of our collective national intelligence.
"Well, we've got technology. Yeah, boy. We've got technology in spades. But you're right. We're probably not any smarter. We're just ﬂooded with information that nobody knows how to use. God knows, we still have war. So how far have we really come?"
"I always say that women should run the planet. Don't get me started on the politics of war. It would be even more interesting if our elected ofﬁcials actually had a voice. Instead we've got this cockamamy cabinet of old zealot farts running the bloodletting, but we could talk about them all night, couldn't we? And here's our turn."
I turned on to Huey's road, opposite the entrance to DeBordieu. If I hadn't known where the plantation was, I would surely have missed it.
"Anyway, screw politics. I think about this stuff, probably more than you would guess. Our government is such a disappointment. All of them... this entire out-of-control testosterone thing... Let me tell you about Huey's house."
"Holy hell!"
The big house had just come into view. And it was a spectacle to behold, with its spreading wings and grand front stairs ﬁt for the arrival of Queen Elizabeth herself.
"Yeah, isn't that something? That was Miss Olivia's family home, but they don't live in it anymore. The taxes were ridiculous, so they made it into a museum. See? There's the parking lot for the tour buses. Huey and Miss Olivia have houses down the road by the river."
We continued to drive, my car crunching along the gravel road, and had yet to catch sight of Huey's or Miss Olivia's.
"Good grief! How many acres do they own?"
"Honey, around here we just say enough. But I think it's around ﬁfteen thousand."
"Holy hell!"
"You said it, sister."
We ﬁnally arrived at Huey's house and spotted Rebecca's car, pulling in alongside of it. We were close to the row of boxwoods that served as the wall between Huey, his mother and the rest of the world. That may sound like a bit of braggadocio, but it was true. Once you rounded the long span of English boxwood hedge, time stopped and you found yourself light-years away from the gnawing panics of twenty-ﬁrst-century living. It was not surprising that Huey had created such an oasis. His eighteenth-century gentleman's spirit could never survive without a sanctuary for quiet reﬂection.
I opened the car door and the humidity slammed me so hard it nearly took my breath away.
"Ugh," I said.
"You would think that by eight o'clock the heat would be broken," Rebecca said.
"We'll be all right in a minute," I said.
As predicted, we rounded the hedgerow and the breeze from the Waccamaw washed us in cool waves of Japanese honeysuckle and sweet olive. It was going to be a beautiful night.
I loved coming here and had always thought that Huey's gardens were one of the best-kept secrets in the world. The terrace ﬂoor of ancient rose-colored handmade bricks was laid out in a basket-weave design, held together with a cracking mortar that allowed baby moss to creep through here and there. Around the edges at perfect intervals of twenty feet stood great lead urns planted with decorative grass climbing for heaven and asparagus ferns that dusted the earth. All of it waved in unison to the rhythm of the river's breeze.
Huey was standing by Miss Olivia, who was seated in one of eight wrought-iron chairs that surrounded the heavy glass-top dining table. The relentless sun had faded the magenta-striped cushions in the seats and backs of the chairs, but they were still cool and inviting. There was a centerpiece of pink hydrangea blossoms stuffed in a large cut-glass bowl. On either side of it stood oversized hurricanes, tall enough to ensure the glow of its columned candles.
Off to the side, closer to the house, was another seating area with chairs and glass-topped end tables. Nearby stood the butler's ﬁeld table on which was placed a silver Revere bowl of cracked ice and silver tongs. Crystal tumblers and bottles of white wine in an oversized silver ice bucket waited on a round silver tray. There was bourbon in a decanter and Perrier wrapped in a linen napkin. Byron moved in the sidelines in his starched linen mandarin-collared jacket, coming forward to offer a cheese straw or a napkin or to refresh a drink.
Whatever it was that Miss Olivia was saying, Huey's face was ﬁlled with delight. Their affection for each other was so obviously genuine that anyone would have wanted to be a part of their lives.
It was the kind of freeze-frame you found in a magazine feature article on old money and how the vastly rich really passed their time. Dressed for the evening and drinks with mother at dusk. The music of water and ﬂoral air gently moving the landscape back and forth in a dance of grace. Delicious bits served on silver trays to whet the appetite for the beautiful dinner that was sure to follow.
Rebecca was excited. Huey spotted us and waved. I couldn't wait to walk on the Valentine stage and take up my part.
"This is like a movie," Rebecca whispered to me as we walked toward them.
"Yep. It's Cary Grant and Bette Davis all over again, except that Cary's a plump old bird."
Rebecca giggled and I made a guilty face.
"Hello, Mr. Valentine! Miss Olivia!" I said. "What a perfect night!"
"Don't you look fabulous? As always . . ." Huey said to me, and then to Rebecca he said, "Miss Rebecca! You shame my rose garden! Look at you! Come join us!"
Byron had already poured a Perrier for me and offered the goblet from his small cocktail tray. Even the tray had a linen doily with lace edges, starched within an inch of its life.
"Good evening, Miss Abigail," he said and arched his eyebrow in familiarity. I was sure he plucked them. They were too perfect.
"Byron," I said, nodding my head in greeting. "Thank you."
"And what can I get for this lovely young lady?"
"A glass of white wine would be nice," Rebecca said.
"Tonight we're pouring an extraordinary ninety-six Louis Jadot, Meursault and a three-ninety-nine California char-doe-naay that I wouldn't serve trailer trash. Does the lady have a preference?" His eyebrows began to undulate as he waited for Rebecca to respond.
Rebecca didn't know whether to be horriﬁed or entertained, so I answered for her.
"I think the Meursault will do the trick. And Byron?"
"Hmmm? Oh!" He reached in his pocket and handed Rebecca the keys to her car. "Good as new!"
"Thanks!" Rebecca said.
"Where on earth did you get the swill?"
"Miss Olivia bought a case at Sam's Club the last time she took off and drove herself to Charleston. It would destroy her not to offer it."
"Save it for the next opening---we can make sangria," Rebecca said.
Before turning, Bryon waved his hand behind his head and then pointed his ﬁnger in Rebecca's direction. "Sangria! Oh, I love it. It's so eighties! Isn't she the clever one?"
"He's a little---I mean don't you think he's . . ." Rebecca said.
"Over the top? Of course he is! But he's hilarious and I'm just used to him, that's all. His squeal is a little bit addictive."
"What do I do about the bill for my car?"
"Don't worry. Huey will twist it out of you."
Rebecca smiled and shook her head.
We sat with Miss Olivia. Huey ﬁnally took a chair and we began to talk about everything except Rebecca and how she lost her home and children.
"We had a tourist nearly drop dead today in the big house," Miss Olivia said. "Screamed bloody murder and passed out. Some woman from Pennsylvania. They said she looked like a giant halibut, just ﬂopped on the ﬂoor! EMS came and everything!"
"Yet another sighting," Huey said, as droll as Oscar Wilde.
"Sighting of who?" Rebecca said.
"Alice," I said, "the ghost of Alice Flagg. She's always coming around, or so they say. She used to take music lessons here in the big house from Miss Olivia's great-grand-something or other. I guess she feels at home here."
"Who is Alice Flagg?" Rebecca said.
"Oh, my dear!" Miss Olivia said, as though Rebecca had spent the most of her life on the moon. "You've never heard of Alice Flagg? Why, it's the most romantic story in the world!"
"Sentimental sop, if you ask me," Huey said. "I wish she'd ﬁnd that ring and get her misery moving to the light."
"What in the world are you talking about?" Rebecca was either politely stonewalling us, getting down to the dirt, or she had a fascination with the other side.
"Well," said Miss Olivia, moving closer to Rebecca, fully ready to reveal the goods on Alice, "she was a young woman in love with a fellow from the wrong side of the tracks..."
"He was the son of a merchant---not a rag picker, Mother."
"Don't interrupt me, son, or I'll go get a switch! Anyway, as I was saying, her family wanted her to marry the son of another plantation owner so they could join the properties."
"It's always about money," I said and gave Huey a little jab in the ribs.
"Quite," he said.
Miss Olivia cut her eyes at us and continued. "Well, the story goes that she took this young man's ring, caught a terrible fever and had to be brought home from school to recuperate. She was very ill and her brother spotted the ring around her neck on a chain or a ribbon or some such thing that kept it near her heart. He snatched it away and threw it in the Waccamaw, and Alice has been coming back ever since, looking for her ring. Isn't that the saddest story in the world?"
Huey played four violins with his ﬁngers and Miss Olivia reached over and slapped his hand. Huey and I smiled along with Miss Olivia, but Rebecca was somber.
"What's wrong, honey?" I said.
"It's not the saddest story in the world. Mine's worse, don't you think?"
By this time, Rebecca was working on her third glass of wine, Miss Olivia had knocked back her third sherry and Huey had drained his third bourbon. The tide turned and the elephant was on the table for inspection.
"How old are your children?" Huey asked.
"My daughter, Samantha, is almost ﬁfteen and my son, Evan, is almost thirteen."
"And they're in camp in Maine?" I said.
"Yes. Sami's at Arcadia and Evan's at Pinehurst. The camps are very close to each other. They've been going for years."
Rebecca's voice became quiet, and she looked at the river like she might like to be in it, drifting along with its current to a better life in a faraway place. Either I was going to speak now or let it go for another night. You know me. I spoke.
"Who was the judge?" I said.
"Campbell. Avery Campbell," Rebecca said. "Look, I really don't want to sit up here and monopolize the night talking about my problems. There's nothing to be done about it anyway."
"Dear," Miss Olivia said and reached out to Rebecca and covered her hand with her own, "I just don't understand. Why in the world would a judge allow this to happen?"
"Because it was what my children wanted," Rebecca said. "They wanted to live with their father."
"And because he's a lazy judge who prefers a clean desk over a long hearing. Let me explain it, Rebecca," I said. "Miss Olivia? I know this is going to sound crazy, but here it is. In this state of ours a child can be heard by the courts at age thirteen."
"Thirteen! That's outrageous!" Huey said. "When I was thirteen I didn't know what socks to wear!"
"Well, sometimes the law protects children and sometimes it doesn't. The closer the child is to eighteen, the more the court will listen to their preference for custodial parent. All Rebecca's husband would have had to do was to get the children to sign papers saying why they wanted to live with their father and why they didn't want to live with Rebecca. The stronger their complaint, the more the court listens. Especially if both children express a desire for one parent over the other---well, that's how it is."
"That's horrible," Miss Olivia said.
"And there was a statement from the children's guidance counselor saying that the children constantly complained to her about their home life. About me, basically."
"Oh great. The larger problem is that it should be against the law for one spouse to alienate the children from the other."
"There's a law?" Rebecca said. Her face drained of all color and I thought she might faint.
"I wish it was, Rebecca. It's called parental alienation--- it's a syndrome. Didn't your attorney go over that with you?"
"No. No, he didn't."
I could see where this was headed, and I decided to just ask a few hard questions, intending then to change the subject so that Rebecca didn't feel like she was getting raked over the coals.
"Who did you use?" I asked.
"Jeff Mahoney," she said. "He lives down the street from our---I mean---where I used to live. He's extremely nice. He usually does wills and estates, but he offered to handle this for me and I trusted him, so I said yes. Nat was furious with me and said we were just wasting money. He said I didn't even need a lawyer."
"I'll bet," I said and winced. "Who did he use?" I was afraid to ask, knowing he had probably used a pit bull.
"Harry Albright," she said. "Do you know him?"
I could feel bile rising in my throat. Harry Albright should have been disbarred years ago. He was totally unethical and always in the headlines, billed more phony hours than anyone, was on his fourth wife and I had always suspected that he drank. He probably kicked his dog, if he had one.
"Yeah, I know him," I said, as nonchalantly as I could master.
"Dinner is served!" Byron announced in his theatrical voice.
Huey got up to help Miss Olivia to her feet. Rebecca and I would follow them into the dining room, but I held back for a few moments to ask Rebecca a few other questions.
"Rebecca? Wait. Listen, what did he have on you? I mean, is there any reason that the courts would have accepted you as unﬁt?"
"Nat said I was mentally unstable."
"Are you?"
"I was ﬁne until I found out he wanted my house and children and then you can bet the ranch that I went crazy!"
"Of course. Who wouldn't? But did you have an affair or do drugs or drink too much?"
"Heavens no! I taught Sunday School for goodness sake!"
"Then what? What did he have on you?"
"He said I was negligent. That the children had to wait too long for me to pick them up from school. And that I was impossible to please---that I nagged the children and made them depressed."
"Is that true?"
"Sometimes. Look, I'm not perfect, but I was a good mother. A good mother."
I believed her. Somehow we got through dinner and got through it without any more conversation about Nat, the children and the divorce. But I was uneasy. I smelled a large male skunk, maybe two.
Five
s
ALL through the night, the air in my bedroom nearly crackled with my annoyance. It was as though my body was producing its own heat lightning, ﬂashes of warmth and the heavy stillness that followed. The hours passed as I tangled and smoothed out my sheets. The ceiling fan clicked, feeding my mood with each rotation. The pillows radiated under my neck; the hair at the nape of my neck was damp with perspiration, and no matter how I rearranged and replumped the pillows, I couldn't get comfortable. I was having a rough night.
If Rebecca's situation was what I thought it was, my fury was going to torment me into the next century if I couldn't do something about it. And why? Why did I care? I thought about it for a while. What had I been doing with my life? Becoming more and more useless to anyone, that's what. Hedonistic. Self-serving. In perpetual denial. Cowardly. What happens to a woman with inﬁnite blessings---good health, plenty of resources, a reasonably sharp mind, decent looks---what happens when she drops off the face of the earth to her entire past and begins again in a tiny magical kingdom like Pawleys with no demands on her time other than the ones she arranges herself? When she has no responsibilities other than to feed herself, dress herself, be witty and pleasant and pretend that her friendship with an aging gay man who owns a gallery is enough to sustain her? When she has no challenges other than improving her handicap?
I'll tell you what happens. She gets bitter. Dull. She smolders in her self-inﬂicted pit of insigniﬁcance. Smiles for the outside world and is miserable inside---that's what she is. A phony. And then one day, along comes another dumb-ass like herself and she sees herself in the dumb-ass's face. She's not Narcissus admiring her own reﬂection in the water. No, the recognition she has ﬁlls her with self-loathing, and she is compelled to save the other from drowning.
Rebecca was unaware of the nearly insurmountable despair that would follow her to the end of her days if she allowed herself to comply with her expulsion from her home and her children's lives. It was the only thing about which I was certain. Life has a way of wrenching your heart. No one escapes trials. Rebecca didn't understand the weight of accepting this wretched fate imposed on her and that it could ruin her soul beyond recognition.
Indeed, these days I hardly recognized myself.
Rebecca was a nice woman---I was pretty sure about that. Her husband was a philandering, lying, abusive, manipulative, asshole---I was pretty sure about that too. But her timidity and insecurities were going to leave her in extraordinary pain for the rest of her life because nobody, including her, had been brave enough, and certainly not noble enough, to see the truth.
A man wants a divorce? Big deal. It happened every day of the week. I say, go have your divorce, but for the love of God please try and be a gentleman about it? Please? Don't manipulate the children like a puppet master and turn them against their own mother. Don't make them sign papers and scoot them off to camp without the mother even knowing what transpired.
I called Rebecca the next morning at eight o'clock, which seemed to be the earliest you could call someone when you wanted to chat over mounting an offensive.
"Hey! You up?" "Yeah, I was just getting ready to go walk on the
beach." "Want company?" Rebecca paused and then said, "Sure. Why not?" "I'll be there in ten." I drove to Litchﬁeld thinking about my own heavy
rocks in my sack. That was the worst feature of getting involved with Rebecca's mess. Dealing with hers might force me to face mine. I wanted to avoid that in the worst possible way. Whenever I felt a little introspection coming on, I just whacked thousands of tennis balls and golf balls, trying to forget.
My cell phone rang. It was Huey. "Morning! Where are you?" "Actually, I'm on the way to Rebecca's to take a walk on
the beach. Want to join us?" "Me? Exercise? Do you want me to ruin my reputation?
No, but thank you. Listen. Do you have a moment?" "Just about one. I'm pulling into Litchﬁeld right now." "Well, Abigail. I've been up all night worrying about
that child. You know we have to do something, don't you?" "Who?" "Well, obviously it's you." "Huey, I was up most of the night as well. I don't want
to get involved in this, this awful business. I'm retired." "It scares you, doesn't it?"
"Hell, no. Nothing could scare me after what I've seen in this world." "Humph. You can say whatever you want, but I think her trouble falls under the headline of man's inhumanity to man." "When a couple wants out of a marriage, they can do terrible things to each other." "When you know someone's being hoodwinked, you are just as guilty if you don't say something about it."
"We'll see. I don't have enough information yet, Huey. And it's not like she's asked us for help. If anything, our little questions annoy the daylights out of her."
"I suppose. You coming in this morning?" I knew what that meant. "Want a Coke?" "And a sausage biscuit?" "I'll see you around ten." "You're an angel, Abigail. An absolute angel." I didn't feel like an angel at all as I pulled into the park
ing lot of Rebecca's building and got out. She was sitting
on the bottom step, tying her sneakers. "Let's go," she said. "Okay." We crossed the dunes, and as always the spectacular
sight of the wide and long stretch of beach made my heartbeat quicken. The blue sky was clear with the tiniest shreds of white clouds stretching out just above the horizon. Flocks of seagulls ﬂew in formation overhead, and scattered pelicans slowly circled and then dive-bombed into the waters, catching sushi. Hundreds of little sandpipers darted to the edge of the shore, digging for periwinkles, and scurried away on the arrival of each foamy wave. The water sparkled under the rising sun and the salt-scented eastern breeze blew our hair away from our faces.
We began to walk in earnest and talked now and then about safe topics---the day, the view and so on. She told me about Claudia Kelly, her plastic surgeon friend from Atlanta. This led us to discuss the many sins of the media and how it hyped public opinion that women over forty were ﬁnished unless they got a surgical overhaul.
"The number one reason men leave their wives is for a younger woman."
"How come you know so much about divorce?"
It seemed like the moment to give her some background information on myself, hoping she would feel more comfortable to talk about her disaster.
"I'm an attorney," I said. "I was a senior partner in the largest matrimonial practice in South Carolina. Until I quit."
"Oh? Why did you quit?"
I stopped, leaned to put my hands on my knees and breathed deeply. Rebecca stopped too, waiting for me to answer. If I thought I had the right to grill her about her private life, then was she not entitled to the same privilege? I considered it and then decided I would tell her.
"My son died. My husband died two years later. I needed to reorder my life. It was a lot to take. It still is."
"Oh! My god, Abigail! I am so, so sorry. Can I ask what happened?"
"Sure. My husband went into the hospital for knee replacement surgery. When he was in college, he played football for Carolina and tore up his knees so many times that he had to...Well, we're all familiar with the agony and the ecstasy and so forth. Anyway, he was too heavy, and while he was under the anesthesia, he had a heart attack. They couldn't revive him. He was only forty-seven."
"Good Lord! That's awful! And your son?"
"Car accident. He was twenty. That's the worst. Yeah. Ashley was just twenty. My beautiful boy. My only child."
I choked up and struggled to regain my composure.
Rebecca didn't know what to say. What could she say?
Only what everyone usually managed to sputter...
"Oh, Abigail! I am so sorry!"
"Yeah, well, thanks. That's the story. I can't stand around and see people I like be taken advantage of. It's my perpetual lawyer gene or something. I'd give anything to have my husband and son back. Anything. So I'm thinking that if I can't have mine, maybe I can at least see if it's possible to do something about what's happened to you. That's why I have been asking so many questions, I guess. Besides that, I guess Huey and I probably are a couple of busybodies."
I started walking again. Rebecca followed, working to keep up pace. I took a number of deep breaths. I hated to talk about Ashley. If I just kept the story to myself, if I didn't say the words, then maybe it wasn't true. Maybe it had not all really happened. Maybe Ashley was home with John, watching a ball game. Maybe I was just on vacation at Pawleys for a few weeks or months, in some kind of limbo that would keep me from the reality of my horror. Stolen lives. Death. So ﬁnal and unbelievable that it was impossible to accept. If I didn't look at it, think about it, talk about it...I could stay sane. I worried that if I lingered around it too much, I might be in danger of something happening to me. Something just as ﬁnal, to relieve my pain.
Over the last three years, there had been so many winter nights at Pawleys when, surrounded by darkened houses, I would go to the dunes in my bathrobe, stand under the milky moon, under the wild stark sky of deep night, and scream like an animal until my throat was raw. There was no one to hear me over the roar of the waves and no one to stop me. I had begged God to help me, with no response. I begged night after night until I came to understand that what had been taken from me was permanent and there was nothing to be done about it.
It was my therapy. If the remembering in the day was too hard, I could promise myself the reward of a night of releasing screams. I ﬁnally realized that it was how I spent the rest of my life that mattered now. You can't bring back the dead---unless it's Alice Flagg. The days and nights that numbered the rest of my life were laid out before me like steppingstones, a path to where? More sorrow? It didn't matter I had to just keep going. All those realizations put on a plate in front of me to inspect, and I believed they were true, I still carried unbearable sorrow. Truth did not heal, and to date, neither did time.
Rebecca had been done a bad turn but at least her family was still alive.
So I walked on, my pace harder and my feet sinking deeper with each step. My breathing was uneven, and I knew I was on the edge of falling apart in broad daylight, right there on the beach. If I did, there was no reason for her to have any faith in me or my ability to help. I felt her hand on my arm and I slowed down and stopped, looking down at my sneakers. One of them was untied and I knelt to retie it.
"Abigail?"
"What?"
"I don't think you're a busybody. Or Huey."
"Thanks."
The ocean was at half tide and rising. Soon there would not be enough beach for us to walk. If I didn't move, my running shoes would be soaked in salt water by the small but threatening waves that raced ahead of the tide. Warnings. I had ignored too many all my life. I stood to face Rebecca.
"Let's go get Huey his Cokes and sausage biscuits."
"Okay."
I knew she thought I was a little manic. First, I had called to see if she wanted a walking buddy, and within minutes of beginning that walk I had begun to skirt that dangerous part of my psyche. My mood changed so dramatically that I frightened myself. It was time to put my monsters back in their closet. No one wanted to see them.
I waited while she changed clothes, and then she followed me to Sam's Corner. I ordered six bottled Cokes and four sausage biscuits---one for her, two for Huey and one for myself.
I followed her to the gallery. Just the short distance from the car to inside where Huey waited was enough to break a sweat. In the span of time it took us to drive from the beach to Huey's, the temperature and humidity climbed so much that the thick air was wet like a sauna. If I had known the name of the person who invented air-conditioning, I would have sent the genius the most outrageous and spectacular orchid in captivity.
"Huey? Breakfast is here!"
"Bless you! How are we this gloriously tropical morn?"
"Practically growing moss under my ﬁngernails," I said. "Other than that, I'm great." I opened the bag and Huey opened the Cokes.
"Morning, Huey," Rebecca said.
"Morning, sweetheart." He handed her a Coke, and she said, "No, thanks. Reﬁned sugar. But thanks."
Huey clutched his heart and gasped. "Mah dee-ah! Surely you are merely lacking in understanding of what food of the Gods truly means! Besides, you're too skinny."
"I even got one for myself," I said when I saw Rebecca's face pleading for a bailout. "Eat."
"Oh, ﬁne," Rebecca said. "Fine."
Rebecca ate in silence, picking up errant crumbs with the tip of her unmanicured ﬁngers and depositing them back on the waxed-paper wrappers. Huey and I chatted about the inane---how delicious dinner had been the previous night, how well Miss Olivia seemed and once again about how successful the opening had been. I watched Rebecca from the corner of my eye. She was having trouble swallowing, but then that had always been the problem with biscuits and sausage. Thick, hot, crusted dough and a greasy, tough sausage patty---delicious, but a difﬁcult combination to work through, even when life was perfect. Poor Rebecca, I thought as Huey went on and on about the daily grind of running a chic art gallery. She took a sip of her Coke, and Huey stopped her.
"Rebecca? Co-Colas are intended to be chugged, not sipped like Madeira. Ah, Lord! When I was a young rascal, my father would pile me in the car and take me to Marlow's store. Now it's Frank's Restaurant. And in those days, it was really something. Marlow's had a great red cooler ﬁlled with freezing-cold bottles, all hung inside by their necks, like the doomed, on this little metal track. The bottom of the cooler was ﬁlled with ice water. Anyway, Mr. Marlow would say to my father, I see you've come for your Coke! He would push back the top, slide two bottles along the track, liberate them and pop the tops with the church key he kept attached to the cooler with a piece of string. My daddy would throw back his head and drain the Coke without a breath."
"Chugging anything is considered an art form by most Southern gentlemen," I said.
Rebecca giggled and continued picking up bits of crust and biscuit. Then she wiped her hands, picked up her bottle and took two large swigs. "Satisﬁed?" she said.
"It's a start," I said. "Frankly, except for these early-morning chugalug fests, I usually have mine in a glass over ice. My mother would roll over in her grave if she could see me consume anything straight from a bottle. Historically, Southern ladies don't do this kind of thing."
"Well, Miss Abigail, I'll have you know that this little bottle has more than a footnote in history. Did you know it was invented in 1915? It was made this way for several seriously artistic reasons. First, the grooves on the sides are supposed to resemble a cacao pod. And its color..."
"Get comfortable, honey," I said to Rebecca, well within Huey's hearing. "His sermons can go on for days."
"Shush!" Huey said, mildly irritated. "Its color was meant to enhance the brownish liquid to make it appear black like coffee, thereby broadening the market appeal to adults and children alike."
"Most days I prefer an espresso," I said, "but when it's this hot..."
"It becomes the perfect coffee substitute!" Huey said, beaming. "I must say, though, there is no substitute for how the bottle feels. I mean, seriously, ladies, would you prefer this lovely little perfectly balanced jewel against your lips, or one of those nasty ragged plastic bottles?"
"Well, that is a good poi---"
"It's rhetorical, dear," I said to Rebecca and rolled my eyes. Honestly! Sometimes she was exasperating. All that naivete? "Yes, Huey darling, it's like drinking from Stueben."
"Oh, go kiss a goat's fanny," Huey said. He blushed and turned to Rebecca. "Forgive me, Rebecca, but sometimes our Miss Thurmond gets up on the wrong side of her duvet."
"Sorry."
Huey puffed himself up. "That's not the issue. The issue is chicken walking."
"What? What's that?" Rebecca was mystiﬁed once more.
One more puff and he said, "Chicken walking is what hens do in a chicken yard---they peck around and around. That's what we're doing here. I've known Abigail Thurmond long enough to know when she's upset. So, before the entire morning slips into the hands of the Lily Pulitzered decorators searching for the perfect painting to match a divine blue and yellow plaid couch, may we please---just us three---may we have a word about Rebecca's situation?"
"What is there to say?" Rebecca said, shifting her weight and wrapping her arms around herself.
"I could make a phone call," I said, wondering again if I really wanted to get involved, much in the same way a diver changes his mind in a midair jackknife.
"What possible good could a phone call do?" Rebecca said.
I drained my Coke and put it on the counter. "Huey? I sure could go for another one of these. Why don't you be a sweetheart and go back to Sam's. Buy every cold one they've got. Rebecca and I can watch the store and then we can chat alone---attorney/client privilege, right?"
Huey raised himself from the bar stool where we all sat in the framing area and made one of his campy departure speechettes.
"You are quite correct," Huey said. "The ﬁne details are none of my beeswax. It's blazing hot and it's best to keep consuming liquids. I shall return in two shakes of a lamb's tail with enough hydration to fortify us for the day!"
We watched Huey leave and shook our heads, smiling at each other as the door closed behind him. Huey's dramatic craziness was crazy-like-a-fox craziness. He had seen Rebecca ﬂinch when I offered to make the phone call. So had I. I hadn't even said who it was I intended to contact, or what they did. Still, she had gripped her hands on her bare arms so tightly that white spots immediately appeared where her ﬁngers pressed her ﬂesh.
But Huey and I had made careers from dealing with people. His typical client was a little insecure about the art world and just wanted to be sure they were investing their money wisely. My clients ran the entire gamut. In any case, Huey knew that if he lightened the mood, ducked out for a moment and left Rebecca in my hands, I would begin the process gently, letting Rebecca set the pace. I would not prod her any further than she wanted to go. On a curious note, this was a ﬁrst for me. Usually the client sought me out. Here I was practically soliciting her business.
"So? Who are you thinking of calling?" she said. "Here, give me that."
She took the wrappers and napkins, put them all in the bag to toss away, squirted the counter with Windex and began wiping up the nonexistent remains with nervous anticipation of what I was about to suggest.
"Sherlock Holmes," I said.
"Be serious."
"I used to know a guy who's a PI---private investigator---who's a regular Sherlock Holmes. I used him all the time. He owes me one. Actually, he owes me a lot. He's fabulous."
"What would he do?"
"Follow your estranged husband around for a few days, take pictures if there's anything interesting going on, then report back to me. If there's something ﬁshy, you'll know it. You can do what you want with the information. You can turn the tables on your rat, Nat."
"What if he gets caught? What if Nat shoots him? Nat carries a handgun."
"Nice of you to mention that." Jesus, I thought, what else has she got up her sleeve? "Look, Everett Presson can handle himself. If he gets caught, he knows what to do. But just so you know, he's never been caught."
"I don't know...I can't imagine Nat is up to something like another woman or something. I mean, he's just not like that."
"Yeah, that's what Jack Welch's wife said, and Hillary Clinton, and Ivana Trump---honey, it's a long list. You don't think men cat around?"
"No. No, I know they do, it's just that I would've known it. At least I think I would have." Her voice trailed off as she began searching her memory.
"Sure."
Rebecca took a deep breath. I could read her mind. She didn't want to know what was really happening and she wanted to know what was happening. In a way, I didn't blame her.
"Go ahead then. Call your friend, this Everett Presson person, this private whatever he is. Is he going to charge us a lot of money?"
"Zero. I told you. He owes me."
"Okay. Abigail? Thanks. I mean, I appreciate your advice. Maybe you're right, I don't know. It's just that--- well, let's not talk about this anymore unless something turns up, okay?"
I understood. Constant facing of the demon that's eating you alive is just too much to bear. Especially when the demon might be you.
Six
s
IT was six in the morning, and once again I was staring at the ceiling fan. There was too much I didn't know about Rebecca's husband, and the more I thought about it, I knew I had to talk to Rebecca again before I unleashed Everett Presson to her husband's shadows. Like, for starters, I didn't even know what the lout did for a living. We'd had the chat at Huey's, and the moment he returned I'd left for a hair appointment. That just goes to show how reluctant I was to immerse myself in this.
I kicked back the bedcovers, washed my face and made coffee, taking it out to the porch to watch the ocean for a while. I settled myself in one of the Kennedy rockers and rocked. I wondered what could make a woman so passive, so meek that she wouldn't ﬁght back when something like this happened to her. It didn't quite add up in my book, but then I wasn't Rebecca. I would have killed anyone with my bare hands who tried to touch my son, much less take him away from me. But I had never had the chance for that ﬁght, and I had lost him anyway.
I got up to reﬁll my cup, stopped at the porch rail and looked out at the horizon. When the world was so ﬁlled with trouble, how could the day be this magniﬁcent, this stunningly beautiful? Everything before me was so perfect it could have been the location for an ad for the department of tourism. The soft dunes were so fragile, one after another, springing plumages of feathered sea oats from the crowns of their heads. Buttercups, black-eyed susans and clumps of yellow-green grasses crept around the bottoms of them, happy to live on droplets of water during dry spells and growing rampant after heavy rains.
Beyond them, for as far as I could see, was the sparkling water of the Atlantic---another day dawning, birds repeating the hunt for food today as they surely would tomorrow. Everything about the birds and the plants was designed not only for their survival but for them to thrive. Maybe that was one reason I loved Pawleys Island so much. Eternity seemed to be in sight but slightly out of my grasp. Maybe it was the challenge to bring them together that convinced me Pawleys was the only place where my imagination and my soul could live in sync with nature's plan.
I wondered what Rebecca's real story was. Battered women---whether it was physical or emotional or both--- sometimes they believed they deserved the punishment. But what woman could believe she deserved to lose her children?
I reﬁlled my mug, found a little pad of paper and a pen and decided to stroll down the beach, making a list of questions for Rebecca. The ﬁrst thing Everett would want to know was where to ﬁnd Nat. I needed the address of his ofﬁce, their home, his usual haunts and so forth. If she could give me his license plate number, that would be helpful. I could already envision her giving me the information but with reluctance. She didn't seem frightened of Nat. It wasn't that. The more I thought about it, her complacency made no sense. In fact, it seemed slightly grotesque. But I decided that my own experience was coloring my judgment and that I had to wait until the facts came in.
I decided to go by the gallery to bring them Cokes, or Co-Colas, as Huey said. So two sacks in hand, I pushed open the door at ten-thirty and found Huey and Rebecca actually working. Rebecca was cutting a mat and Huey was writing checks.
This Coke-slash-sausage-biscuit routine was not healthy for anyone, and I knew it. I made a mental note to make some fruit salad for tomorrow.
"Morning all!"
"The sausage angel! My love!" Huey said.
Rebecca giggled and stopped working.
"Sausage angel?" she said and laughed again. "That's some title!"
"Don't mind him, Rebecca. He's just a little cracked, that's all."
Huey took two Cokes and, after counting what was in the bag and pouting at me, only one sausage biscuit. "Are you putting me on a diet?"
"No, baby. I just need you stay healthy for my sake." I smiled at him and he shook his head.
"Women," he said. "Forgive me if I take this to my ofﬁce. I have a pile of checks I want to get out in the morning mail."
"No problem," I said. "Mind if I join you?" I said to Rebecca.
"Of course not!" she said and cleared away her work from the counter.
"So listen," I said, taking a bite of my biscuit, "I need a little bit of information and then I can unleash the hounds."
"Sure," she said.
I asked Rebecca for the information I needed, and she very willingly supplied it. Nat was Nat Simms of Simms Autoworld. The business was started and still very tightly held by Nat's father, Tisdale, although his father had given Nat a letter on his thirtieth birthday granting him a twenty-ﬁve percent ownership. I had indeed seen their television ads all my life. Hi! I'm Tisdale Simms! When you're in the market for a new car... They were horrible. I could still see the old man in his straw hat, squinting at the camera, reciting his lines from an unseen poster and smiling from ear to ear. Navy jacket, white shirt, red tie, khaki pants---it was the Lowcountry good old boy uniform that erased the lines of class and wealth and joined men together. You'd buy a car from a guy who seemed like your best pal, wouldn't you? Apparently a lot of people thought so, because Nathaniel Tisdale Simms and his boy Nat sold more cars than anyone in the entire state of South Carolina. It also meant they had more money than the Saudis. And while money shouldn't have been an issue, it was. She explained it was her father-in-law who owned the big boat, the mountain house, the beach house, the art collection. Nat's partnership in his daddy's business was on paper only and paid no dividends. I tucked that information away in the back of my mind.
I just listened to her, nodded my head, took a few notes and a few bites of breakfast and thought, my, oh my, what an interesting can of worms am I about to open.
I couldn't wait to call Everett Presson, which I did as soon as I got back to my house on Pawleys. Maybe I'd even take a drive to Charleston and look for a car for myself. Yes! That might be fun!
"Everett? Hi! It's Abigail Thurmond!"
"Well! As I live and breathe! How the heck are you? Where have you been?"
"Oh, Lord, Everett, it's a long and, I'm afraid, sad story that I'll tell you when I see you. Listen, I'm calling you because I need a favor."
"You just name it! After all you've done for me? Just name it."
I told him about Rebecca and her husband, Nat, and he listened carefully, stopping me now and then to take notes or to clarify things, and at the end he said exactly what I thought.
"This guy's got a girlfriend. I'd bet my Chevy on it."
I told him I agreed and then gave him a little grief about his car. "You still driving a Chevy? Same old nasty clunker? With all the checks I signed to you, you should be driving a giant Benz!"
"Hey, I gotta be low-key, you know. I looked at a Buick last year, but it had too much chrome. Anyway, just give me a few days and I'll report back."
I gave him my home number and said, "Thanks, Everett. I mean it."
"Sure thing."
For the next ten days I ﬁlled my time with a member guest tournament at a golf club in North Myrtle Beach, placing fourth. I could not have cared less, but the women I played with were all out of sorts.
"Hey! We won a little nut dish, didn't we?"
The glare of their bitterness was so intense that I slipped away as soon as I could. Honestly, some people took this golf business just way too seriously for me. I picked up my dry cleaning, the New York Times that was saved for me at Litchﬁeld Books and decided to go home. At the last moment, I decided to swing into the Bi-Lo and see what I could make for dinner that wouldn't require too much effort.
I was pushing my cart by the hermetically sealed boneless, skinless chicken breasts when I felt a tap on my shoul
der. It was Rebecca.
"How was your tournament?"
"We placed fourth, which I thought was pretty darn good, considering it was ninety-ﬁve in the shade," I said. "You cooking tonight?"
"Yeah, Huey decided to close early, so I thought I would just grab something easy. What are you up to?"
"The same. I'm hitting the sack early tonight. I'm exhausted. Too much sun."
"No word, huh?"
"You mean from Everett?" She nodded, and I said, "No, but as soon as I hear anything, I'll call you right away."
"Okay."
Well, at least she was curious.
Several days later I found a day-old message in my voice mail from Everett.
"Call me," he said. "I've got lots of nice pictures . . ."
It was after seven. I dialed him as fast as I could, kicking myself that I hadn't given him my cell number (but it didn't work half the time anyway) and cursing Bell South for their lousy voice mail service.
"Everett? Everett? Hey, it's me, Abigail! Sorry to call you after ﬁve..."
"No problem. When are you coming to Charleston? Or Mount Pleasant?"
"I can be there tomorrow morning if you'd like me to."
"I've got something in the morning, but how about we meet at Jackson Hole for an early lunch? It's on Shem Creek. Do you know it?"
"Hole is the operative word. But they have great crab cakes. Eleven thirty?"
The hour was ﬁne with him, and I knew that if I asked him what kind of pictures he had, he wouldn't want to tell me. Everett would rather have the pleasure of seeing the shock on my face and I could certainly give him that. He deserved it.
In general, the public didn't fully appreciate how dangerous private investigator work was. Contrary to what I'd told Rebecca, Everett had been in more than one rumble with one angry husband or another, and his nose had been broken so many times it was sort of a scrapbook of his adventures. Each bump and turn it took was a reminder of another battle weathered and won. But he was still the best in the business because he took those risks and always got results.
I crawled into my Pawleys Island hammock---what other kind would I own?---and began reading the Week in Review section of the Times. The only thing I could focus on was the political cartoons, which perfectly rendered the climate. It was another election year and the mudslinging was well under way.
Maybe it was just me, but the political world that had once fascinated me now just left me shaking my head wondering how America, who had fed, sheltered and defended the masses, had arrived at a place of such low esteem to the rest of the world. Clearly, part of it was fanatical religious ideology and the exported vulgarities of our culture. I mean, if I had never known an American and I watched a few episodes of Sex and the City or even the old reruns of Dallas, I would think Americans were totally immoral. Even though those shows were designed to parody our lives, if I didn't know better, I might believe what my eyes saw on the television or movie screen.
Everything was perception. Even from my hammock on Pawleys Island, this little spot in the Atlantic Ocean, I could smell a trace of disdain from across the water. But of course, I knew that was in my own head because I was only wondering about myself and how I would stand up to scrutiny. I, who had made a living of dissecting the lives of others, would wither, dry up and evaporate under public examination. Worse, I had become a crone, stirring the pot of Macbeth. How in the hell had I let that happen?
With the heel of my foot, I pushed back from the banister to make the hammock swing gently back and forth until I was so drowsy that I knew if I didn't get up then, I would wake up with rope marks all over my body. I stood up from the hammock as it came to its resting position and looked out over the dunes. It was low tide and the beach was illuminated by the stars overhead. There in silhouette I saw the form of a man in a coat. He was all gray. My heart lurched as my ﬁrst thought was, who in the world was on the beach alone at that hour in an overcoat in late July? When I looked back again, he had vanished. The Gray Man? Ridiculous.
In the morning I thought about the Gray Man again. He was our local insurance adjuster of sorts, except that he had been dead for over a hundred years. No matter. The story goes that he was returning on horseback from the big war (he was wearing gray, after all!) to his ﬁancée's home on Pawleys. It was raining to beat the band. The horse fell in a muddy hole, the Gray Man went ﬂying and he died as a result of his injuries. I don't know what happened to the horse, but apparently he got up dead and went to her house and rapped on her windows. She saw him waving frantically to leave the island. She did leave with her father, and the house was spared from the storm. So if there's a storm coming and you see him, your house will survive intact.
I saw him right there that night. It wasn't my imagination. I was sure of that. But there was no hurricane in the forecast other than some piddling tropical depression off Florida's coast. The only real hurricane was the one we were about to cook up for Rebecca.
On the drive to Mount Pleasant, I thought about calling Huey and then decided against it. I would call him after I met with Everett. I listened to the weather reports and they were predicting afternoon thunderstorms. So what else was new? Every morning the temperature climbed with the humidity, and when Mother Nature couldn't stand it anymore the skies grew dark, lightning crackled and it rained like the end of the world. Around eight, the sun would appear for a few minutes until it began to slip away. I loved that hour, and nowhere was it more lovely than at Huey's. I would call him to see if he wanted to have dinner. I would tell him my alleged Gray Man story, and he could update me on the ghost of Alice Flagg. We would talk about the supernatural world that Huey believed in so strongly, and I would argue that it was all nonsense. But I really didn't want to believe that it was. If there was nothing to the Gray Man or Alice Flagg, then where were Ashley and John? No. I couldn't vouch for Alice, but I had seen the Gray Man with my own eyes.
Seven
s
WHEN I walked into Jackson Hole, it took my eyes a few moments to adjust. The sun, catching the edges of the thousands of beer cans lining the ledge around the ceiling of the area, was throwing beams of corneal abrasion around like a Las Vegas light show. I had forgotten how delightfully tacky the place was, and I took a deep breath, anticipating a relaxed lunch.
Someone named Linda, wearing a diamond as big as a judge's gavel, greeted me and showed me to the table. Things must be good in the cheap seafood restaurant world, I thought.
"Here we are," she said. "I hope you enjoy your lunch."
I could never ﬁgure out why these people who worked in all these restaurants that littered the shores of Shem Creek seemed so happy. If I had been forced to spend my days in a dump like Jackson Hole, I would have been the Zoloft queen. But what did I know? Maybe all the tourists were serious tippers, but I doubted that.
"Thanks," I said, and before sitting down I gave Everett a huge hug. "How are you, Everett?"
There was Everett in khaki shorts and a knit shirt, and I had overdressed in a black linen dress. Was it my fault the dress codes of the world had fallen to something a notch above pajamas? But I realized I was something of an old fart so I brightened up to match his enthusiasm.
Everett was just bubbling over and couldn't wait to show me what he had. "How am I? Great! You look fabulous! So tell me what's going on with you? Where have you been?"
"Everett? I'm gonna give you the Cliffs Notes version of my horrendous story, and then we are going to move on to other more pleasant topics." I took Everett through the chain of death, and he was completely surprised and somber.
"Good Lord, Abigail, I wouldn't wish any of that on my worst enemy. I am so damn sorry."
"Thanks. I know. But I'm okay, really---I mean, as well as anyone would be in my shoes. What can you do? Life goes on, right?"
"Yeah, I guess, but man oh man, that is too much."
"It is exactly as much as I could stand without losing my mind, and believe me, there are still moments when, if I think about it all too much, I might still go insane. That's why it's good for me to get busy. So tell me what you found."
"Okay, her name is Charlene Johnson," he said, handing me a manila envelope. "And guess what? She works for Nat in his daddy's business. Isn't that a coincidence?"
"Bloody convenient too. Tsk, tsk. Why does it always happen in the workplace?" I opened the envelope and removed two folders. The ﬁrst one held a stack of eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs. I began ﬂipping through them. First there was a picture of them leaving the Bank of South Carolina on Meeting Street and another of them using an ATM machine at the Bank of America on Savannah Highway. Then there were pictures of them at Community Firstbank and Washington Mutual, and all I could think was, gee, they sure do go to the bank a lot. Not very romantic. At the bottom of the stack were a few pictures of them coming and going from the cosmetic surgery center on Calhoun Street. What was that about? Well, it looked to me like Charlene was just a regular girl in the ﬁrst photograph but in the last one she had become Jessica Rabbit. Poor thing. Who would ever take her seriously?
I opened the other folder. They were grainy and some were slightly out of focus, but one thing was obvious. Nat Simms knew Charlene Johnson in the biblical sense, and we're talking in detail.
"How did you get this picture of them?"
"There's a huge live oak across the street. I just shinnied up the trunk and positioned myself with my zoom lens..."
Before I could stop myself I said, "Looks like Nat positioned his zoom as well."
Everett burst out laughing and I turned a thousand shades of red. "Abigail!"
"Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! I just couldn't resist."
That was the kind of joke I might have made with Huey, but never with someone from my professional life. Maybe I was mellowing after all. I continued to stare at the pictures, one after another, but I kept going back to one of them in the living room of Rebecca's house. They were smoking what looked like a cigarette, but I knew it wasn't a cigarette by the way they handled it.
"Everett? Let me ask you something. In your professional opinion, does this look like they're smoking pot to you?"
"Yep. Absolutely. In fact, I could smell it across the street. I'd bet if I went back and hung around for a few days, I could ﬁgure out where he's getting it or who he's getting it from. I saw them getting high on several occasions, but this was the clearest photograph I had of them actually smoking. You say this guy got custody of their children?"
"For the moment."
"Well, I don't think family court would approve of this, do you?" Everett handed me another folder from his briefcase and grinned widely. "Take a look at this."
I opened the folder and nearly fainted from what I saw. There was Charlene Johnson spanking Nat's bare backside with a hairbrush. He was lying right across her lap. But not to worry, it wasn't like Nat was naked. He was wearing a Clemson football jersey.
"I guess his panties got lost in the shufﬂe somewhere?" I was choking on laughter.
"He's got issues," Everett said.
"Uh, yeah!"
As the young waitress approached I closed the folder as quickly as I could.
"Hi! I'm Gracie and I'll be your server this afternoon. I'd like to just go over the specials with you..."
Gracie was as cute as a bug and she chattered on with so much perkiness as though she could save our eternal souls from the ﬂames of hell by convincing us to order the seafood plat du jour. The more she described the food the wider her eyes became. This was one very dramatic young woman.
"And if you're really hungry, there's the Captain's Platter. That's a dozen sautéed scallops, a dozen shrimp, two deviled crabs and a whole fried ﬂounder. It comes with two sides. Personally, I'd get the red rice and the collard greens and ask for extra hush puppies, but then the fried okra is banging..."
"Whew! Gracie! Too many choices! I'll just have the crab cakes and a side salad. How 'bout you, Everett?"
Everett ordered a fried ﬁsh sandwich with a side of fries. We both ordered iced tea and some crab dip to pick on while we waited for our entrees. The irrepressible Gracie swept away and I pondered youth being wasted on the young for a moment and then checked my watch. How long would lunch take to get here? Knowing I had the evidence to prove Nat was a skunk had left me absolutely ravenous.
Every now and then I would pull out the folder and sneak a look at the pictures. Everett would say, Good, huh? And all I could think about was Nat's ass and the old saying about someone who was cheap---that they were tighter than a gnat's ...Well, you get the drift, I'm sure. Basically, I giggled my way through lunch, pausing every thirty seconds to thank Everett and to sneak another peek.
Cruising back to Pawleys, I fretted over how best to handle the kryptonite in the envelope next to me. Those pictures were so hot I could almost feel them radiating from the passenger seat. Rebecca would probably have hysterical ﬁts when she saw them. It was one thing to think that your husband might, just might be fooling around. It was quite another to hold a photograph in your hands of your husband sprawled across the lap of his mistress, wearing a football jersey and getting his fanny spanked. Naughty dog. And, let's be honest, Nat wasn't just fooling around. He was doing drugs and engaging in what the courts would certainly view as unhealthy behaviors.
I had to consider the location for dropping the bomb. I couldn't do it in the gallery and it didn't seem right to invite her over to my place. I decided to call Huey.
"Huey?"
"Abigail! Where are you?"
"I just passed McClellanville. I had an appointment in Charleston today. Listen, I need your advice."
"Uncle Huey is all ears."
"I've got a stack of pictures in my hot little hands that would take the wind out of Johnny Cochran."
"And I assume that these photographs are of Rebecca's Rat?"
"And his paramour. Huey, I am not kidding, they are so gross and trashy that if Rebecca sees them she is going to die." I knew I shouldn't have said that. It was unprofessional. But it was out of my mouth before I knew it.
"Good Lord." Huey was silent for a few minutes, and during that eternity I sighed for all the world. "What's in them? I mean, what are they doing?"
"Huey, you know I can't tell you that. I shouldn't have said anything to you. You have to promise me you'll keep it to yourself."
"I am a paragon of discretion, Abigail. You have my word."
"Thanks. I just want to know how you think I can handle this in the most sensitive way possible."
"Well? You could always throw them away. I mean, you could just say that your fellow in Charleston didn't turn up anything, couldn't you?"
"I can't do that. I just can't."
"Well, then, go by her apartment and just hand them to her and then leave. How's that?"
"Too cowardly. God, Huey, this whole drama keeps rolling around in my mind. I mean, I only did this because I thought she got duped, not because she came to me begging for help. I honestly think that she thinks if Nat doesn't want to love her anymore, then ﬁne. And I agree with that, but I sure wouldn't give up my home and family unless I was making a fully informed decision. Sometimes being right is the worst thing in the world. She's going to hate me."
"That's ridiculous, Abigail. Rebecca thinks you're the smartest and most elegant woman she's ever met."
"Well, at least she's right about something."
"Abigail! Hubris!"
"Sorry. Joke, joke. But let me make a little prediction. She's going to blame me, Huey. I've seen it happen thousands of times."
"The old shoot the messenger. You know, Abigail. This is rather a sticky wicket, isn't it?"
"I love it when you do your Rumpole, Huey. Help me ﬁgure this out. Huey? Huey?"
The phone went dead. We had lost our connection. I tried redialing him, but I couldn't get any service.
The dead zone. Huge sixteen-wheelers zoomed by, and it was all I could do not to be consumed by the fact that I was traveling the same piece of road that had claimed the life of my son.
When other people traveled Highway 17, heading north from Mount Pleasant, they thought of Boone Hall Plantation, Brookgreen Gardens, Hobcaw Barony or all the beautiful places to visit that give the Lowcountry its unique reputation of grace and splendor. In contrast there was the rustic home cooking of Seewee Restaurant, the great charm of the shops on the waterfront at Georgetown and all the seafood restaurants at Murrell's Inlet. But I rarely thought about those places. I thought about my own agony.
I tried to move away from my dark thoughts, remembering that when I was a child my father would take me to the Hammock Shops at Pawleys just to swing and to have an ice cream cone. Even today I knew lots of people who would drive from Columbia or Greenville only to have dinner at Louis's Fish Camp, then spend the night in a hotel or a friend's condo, take an early morning walk on the beach, drinking in the salty air before leaving the fantasy. Oh, yes, Highway 17 meant something wonderful for many people, but not for me. I could feel my chest tighten with anxiety as I approached the strip of land where the accident happened.
In an act of emotional self-defense, I tried Huey's number again and this time the call went through. I cleared my throat and sighed, collecting myself so that Huey would not detect my passing panic.
"Hi! Sorry. We got disconnected."
"Abigail, listen to me. I have been thinking about this, and there are several ways to deliver the news to Rebecca. One, you hand them to her, say you never looked at them and walk away. She'll know you're a liar, but she'll have the opportunity for a private nervous breakdown--- but she might do something crazy. So I don't think that's what you should do. Two, you hand them to her and say something like, Look, this is going to upset you. I can stay if you'd like or you can look at them in private. I think that's the best bet. And obviously, I think the best thing is to give them to her outside of work in a relaxed environment. Why don't I invite her over for supper and you come too. Maybe the best way to do this will come about naturally. What do you think?"
"I don't know, Huey. What if she's embarrassed that we're both there? Two against one?"
"Look. I'll make myself scarce if it comes to her actually opening them. But I think she might beneﬁt from a man's perspective, don't you?"
"I think you want to see the pictures."
"You know it, sugar. I'm already drooling."
I knew if Rebecca opened them she would show them to Huey at some point anyway. I mean, who were we kid
ding here?
"I just...I think... oh, ﬁne. What time?"
The guillotine was hoisted, Nat's head was on the block and he may or may not be revealed as the venomous skank he was, depending on the depth of Rebecca's curiosity and the strength of her will that very night.
At seven-thirty, I pulled around Huey's road, passing Miss Olivia in the backseat of her Mercedes Benz, driven by Byron. They waved and I waved back. I could see Miss Olivia asking Byron to stop, and so he did. I lowered my window opposite Miss Olivia's.
"How are you this evening?" I said.
"We're just running out to get a few more string beans! We'll be right back!"
I nodded and raised my window, smiling to myself. Miss Olivia didn't trust Byron to even choose string beans. In her eighties and she still thought she had to---well... what could you say? She was just a pistol.
I pulled in and parked. Rebecca's car was there. Good, I thought, maybe she's had a glass of wine and loosened up. As I got out of the car I looked up. Like the old man down at Mr. Marlow's store used to say, Low, looks like it's making up a storm! There was a storm coming for sure, and I was glad of it. Maybe it would wash away the humidity.
I walked around the hedges, stopped for a moment and for maybe the hundredth time looked at what Huey had created for himself and his mother. By slipping away from the main house, and with the magic of landscaping, he had created a cul-de-sac that looked like it had always been there. His house sloped down toward the water, and hers appeared to adjoin his. It was only separated by the courtyard. The architecture of each house was identical but the main difference was that her interior was all of Universal Design. Outside, her entrance had a gentle slope up to her front door, in case, God forbid, she ever needed a wheelchair or a walker to move around. Inside, there were no saddles in the doorways, where she might accidentally trip, fall and break her hip. The windows were all on springs so she could open them with the lightest touch. Naturally, all the sinks had swing-arm faucets, and the bathroom was outﬁtted as you would expect, but beautifully so.
It must have been a source of great comfort for Miss Olivia to know she was so loved. Forget my own personal life. I knew it was going to shatter Rebecca when she discovered how profoundly Nat did not love her.
Eight
s
I pressed the imposing brass handle of Huey's front door and it clicked open with an ominous sound, like a handgun ﬁred by someone playing Russian roulette, my life spared by an empty chamber. Rebecca was alone in the living room. She turned to face me and she smiled, her left lip dipped in nervous self-consciousness. For the ﬁrst time I noticed that she looked smaller; thinner, really. The collar of her blouse stood away from her neck with such a gap that it could have been ﬁlled with a large scarf and still have been easily buttoned. She looked tired. Probably not sleeping very much. Or eating.
"Gosh," she said, "seems like I'm here for dinner all the time. I mean, I should have y'all over for a barbecue, don't you think? I can't cook like Byron, but I can put steaks on a grill, at least I think I can."
"Don't worry about it. Huey is mother hen to us all." I gave her a polite hug that always for some unknown reason included a pat on the back. It was a lady hug and one that indicated sorority sister affection. "You can cook for me anytime. I'm thinking of turning my kitchen into a sauna. It's the least-used room in my house."
I helped myself to a glass of mineral water while Rebecca chattered. All I could think about were the photographs (most of which I had kept aside in my car), and I didn't hear a word she was saying. When I turned to face her, she saw in my expression that I wasn't listening to her.
She stopped in midsentence and said, "Whatever it is you want to tell me, just go ahead." Her face was blotchy, probably also from nerves. "I knew something was wrong the minute I arrived. Huey said he had to return some phone calls. And Miss Olivia went to the store."
Huey had done as promised and had given Miss Olivia the cue.
Before I could say anything Rebecca said, "You found out something about Nat, didn't you."
It was a statement, not a question.
"Look, Rebecca. My PI friend in Charleston, the guy I told you about that I've known for twenty years, did a little digging around and found out some, well... Look, I'm just going to say it. I have this manila envelope with pictures. You can take them home and look at them in private. Or you can look at them now or you can throw them in the river. I mean, it's up to you."
"I knew it."
"Well, unfortunately, you were right."
I held them out to her. Rebecca trembled slightly as she took the envelope, held it to her chest and gave a long sigh of resignation. She dropped the evidence in her purse without opening it, which surprised me. I would have ripped the envelope open immediately.
"You've seen them, haven't you."
Again, a statement, not a question.
For a moment, I considered making up something but I hated liars. Besides, lying would have placed me in the
realm of her foul husband.
"Yes."
"Are they horrible?"
"They're not wonderful."
"On a one to ten?"
"For me they would be about a nine and three quarters."
I could see she was bracing herself. She inhaled deeply and searched my face for answers. Was it inﬁdelity? I could see that she suspected it. Did the pictures reveal more than inﬁdelity? To me they did. They were about betrayal at a lethal level. I knew I was facing her down. I didn't want her to throw them away. I wanted her to see what her husband was doing and who he really was.
"Oh, hell! What should I do?"
"Well, I know what I would do..."
She sank to the couch and put her face in her hands, her elbows stabbing her knees. I noticed that she still wore her wedding band. Knowing what I knew, if Nat Simms had been mine, I would have bribed his dentist to grind it and ﬁll his front tooth with it.
After a few moments she looked up, not at me but at the portrait over the ﬁreplace mantel of Huey's very serious great-grandfather. He was dressed in the formal manner of his day, but like a spooky painting of Christ, his piercing eyes followed you.
Rebecca's facial blotches had progressed to a deep crimson blush, and her eyes were brimmed with tears. I would not have blamed her for an instant if she had cried all over Huey's silk jacquard couch. The strength of the storm whirling in her thoughts was all but impossible for me to detail. But to describe it in Lowcountry terms, although the hurricane was still off the coast of Puerto Rico, small craft warnings were in effect until further notice all the way to Maine.
She stood up, shaking and ﬁdgeting, grabbed her purse and started for the front door.
"Rebecca! Are you leaving?"
"Leaving? Leaving? No. I'm going outside for some air. I'm going to look at this pile of bullshit your self-righ-teous, know-it-all conscience couldn't resist shoving in my face, and then I will decide if I am leaving. Or if I am ever speaking to you again."
She slammed the door, and the sound of it echoed like thunder all over the entire house. I stood there in the foyer, unable to move. I was completely surprised by her uncharacteristic ﬁt of temper. I had expected it, I had predicted it, but when it burst forth from her in such an explosion, I was mortiﬁed. I had done something terrible and irreversible. Was I self-righteous or a know-it-all? It was an ugly thing for her to say. Either way, the price of my actions would perhaps prove to be more than she wanted to pay. An innocent woman would now suffer tremendous pain and humiliation because of what I had brought her. I was ashamed of myself.
Huey was standing next to me and I hadn't even yet noticed.
"Should we go after her?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Let her have some privacy."
We moved back to the living room where Huey poured himself a large glass of bourbon over ice and crushed mint. I stood by the window and watched her. She was all the way down at the dock and had yet to open the envelope, as far as I could tell. Her shoulders were heaving, her head was thrown back. I knew she was crying like a two-year-old. I felt like a scavenger, something treacherous and sneaky.
"This reminds me of the time the rattlesnake was on my porch. I called animal control and they came right away. They couldn't ﬁnd it, but after they left I did. It was curled around my doorknob. Oh, Huey! What in the world have I done?"
"We. And you haven't wrapped a rattler around her doorknob. I am a partner in this, Abigail. I take at least half of the responsibility."
"Oh, Lord! Look at her! She's hysterical!"
Rebecca was walking in circles around the dock. I was afraid she would lose her footing and fall in the river. From our distance we could see that the sky and waters had grown dark and the swollen tide was swift and terrible, moving in bundles of choppy frenzy.
"I think I should go and get her. It's getting very dark, Abigail, and any minute the skies are going to open up and rain like mad."
But it wasn't raining, just distant rumbles, and Rebecca had only just removed the envelope from her handbag. We watched, voyeurs mired in a horrible intrusion, as she ﬂipped from one photograph to another and then all over again from the start. One by one, she tore them into little pieces and threw them with all her might into the wind.
"Well, there goes the goods," Huey said with a sigh. "Abigail? Either we have saved her or we have destroyed her."
"Huey. I feel absolutely ill."
"What's that? Who's sick?"
It was Miss Olivia who must have entered the house through the kitchen door with Byron. We were so focused on the scene of Rebecca at the river that we hadn't even heard her approach. Her eyes squinted and traveled with ours in the direction of Rebecca.
"Mercy! What's happened?"
"I'm afraid that Rebecca has been the recipient of some very disappointing information about her husband, the scoundrel."
Miss Olivia elbowed her way in front of us, peering with all her power to evaluate Rebecca's state. "Get me a sherry, Huey, please, son, and don't let her see you. Goodness gracious! You two are spying on her like a couple of guard dogs! You may as well be barking your fool heads off. Now watch me! You have to stand to the side of the curtain panel like I am! See? Not just out there for the whole world to catch you!"
Huey handed her a small sherry; she swallowed it in one gulp and held the glass out for Huey to reﬁll without so much as a Thank you and another, please? Huey complied and we continued to watch. Finally the rain began to fall in great pellets and within the space of seconds it was pouring. I saw Rebecca then as she sank to her knees, ran her hands through the water and wiped her face. But then she stayed on her knees, and it was plain to see that she was weeping. At ﬁrst I had thought she was considering a fatal swim, and I can tell you this much. We were all becoming very frightened---for Rebecca's safety and her mental state.
"I'm going to get her," Huey said. "She's getting soaked to the skin and she'll catch her death."
Miss Olivia called out, "Byron? Byron?"
Byron appeared so quickly it was obvious he had been listening just out of our sight.
"Yes, ma'am, Miss Olivia?"
"I'm going to take my dinner in my own house." Miss Olivia held her glass out for the second time. "This is too much commotion for me."
"Yes, ma'am, Miss Olivia. I will bring it to you as soon as it's ready," Byron said and left the room.
I took Miss Olivia's glass and ﬁlled it because Huey had moved to the hall to get an umbrella from the closet.
"Here we are," I said, handing it to her.
She drained it quickly and said, "Oh!" When Huey opened the front door, the sounds of the storm rushed in on wet air. The storm was so violent we may as well have been outside.
"Take me home, son," Miss Olivia said. She took his arm, snuggled into his side and they left.
I watched them lean into the wind and cross the front terrace to Miss Olivia's door, which was actually more expedient than taking the long covered pathway from the side of the house. If we were having storms like this in July, what in the world would the hurricane season bring?
Soon Rebecca and Huey were back. They were absolutely drenched. I didn't want to talk about the pictures unless Rebecca did, and anyway the obvious ﬁrst step was for them to get dry. Huey led Rebecca to the guest room, offering her a bathrobe and a hair dryer and saying that Byron would dry her clothes. She glared at me as she passed the living room, where I had curled myself up into the corner of the couch.
While they were gone, I tortured myself. Don't shoot the messenger. Yeah, sure.
Byron reappeared with a tray of fruit and cheese, offering it to me.
"Some drama, hey, Miss Abigail?" he said dryly with a little smile.
"You know what, Byron? When you say these things, I am never sure how to respond."
He stood back waiting for me to continue but I was not comfortable enough with Byron to engage him in gossip. Besides, he was Huey's houseman. He put the tray on the coffee table, and sensing that there was no camaraderie forthcoming, he threw his hand back.
"That's all right! You don't have to dish it with me. I hear it all anyway."
He turned, left the room and to his back I muttered, I am sure you do.
"I do," he said from down the hall.
Well, that was just Byron and I was as sure of anything that Huey probably sat around with him at night and recounted every detail of his life. I don't know what I thought about while I waited there alone for Huey and Rebecca to return, but I can tell you that the time passed slowly and I was hugely relieved when Byron called us to dinner.
Huey sat at the head of the table and I sat opposite Rebecca. Byron placed a tureen at my elbow and ﬁlled my soup plate. It looked like cream of asparagus, but it could have been broccoli or artichoke, for all it mattered to me. We waited in silence as he went around the table serving the ﬁrst course, pouring wine and water and offering bread. Finally he left the room and Huey attempted to break the ice.
He raised his glass and said, "Here's to friends. There is no greater love than that of a good friend and no greater loyalty than that of a good friend. Their value is inestimable!"
We clinked all around and took a sip. Hesitating, Rebecca raised her glass and said, "Here's to friends honoring each other's privacy and not discussing each other's problems when the troubled one is absent."
Huey touched the edge of his goblet to Rebecca's and then turned to me. I placed my glass back on the table. I wasn't going to quibble over this insinuation. I was going to get it straight.
"Rebecca. You have not known me long enough to know that I would never give away any single thing you ever said to me in conﬁdence. It is human nature for friends to discuss friends. It's the tone of that discussion that counts. If it's malicious, then you would have a right to your bitterness..."
"I'm not bitter . . ." She shot me a death ray.
"All right then, your suspicions..."
"I'm not suspicious either." Another laser of destruction was lobbed my way.
I took a deep breath and dealt with her as I would have any client. "All right then, what would you call it?"
Huey was on the edge of his seat holding his breath. He hated confrontation, and especially at the dinner table. So did I. Rebecca was quiet for a few moments, and then she ﬁnally spoke in surrender. It seemed that Rebecca didn't have the wherewithal or the desire to have a battle with us.
"I would call it disappointment," Rebecca said. "I am very deeply disappointed."
"About Nat and his behavior?" Huey said.
"Well, of course she is, Huey," I said.
"Of course I am upset about that," Rebecca said. "It's horrible. But I'm more upset about his choice of a lover. Do y'all know who the woman is?"
I kept quiet and Huey shook his head.
"I was never privileged to see what you all are discussing," Huey said with a trace of royal jealousy. "And whatever you may think, Rebecca, Abigail told me almost nothing. Except that she was concerned, deeply concerned about how best to give the information to you."
Rebecca looked up at me and this time she seemed apologetic. She was going to need a lot more spine that she apparently possessed to get any justice from her creep of a husband in a court of law.
"I just don't like y'all talking about me, that's all. You hardly know me. I came here to paint and to get away..."
"Yes, we know that, Rebecca. You've said it a thousand times. But while you're away and painting you are allowing Nat to rob you of everything you are entitled to..."
"Ostrich!" Huey offered, smiling, pleased with his cleverness.
Rebecca and I stopped and stared at him.
"Honest to God, Huey," I said.
"Thanks a lot, Huey," Rebecca said. And then she added, "You're right. He's right, you know. It's just that I don't want to ﬁght with Nat. You don't know how he is. He's ruthless. If he wants the kids and the house, let him have it all. I quit. And he can have that lowlife Charlene too."
"Lowlife?" Huey said.
The kitchen door swung open. All conversation ceased as Byron cleared the untouched soup and replaced them with plates of tiny lamb chops propped on mounds of risotto, drizzled with a gleaming sauce. He put a bowl of watercress salad on Huey's left and excused himself.
"I'm going to see about Miss Olivia now," he said. "Of course. Thank you, Byron," Huey said. "This looks
beautiful." "Is she not well?" Rebecca asked. "No, she's ﬁne. Just a little tired," Huey said. "Now,
back to Charlene? Who is she?"
"She's gross! She has a ﬂat chest, a ﬂat butt, barely a high school education, nasty hair...I mean, y'all, she's a little redneck nothing! She makes minimum wage and..."
"Um, Rebecca, she doesn't have a ﬂat chest. Or a ﬂat
anything," I said. "She has ears like a mule!" Rebecca said. "No, she doesn't," I said. "She most certainly does!" Rebecca said with insistence. "Not anymore, and I can prove it," I said. "Please do!" Rebecca said. "What in the world . . ." Huey said, thoroughly con
fused. "I have other pictures in the car. Should I get them now?" "You have other pictures in the car? By all means!" Re
becca blurted. "Abigail, darling," Huey said, "let's have dinner ﬁrst.
We didn't touch Byron's soup and I'll hear about that for sure, and if you don't eat dinner he'll have a ﬁt, and besides . . . it's still pouring outside."
"There's an umbrella by the door," Rebecca said. When we looked at her, incredulous that she would send me out into the proverbial dark and stormy night, she said, "What? I want to see the pictures!"
"So do I," Huey said. "Take my raincoat from the hall closet."
I ran to my car thinking, well, at one point in her life she had gumption, and although my favorite sandals were squishing from the puddles of rainwater and the great crackles of lightning terriﬁed me, I was glad to see Rebecca speak up for herself. It was about bloody time! And who was Huey kidding to suggest that we eat before looking at the pictures? But on second thought, it would take an earthquake to get between Huey and a meal on a plate in front of him.
When I got back, Huey was gobbling up dinner and Becca was pushing hers around the plate. The pictures remained on the table, tucked inside the pages of People magazine, where I had slipped them to keep them dry. There was a photograph of them leaving the bank and, yes, I had censored the one of them taken from the tree across the street from Rebecca's bedroom. I don't know what had made me pull that one out but I guess I couldn't bring myself to have Rebecca see her husband in such a sordid position. And the one of them leaving the bank? It was bothering me, that's all. There were a few others---less incriminating, but shots of this Charlene clear enough for Rebecca to say whether or not Charlene had altered her appearance with surgery.
Huey couldn't ﬁnish dinner fast enough. His eyes twinkled with devilment anticipating what he was about to see.
"Well?" he said, sitting back and wiping his lips with his napkin.
"All right," Rebecca said, "let's have a look."
I passed the magazine to her and she pulled them out, gasping and passing them to Huey until she came to a really graphic one.
"They were in my bedroom!" she said. "What kind of nerve!"
"Let's see, hon," Huey said.
"No, I don't think so," Rebecca said. "I'll just keep this one to myself."
Huey shot me a look, and I shook my head to say, Let it go, Huey.
"I'll go get the magnifying glass," Huey said and got up from the table.
We went over them again and again until Rebecca ﬁnally said, "There's no question about it at all. She's had massive work done. Those aren't even her teeth! He wouldn't pay for marriage counseling, but he paid for this?"
"Heavens!" Huey said.
"I mean, I could understand if Nat left me for someone who was beautiful and aristocratic, but this tramp Charlene is the trashiest thing you can imagine! I mean, y'all, she's as thick as a brick! Dumb as a post! She's stupid! She has nothing, I mean nothing, going for her!"
"She's got something," I said. "She probably makes Nat feel like the king of the world."
"Well, next to her, he is!"
Then the funniest thing happened. Rebecca began to laugh, which of course, gave us the signal to laugh with her.
"It's just, I don't know, absurd!" she said.
"People can be so stupid," I said.
"Lord! She's tacky!" Huey said.
When we all ﬁnally regained our composures, I said in my theatrical attorney's voice, "Mrs. Simms? Can you say with reasonable authority that those are new breasts?"
"Absolutely! Goodness! She went from Little Orphan Annie to Dolly Parton!"
Huey suppressed another giggle attack and so did I.
"And these ears are different?"
"Honey? She had ears that stuck out so far you'd have thought she could take off in a stiff wind and ﬂy the whole way to Florida!"
"And these buttoc---I mean her rear, um..."
"Her derriere?" Huey offered.
"Yes! Thank you, Huey! Her derriere?"
"Abigail? Her booty, her teeth, her ears, her bazooms--- the whole woman has been rebuilt! How can she pay for this when she earns minimum wage? Well, she didn't, did she? Y'all know what? Now I am ofﬁcially pissed off in purple. Abigail, will you help me at least recover some of my money?"
"Rebecca? This is the most egregious and appalling misuse of marital assets I have ever seen in all my years. I will represent you and with pleasure! And on the house! I'll extract my fee from your sorry excuse for a husband as I scrub and polish the courthouse ﬂoor with his arrogance and stupidity."
"But call Jeff Mahoney ﬁrst, okay?"
"What would you like me to call him?"
"Abigail! I haven't ever seen you quite so animated!"
"Huey, baby? You ain't seen nothing yet!"
I looked at Rebecca again and my eyes went to her hands as she ﬂipped through the pictures once more. Her wedding band was gone.
"Rebecca? Did you toss your wedding band into the Waccamaw?"
"What? No! Heavens! It is gone!" "Alice Flagg, cupcake. Alice Flagg came and stole your
ring. Happens all the time," Huey said. "Well, if she wants Nat Simms, she can have him!" "I think Alice has better taste," I said. "Even from the
grave."
Nine
ABIGAIL'S GOT GAME
s
REBECCA reminded me to call Jeff Mahoney to advise him that I was taking over her case. In any other circumstances I would have made the call simply as a matter of course, but I was already convinced her Jeff was such a moron that I didn't feel like extending any courtesy to him. I mean, what did this guy ever do for her? Let's see . . . lost her house, her children, her life? He probably got his law degree online while watching live cams of coeds. And, what contribution could he make toward the win? Probably nothing. It didn't matter. I simply added his name to my daily agenda of things to do.
I got up with the sun and walked the beach. What in the world was making me so cranky? Well, for one thing, I had this intense reluctance to enter a courtroom. I kept seeing myself pushing through the oversized doors, walking up the center aisle, dropping my briefcase on the ﬂoor and my folder on the table, looking up, over or back into the face of Julian Prescott and then falling off the cliff of propriety into the abyss.
His face played in my head like a CD with a deep scratch. What would happen if I saw him? The one indiscretion of my entire life. In the daylight I regretted our affair with my whole heart, but there were many nights I would have given anything to have it happen all over again. But I'm not here to tell you about that chapter in my past. I only mention it so that you won't think I'm trying to paint myself as Joan of Arc, some sexless icon of the battleﬁeld. I understand desire and lust as well as I know betrayal and the pain it brings. I've known nothing but guilt and remorse since then.
We were married to other people. Ashley had just died and John was drinking too much, which was his way of dealing with it. I was considering divorce and I wound up in bed with Julian at a conference in Chicago. I couldn't help myself. Neither could he. There was this invisible thread between our hearts, something that in another place and time would have been a beautiful thing...We knew it was wrong, that the stakes were high and that if we continued, we would be found out. And, to our surprise, we were.
His wife was devastated, had a complete nervous breakdown, including the nastiest case of shingles I have ever heard described, and had to be hospitalized. Julian was so stricken with guilt that he completely stopped talking to me, saying only that it had to be over. And my John? It broke whatever was left of his spirit and I know it contributed to his death.
No, I had no desire to ever hurt anyone again. My love for Julian Prescott and my ambitious law practice swallowed my life whole. I had not only allowed it, I had invited it. Now I was completely alone. In one way I believed it was a sentence I deserved, that the penance for my sins was to be paid right here by being alone.
If any one thing was to be said of Pawleys Island, it was that it reminded you of what was true in the most basic terms. You were born, you lived and then you died. And while that was no revelation to anyone, I was always amazed at how many people just banged their way through year after year, never giving a thought about what their lives meant. Or how they intended to make them mean something.
All along the shores of Pawleys Island stood houses that had been there for a hundred years or more. The families who occupied them were the same ones whose ancestors had built them. Oh, sometimes they were sold to someone outside the family, but for the most part they stayed in the hands of the original family. If any of the houses were blown away by a hurricane, an improved duplicate replaced it.
Pawleys Island residents walked land soaked with the memories and dreams of their relatives who had gone on before them. It was an awesome reality. The tide rose and fell anyway. It didn't matter which generation occupied the house.
It was hard not to think about your allotted years with that kind of continuum staring you in the face. Of course I thought about my beautiful Ashley and how I missed him. And of course, John.
In many ways I had been a willing zombie, acting so ﬁne, so well for my tiny audience of Huey and the others. Inside I was dead, thinking somehow that I had already lived my life and lost what happiness I would ever have. And that it served me right. I was waiting for death to ﬁnd me---that is, until this whole business with Rebecca Simms found its way to my plate. Now I could feel the strength of my heartbeat and I was somewhat glad to be useful again.
I sat on my bottom step and knocked the sand from my sneakers and went inside to begin my day with a phone call to Jeff Mahoney, Idiot Attorney.
To my utter astonishment, he was a gentleman. As soon as I explained the reason for my call, his ﬁrst words conveyed certain tenderness for Rebecca and genuine despair over her unbelievable predicament.
"How is Rebecca? Mrs. Simms, I mean. Where is she? Is she well?"
"How is she? Well, I suppose she's as well as any woman could be in her situation."
"May I be candid with you, Ms. Thurmond?"
"By all means."
"In all my years, not just my professional years, but in my years on earth, I have never seen anything to match the ruthlessness of her husband or the animosity of her children. Just incredible."
"What do you mean?"
Jeff Mahoney began to gush like a bloated river, charging over its banks, swirling in every direction at once.
"It's just that I heard all these terrible stories."
"For example?"
"Nat Simms went to Clemson and played football for them, right?"
"And so?" Don't get me started on football, I thought.
"And so, his daughter, who adores him and could never play football, only wants to be a cheerleader for Clemson."
"What's so terrible about that?"
"Well, the scuttlebutt is that Mr. Simms promised her breast implants to improve her chances of becoming one if she would sign papers stating her preference to live with him. I don't think she's even sixteen. She's in my daughter's class."
"Excuse me, Mr. Mahoney, but you are kidding me, aren't you?"
"I wish I were. And there's more."
"I can hardly wait to hear." I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, Nat's girlfriend was practically bionic.
He cleared his throat, sensing his own overenthusiasm and a highly probable lack of propriety.
"Look, I want you to understand something, Ms. Thurmond. My own wife of twenty years just died from breast cancer last month. She was only forty-three. She was the sweetest woman I have ever known and I don't say sweet to imply she wasn't a highly intelligent, extremely competent woman in any situation. She could have held her own in a senate hearing or in a bank robbery. I have the greatest respect for women."
"Bravo," I said, with a taint of sarcasm, and then realizing the man's wife had just passed away, I added, "I am very sorry about your loss. I lost my husband not long ago, so I know something about what you must be feeling."
"Thank you. Look, all I'm saying is that there's more to this than met the eyes of the court. Nat Simms had some other agenda going on. I mean, I think it's fair to say that he fell out of love with Rebecca a long time ago. Ask anyone. The stories of his public humiliation of Rebecca are legendary in our neighborhood alone. There hasn't been a dinner party in the last four years when Nat didn't do something to embarrass Rebecca and their hosts. He's sadistic, and to tell you the truth, he was a little frightening. People thought he was a loaded bomb, if you know what I mean."
"I don't mean to sound dense here, counselor, but a loaded bomb can mean a lot of things. You have to tell me exactly what you mean if I am to help her."
"I mean that, for his own reasons, and no one yet knows what they are, Nat Simms wanted Rebecca out of his life and the lives of his children. The conundrum is that I cannot imagine why anyone would want Rebecca Simms out of his life! She was faithful to her family and she never forgot anyone in need or failed to thank anyone who had shown any member of her family a kindness. And she's a good-looking woman. I mean, what more could a man want
in a wife?"
"I don't know."
In the next few minutes, Jeff Mahoney, who I now almost liked, agreed to FedEx me all the paperwork he had on Rebecca's case. Then he gave more examples of Nat Simms's temper and recounted different scenarios of how the children rebuked Rebecca, and how Nat supported their positions. Jeff offered to answer any questions, anytime, including offering himself up as a witness for a sworn deposition. I said, Yes, thank you, to that.
We hung up and I went out to the porch for a few minutes to collect my thoughts. I considered myself to be a rather cool customer. I was not easily upset. My conversation with Jeff Mahoney made me very uncomfortable.
Nat Simms was dangerous. Now it was easier to understand why Jeff Mahoney had allowed Rebecca's family, home and assets to slip away. Simply put, he decided Rebecca's very life may have been at stake and that custody of her hateful children wasn't worth dying over. Possession of her house was not worth her life. And a reconciliation with Nat? Hell, to hear Jeff tell it, Rebecca was lucky to get away with her skull intact.
The more I thought about it, the more angered I became. We knew that Nat had a girlfriend---a tacky specimen to be sure, but a girlfriend all the same. We suspected he had footed the bill for her transformation. Now we had another example of Nat and his promises of plastic surgery. What had he promised their son? Who knew? A trip to the moon?
I came to several conclusions. Nat would have Charlene. No argument there. For the moment, he could have the house and custody of the children as well. Rebecca was entitled to half the assets they held, which meant a huge cash settlement for her. The children? I didn't know them but I knew I could demand a psychological evaluation and convince the court that Nat had to pay for therapy for them. He obviously and in a very methodical manner worked to undermine and eventually completely alienate the children from their mother. Rebecca had cowered. She probably thought that biding her time would pay off, that Nat would come around, that the children were going through a stage... she had guessed wrong and lost.
Nat Simms was a bulldog, and this whole drama he produced was still most likely about money and about lust. It was a new trend in the land of divorce and one that I despised. In the old days, a gentleman would never have sued his wife for the house, custody of the children and child support. Now it happened all the time. It was a déclassé intimidation technique.
Nat didn't love Rebecca, and he probably didn't love Charlene either. But Charlene was easy. Charlene was some poor, uneducated woman who probably struggled to keep food on her table. Was she going to give Nat a hard time about going to every football game Clemson played? No. Did Rebecca? Yes. Rebecca told me she was sick to death of football. If Nat didn't want to go to the Charleston Symphony but preferred to watch golf on television, would Charlene put up a fuss? No. She probably opened a can of chili, nuked it and served it to him. Charlene had probably never heard of the Charleston Symphony or stepped one foot inside the Dock Street Theater either. Had Rebecca? Yes. Rebecca loved the Dock Street and the Symphony and had served on tons of committees as a volunteer to organize beneﬁts for them.
The only problem I had with what Jeff had told me was that I couldn't decide if going after Nat's wallet would jeopardize Rebecca's personal safety.
I decided I would do everything in my power to see that it did not. There were probably more laws on the books and more legal precedent in divorce law than in any other area. I read somewhere recently that a million people get divorced every year. For whatever reason Nat Simms would claim, he couldn't just boot Rebecca out without a dime after twenty years of marriage.
My next step was to call Nat's attorney, the infamous Harry Albright, and put him on notice. I took a deep breath, went inside and dialed his number. I gave my name and the reason for my call, was put on hold, expecting to have the secretary come back and take a message. That's what I would've done. If I had been Harry Albright I would have called Nat Simms and asked him why a new attorney was calling. But his arrogance prevailed and Harry Albright picked up the phone.
"Hello?"
"Mr. Albright? This is Abigail Thurmond calling."
"What can I do for you, Ms. Thurmond?"
"I wanted to let you know that I have been retained by Rebecca Simms to represent her in her divorce from your client, Nathaniel Simms."
"Don't waste your time, Ms. Thurmond. The judge has already handed down a decision and..."
"We'll see about that, Mr. Albright. You might want to advise your client that I am going to begin discovery of his ﬁnancial affairs..."
"I'm sure he will be delighted by the news," he said with a little laugh that sounded like a snort.
"Tell him to expect an interrogatory," I said.
"Sure thing," Harry Albright said. "But it's an exercise in futility."
"We'll see what's futile. And I will be investigating his personal relationships as well," I said.
"What do you mean personal relationships? Nat Simms is a straight arrow! A family man!"
"Yeah, sure, and my grandmother was a samurai."
Albright got quiet and the conversation took on a new tone.
"Another woman? He never told me there was another woman..."
"Well, Mr. Albright, you have to wonder how many other lies he told you, don't you? He sure lied to his wife plenty. But I'll get this all sorted out..."
By the time I said good-bye to Harry Albright, which was as soon as possible, he was seriously annoyed.
No attorney appreciated being lied to---especially the dregs like Harry Albright, whose reputation oozed the slime of a tar pit. Attorneys acted on information the client provided, and in the end, if counsel acted on lies, it reﬂected badly on not only the attorney but the entire ﬁrm. In Harry Albright's case, he was a dank ﬁrm of one, having squirmed down to the swamp one sleazy win at a time. I mean, his mother was his secretary, okay?
It may have been a conceit to admit, but I was itching to dismember Harry Albright almost as much as I relished the vision of Nat Simms writing checks for Rebecca. It made me feel lighthearted.
I looked around my living room, which until that moment had seemed like a perfectly ﬁne living room to me---two old lumpy sofas, slip-covered in charcoal ticking, two old armchairs with ottomans, upholstered in pale blue pinwale corduroy, a scuffed up walnut coffee table from the Ding Dynasty, with neat stacks of National Geo graphic magazines from the seventies and every end table sagging under the weight of family photographs that chronicled our lives. The furniture needed Botox worse than I did.
What did it mean that I had kept things as they had been for ﬁfty years? Did I think that keeping my parent's furniture and even the layout somehow kept them alive? No, that was too weird to consider. My encounters with them were for late nights on the porch. I think the state of my décor meant I was too lazy to do anything about it.
I had a cell phone in hand, and my parent's old rotary phone from the sixties sat on the phone table---end of ofﬁce equipment inventory. I had no fax, no copier, no laptop, no printer. It didn't exactly look like Churchill's war room.
I decided I would use my parent's old bedroom as an ofﬁce. Why not? It had great light. I pushed open the door and looked inside for the ﬁrst time in a very long while. It did not have great light. The windows hadn't been washed since I had moved in. The shades were yellowed and split. Their old creaking iron bed and nightstands were still there, made up for company that never came. Two overstuffed chairs upholstered in sun-rotted ﬂoral print chintz sat in front of the windows that faced the beach. I mean, we Pawleys Islanders prided ourselves on being "arrogantly shabby," but this was testimony to the state of denial in which I had been living. When I had moved in permanently three years ago, I hadn't noticed any of these ﬂaws.
The bedroom needed everything. At the very least, the bedroom needed to be thoroughly dusted and cleaned. The housekeeping required was beyond my available time. I would ask Byron if he could help me ﬁnd someone to pull this place together and maybe even maintain it.
I decided to begin the reluctant resurrection of my career by buying a laptop and a printer. Although I was determined that Rebecca's case would be the only one I would handle, I could use a laptop and a printer for many other purposes---shopping, general correspondence and reading about the outside world on the odd occasion when the mood struck.
I knew there was an ofﬁce supply store or something like it on Highway 17 that would do the job. These were places I had diligently avoided since I retired, and now I was about to be a customer.
I pulled into the parking lot of the shopping center and sat in my car thinking about what was ahead of me. I didn't want to go back to work. I mean, I really did not want to print business cards and letterhead. But Nat's behavior was so well, evil. Nat Simms had all the earmarks of a narcissistic sociopath. If I had believed in demonic possession, I would have said that Nat Simms might be an example of it.
No matter how successful I had ever been, this would not be easy. I was in for a ﬁght. Experience told me that Nat Simms and Harry Albright would do everything in their power to discredit Rebecca and see the judgment stand. I knew that the judge's decision was a terrible mistake but at the same time, it was clear that I would have to take this one careful step at a time to earn the win.
Te n
s
I was pretty well caught up on all the framing jobs at the gallery, so I took the day off to paint. Huey was sweet about it. He knew I was a bundle of nerves. I was.
I was in the middle of setting up my easel and thinking about how screwed up I had become. With each passing day, it was increasingly hard to concentrate on anything. I was upset all the time. In fact, I think I was more upset since Abigail had taken over than I had been when Nat had me thrown out. Maybe that was because I had seen Nat's blow coming and now I didn't know what would happen. The only thing working in my favor was that I didn't have anything else to lose.
I wouldn't say I was elated to have someone like Abigail in my corner because I didn't want to rehash everything. She was the kind of person who would dig and dig. However, when her PI friend produced those pictures, I realized that Nat was a complete liar. Almost comical, really, except that he had the house, the kids and all the money. If Abigail could at least work out a better settlement, then it might be worth it to suffer some more. One thing was for sure, unless there was a huge change in their attitudes, I didn't want to go back to Charleston and raise those kids.
Last night I sent my children emails at camp again. No response. I could see on the server that they had been opened and I assumed delivered. Last week I sent Evan a box of water guns for every boy in his cabin. It was a surprise gift, bought in a moment of thinking I had to win them back. I mean, even though Evan had sided with Nat, he was still my baby.
I called the camp to see if he had received them and they said, oh yes, all the boys were having a wonderful time spraying each other, the weather was very hot. But when I asked the young counselor if I could speak to Evan he hemmed and hawed around and then said they couldn't ﬁnd him. I knew it was a lie. Evan didn't want to talk to me. Can you imagine how that made me feel?
Sami was worse. I sent her daily emails with no response. I could understand that a young boy didn't answer mail, or maybe he was afraid to because communicating with me might incite Nat. But my only daughter? What was more painful was that I had written her a letter trying to explain that while I didn't understand her animosity toward me, I loved her, I would always be her mother and no one could ever replace her in my heart. I told her about a Christmas I remembered, when she was about six. She had asked Santa for and received her ﬁrst life-sized baby doll. She was so adorable with it. I would stand in the hall outside her door and listen to her repeat the same words to her doll that I spoke to her. Please don't cry, baby. You know your momma loves you. There now, that's better . . . I guess I had hoped she would remember too. But there was no response to my letter. I was numb from that rejection.
I began to paint, and the next thing I knew I found myself trying to paint that same baby doll, undressed, walking toward the viewer and away from something. What was she leaving behind? Or who? I drew in a shadow ﬁgure of an old man wearing a hat. The undressed baby and the fully clothed man seemed slightly obscene. What in the world had possessed me to create such a thing? It didn't matter. I had discovered that sometimes painting was like exorcism. It could rid me of demons and bad feelings about almost anything.
My cell phone that never rang rang and I walked over to the table to answer it. It was Abigail.
"Hi! You busy?" she said.
"No, just painting a very strange picture..."
"Oh. Well, good, good . . ." She could not have been less interested and began to update me on Nat. "Nat's attorney received the interrogatory, and let me tell you, he is plenty mad too."
"Why?"
"Because of the questions we are asking him to answer. Remember?"
"Well, I'm glad I'm here and not there. Nat would probably be throwing pots and pans at my head."
"The good news is that he has to answer them honestly, because if he lies about anything it could be treated as perjury."
I could hear the excitement in Abigail's voice, but it wasn't like she had anything to be excited about, as far as I could tell. At least not so far.
"You know, Abigail, he's gonna tell his attorney nothing but a bunch of lies. Nat lies to everybody all the time."
"Probably. Why in the world do people act like that?"
"Abigail?" Where and how do you explain somebody like Nat to a normal rational person? I took a deep breath. "For a couple of reasons. One, I guess he knows that he can get away with it. And two, he rearranges the truth so that people will like him and think he's wonderful. Nat thinks it's more important for people to like him than it is for them to think he's smart or anything else. You see, half the time he lies on purpose and the other half of the time he doesn't know the difference."
"Sounds a little pathological to me."
"It made living with him pretty difﬁcult."
"I'm sure."
"I was always apologizing for him. But that same craziness sure made it easy for him to sell a lot of cars."
"I'll bet. Well, I'm gonna play nine holes this afternoon. But I'm on my cell if you need me for anything."
"Why would I have to bother you, hon? You go play and have fun." I thought I sounded kind of upbeat just then and that not only pleased me but I could hear some relief in her voice as well.
"Well, Rebecca, I don't want to alarm you, but the cat is out of the bag, isn't it?"
"Listen, Nat doesn't know I'm here, and anyway, he knows my cell number and have I heard from him in all this time? No. I have not. He's too busy screwing his slut to check on his wife." Then, for the ﬁrst time since my arrival at Pawleys Island, I really giggled. And Abigail, on the other end of the line (no doubt decked out in black-and-white golf clothes), giggled too. It felt pretty good.
Pretty good until the phone rang again, that is.
It was Huey. He had cracked a crown and had to rush to the dentist. Could I come and cover for him? Of course I would. So much for my painting day.
I changed clothes and hurried over to the gallery, taking another glance at the doll painting. It was beautiful and bizarre all at once. I wondered what Huey would say about it.
"You're an angel!" Huey said on his way out.
"Don't think a thing about it," I said to his back.
The door closed and there I was alone in the gallery for the ﬁrst time. It seemed very empty and too quiet. Well, I thought, pulling my sketchpad out of my bag, this might be a good time to draw. But as luck would have it, a customer came in, a nice-looking man.
"Hi! If I can help you with anything, let me know," I said. "Okay, thanks." Most people just liked to browse, and I wasn't a pushy
salesperson anyway. A little while passed, and I noticed
him standing in front of a painting of a creek scene. "That's a beautiful painting, isn't it?" "Yes, it is," he said. "I'm looking for a gift for my ﬁancée
for her birthday, and I thought she might like something like this. It looks like Shem Creek, and we spend a lot of time there because she has a bakery in this restaurant..."
"Wait a minute. Do you mean Mimi's?" "Yeah, do you know it?" "Are you kidding? Her pound cake? To die!" He chuckled a little and said, "Yeah, she's something
else. We're getting married next summer. By the way, I'm
Jack Taylor." "Lord! Where are my manners? I'm Rebecca Simms." He bought the painting and was thrilled about giving
it to her. What a nice man, I thought, watching him leave.
Several hours passed and no one called or came in. I began drawing another doll and then Evan's favorite Paddington Bear, and somehow they were personiﬁed in a way that was so spooky they gave me goose bumps. All my sorrow was present in those toys. The tourists would never buy them in a million years and neither would any interior decorator I had ever known.
I jumped at the sound of the doorbell. It was Huey. He was holding a handkerchief on his swollen lip and his jaw was very puffy.
"Hi!" I said. "How's your tooth?" "Uh gawt tho mutch Novocaine tha Uhm dwooling!"
It wasn't funny but I suppressed a laugh with both hands.
"Poor thing! Let me get you an ice pack!" I ran back to his ofﬁce, where the refrigerator was. It didn't have an ice maker, but regulation plastic ice trays. Huey was on my heels. I popped out some cubes and wrapped them in a kitchen towel.
"Thaks. Uck. I juss hay tha dennis."
"Good thing you have this fridge here. Okay, hold this on your face."
"I haff ta haff a kithen---Uh maigh staave!"
"Yeah, sure."
"Well..."
The phone rang and I grabbed it away from him, knowing that if he had spoken, the caller would surely think they had the wrong number.
"Gallery Valentine!" I sang out in as chipper a voice as I had heard myself use in weeks.
"Becca?"
"Nat?"
"I want to talk to you!"
He was screaming so loud that I had to hold the phone away from my head.
"How did you ﬁnd me?"
"What's the difference, Becca? And just who the hell is this bitch, Abigail Thurmond? I mean, who do you think you are? You know, my lawyer calls me and tells me you have a new lawyer, this old retired hack, Thurmond."
"What?"
"Yeah, hack. Goddamn it, Becca, you're so pathetically stupid it's almost criminal! You hired a washed-up loser and you don't even know it!"
"Stop it! She's not a washed-up anything, Nat, and I wish you would stop screaming!"
He laughed and said Whoo yeah! I could just see him shaking his head the way he always did when he was telling me how wrong I was about anything and everything. I looked at Huey, whose eyes were wide in surprise as he hung on every word. My face got hot and my whole body broke out in a cold sweat, making me shiver.
"You listen to me, Becca. What the hell is this? I mean, You will please take notice that you are hereby required to answer in writing the following interrogatories, pursuant to Rule 33(b) of the South Carolina Rules of Civil Procedure and Rule 25 of the South Carolina Rules of Family Court ...You know what, Becca? I had been sitting here thinking maybe you and I could work things out---you know, go to a marriage counselor or something and try to get back together. But with this bullshit staring me in the face? I don't think so, Becca. No, I don't think I want to be with you anymore because of what you have done. It's obvious you don't trust me and..."
Huey was scribbling madly and pushed his note across the desk for me to see.
Tell him to tell his lawyer to call Abigail! Don't let him ha rass you!
I looked at it and nodded my head. Nat was still raging like a lunatic.
"She wants my income tax returns for the last seven years! She wants all my bank statements! My credit card statements! I don't even know where they are! Do you know how much time it would take to get all this shit together?"
"No," I said.
"Well, let me assure you, it's time I don't have! Just listen to this question! Have you ever smoked marijuana or used any kind of illegal drugs? What kind of bullshit is this? Me smoke pot? You must be out of your fucking mind, Becca! And this! Have you ever been arrested for driving under the in ﬂuence of alcohol? Tell your stupid lawyer, Becca, just tell her that if I had, it would be matter of public record and she can go get off her fat ass, go down to the courthouse and look it up!"
At this point, Huey was gesturing wildly for my attention and mouthing, Hang up! Just hang up! I shook my head at him. I couldn't hang up because I wanted to hear what he would say next. You see, at the Nat Simms's School of Abusive Behavior, I had mastered the skill of standing still while the ﬁring squad did its job.
"Wait! Listen to this, Becca! Have you ever viewed or pur chased pornography on the Internet or shopped at an adult book store? I mean, what the fuck is the matter with you? Are you completely fucking crazy now? Is that what's happened to you? You run off to Pawleys Island, and what? Get some job selling clown paintings with big sad eyes? God! You're such a loser!"
"No," I said. "That's not what I'm doing, and I am not a loser, Nat."
"Then what do you want me to think?"
The gallery door opened and Huey left to see who had come in. Huey was thoroughly offended by the language he heard Nat use and by his aggressive tone.
"Nat? You're going to think what you want to think. All I want you to do is answer the questions honestly. That's all. And Nat?"
"What?"
"Please don't call me at work."
"Call you at work? You're goddamn lucky I didn't drive up there and beat the crap out of you..."
That was when I put the phone back in its cradle. I just hung up. I was so light-headed that I knew if I didn't sit down I would faint. He had said he was thinking about us getting back together? Did he break up with Charlene? Did he mean it? Was he ﬁnally sorry? Was I crazy? I put my head in my hands and considered having a good cry, and then I felt Huey's hand on my shoulder.
"Thoo all ight, honey?"
Well, at least his Novocaine was wearing off. Somewhat. "How could I be?" I looked up at him and I could see that he was worried.
"Nuh, of course thoo aren't." Huey turned his desk chair around and sat opposite me. "Wan to talk abou it?"
"What is there to say?" This was when my eyes started to tear. "He got the interrogatory Abigail sent to his lawyer." I stopped to take a tissue and wipe my eyes. "Huey? He's as mad as he can possibly be. He said I was lucky that he didn't, quote, come up here and beat the crap out of me."
"He threatened you like that? He actually used those words?"
Suddenly, Huey was perfectly articulate.
"Oh, big whoop. He says things like that every ﬁve minutes."
"It's not right."
"He doesn't mean it. He's too lazy to do it. Guess what else? He said that Abigail was a washed-up hack. That's not true, is it?"
"Certainly not. She simply doesn't practice law because she doesn't need the money." I looked into his eyes and he added, "She was the ﬁnest divorce attorney in South Carolina for years!"
I was quiet for a moment. Maybe Huey was right or maybe he was wrong, but I didn't care about Abigail right then. My stomach was killing me from what Nat had said. The war had begun again, and I wasn't sure I was up for the ﬁght.
Eleven
REBECCA: BOTHERED BY GNATS
s
SEVERAL days passed, and during that time Huey hovered all around me like Nat might jump out from behind the curtains and stab me to death with his Swiss Army knife. He answered the phone on the ﬁrst ring and kept an eye on the front door. No one would get to me without passing through Huey.
And Abigail? Every time Abigail had a thought she called me. She questioned me relentlessly about everything that had to do with the children. When she got tired of asking me about them, she questioned me over and over about Nat and every aspect of our relationship. By the time Friday arrived, she knew more about me and my poorly behaved brood than anyone could possibly want to know.
And on Friday, Nat called again. At work, but on my cell phone.
"Look, Becca, I want to apologize about the other day."
His words were surprising and, believe it or not, sweet.
I found myself remembering how much just the sound of Nat's voice had made me blush at one time in my life.
"For what?" I said with as much nonchalance as I could muster.
"For yelling. Look, you have every right to hire another attorney. And my attorney tells that this thing I'm supposed to answer is normal. So, please accept my apology, okay?"
"Okay."
An apology was unprecedented. Nat could knock over a waiter and his tray in a restaurant---which I had seen him do---and say that the waiter was totally at fault. The water or food could go all over everyone, and Nat would throw his hands in the air and say, Don't look at me! I had never heard him apologize for anything in his entire life.
"Maybe if you and I could just get together and discuss this document, it would be good. Anyway, I have some mail from the kids and you might like to read it. Have you had any communication with them?"
I dodged the question, wanting to hear what the letters from the children said.
"Not really," I said. "I sent Evan some water guns and I expect that I'll hear from Sami anytime now."
"Well, tomorrow's supposed to be a nice day, so why don't I drive up there and we can have lunch or something?"
"I have to work tomorrow..."
"Yeah, but you have to eat, right?"
"I'll call you back. Okay?"
There was silence for a moment and then he said, "Okay."
Huey was already on his cell with Abigail, and when he saw that I had hung up with Nat, he passed his phone to me.
"Rebecca?"
"Yep. Hey, Abigail."
"Nat called? What did he say?"
"He said he wants to have lunch tomorrow to talk about the interrogatory."
"Ha! No way." Abigail laughed and added, "But, this is typical. He just wants you to remove any questions that might make him look like the skunk he is, that's all. He doesn't want to be convicted of perjury either! Round one, our favor!"
"I'm a little nervous to see him, Abigail."
"You're not going to see him," she said.
"He has mail from the kids. I want to see it."
"He does? Hmm. I want to see it too. It could be very interesting for the family court judge. But I don't want you in harm's way. I mean, Rebecca, Nat has a handgun. So, let's be serious about this. And he's volatile. Who knows what he might do?"
"I'm going to call him back and tell him that I'll have lunch with him at Louis's Fish Camp. I'll be ﬁne. Nat's not gonna shoot me. Are you kidding? That would ruin his whole plan!"
Huey, who was standing by, could contain himself no longer.
"I'll be at the next table," he said. "Just let him try to make a scene. I can handle him. I have a black belt, you know."
This was the comic relief we needed. The vision of Huey in an all-white kung fu outﬁt was pretty funny.
"Well, it's been a while, I'll admit."
"What's he saying?" Abigail said.
Huey took back his phone. If there was one truism about cell phones, it was that everyone seemed to think it was necessary to scream into them. If you were within ten feet of the thing, you could hear everything on both sides of the conversation. Stupid.
"I said, I have a black belt, that I will be at the next table and that if Nat so much as raises his voice above a normal tone for one second, I will stop him."
I could hear Abigail clearly say, What are you gonna do, Huey? Karate chop his salad?
Before the day was out, we had a plan. Abigail and Huey would be in the restaurant. I was to say nothing about my knowledge of Charlene, nothing about the private investigator, and nothing about the pictures. I was to listen to Nat, hear him out and tell him that I would talk it over with my attorney and let him know.
"If you don't think you can handle it, Rebecca," Huey said, "I mean, that if you think you're going to be shaky from nerves or something, I can give you a little something."
"Like what?"
"An Ativan."
"Ativan? Oh, Lord! Listen, I took a half of one of those things one time and I slept for twenty-two hours. I'm not good with drugs," I said. "And y'all? I feel a lot better knowing you'll be there. I'll be okay, really. He's not going to get to me. Don't worry."
"I worry about everything," Abigail said.
"So do I," Huey said.
Me too, I thought.
I went back to Claudia's condo, thinking I would spend Friday night with takeout food, just painting. Huey wanted Abigail and me, to come for dinner to make a war plan, to role-play it, and go over it until it seemed like nothing to go through a lunch date with the man who had betrayed me and caused me the most unspeakable pain I had ever felt. I thanked Huey and declined.
I called Nat; he didn't pick up his cell, and I left a message to meet me at Louis's at one. I was glad he didn't pick up. The anticipation of seeing him tomorrow had not done a single thing for my appetite or my artistic ambitions.
I decided to continue being miserable by going online and looking at the Web sites of my children's camps. Every day they posted new pictures so parents could follow their children's camping experience. Sure enough, there were pictures of Evan in a canoe with another boy, smiling and waving their paddles and another of him helping a fellow camper blow out the candles on his cake. At Sami's camp, there were pictures of them in some kind of dramatic production and another of her on a tennis court. I sent them both emails, knowing they would go unanswered.
I couldn't make myself feel better, so I decided a hot shower might do the trick. Sometimes it was best to end the day earlier rather than later. I looked in the bathroom mirror and saw someone I barely recognized. I was pale and gaunt, as though I had been in bed for a month, suffering high fever and ﬂu. There were purple splotches under my eyes, the kind I got from lack of sleep. My stringy hair needed to be shaped. It was the middle of the summer and I had no tan. I looked just like the submissive, weak, washed-up housewife he thought I was. I could hear his voice.
There's nothing, do you hear me, nothing you do that I can't hire someone else to do! Your services are no longer required!
I had cried a river when he said that to me and I thought those words would ring in my ears forever. Worse, when he had said them, I had believed him. I was a housekeeper, a driver, a cook, a nag.
That was then. I was not that woman any longer.
I thought more about my appearance while I examined my teeth and gums. I could have called Abigail and asked her to borrow some power clothes, something black that would indicate my new strength. I decided, no, let him think whatever he wants to think. He would ﬁnd out soon enough that he had taken advantage of me for the last time.
On the other hand, why was I worried about how Nat thought I looked? Was there still some part of me that wanted to be attractive to him? Of course there was. It was only normal. How many songs were written about how the one who fell out of love would regret the good thing they had lost? Hundreds. Did I really want Nat to see me looking this bad? Yes, I did. The other side of me, the victim side, wanted him to see the ravages of his inhumanity. I wanted him to suffer like I had, to doubt himself and to feel guilt and shame and for once in his miserable double dealing existence on this earth, I wanted him to see what a horrible person he was. Would he? Probably not.
Abigail was right. I would be well advised to tell him nothing and just listen to what he had to say. Play the mouse that he thought I was.
I never got into the shower. Instead, I walked out onto Claudia's balcony and listened to the night sounds of the ocean roaring in and pulling away. I wondered if I would have the well of strength I needed when I saw him. I would have to exercise serious self-control. Would I want to throw something at him or slap him and call him a conniving bastard for taking my home and children away from me? For telling me I was a bad mother and making the children believe it? And me! I had believed it too! Or would I want to break down, weep like a pathetic fool and beg him to tell me why he had done these terrible things to me? God knows, another woman was no reason to behave the way he had.
My hair was wet from the spray of the ocean. I didn't care. I didn't want to paint anymore that night. Or eat. I decided to open a bottle of wine and just drink the entire thing myself. Or not.
What was it I wanted besides money? I knew then, right then on Claudia Kelly's balcony, that what I wanted was revenge. It wasn't necessarily custody or the house. It was revenge.
I wanted to humiliate Charlene. I wanted to slap her as hard as I could. I wanted to bankrupt Nat. I wanted to see him on the corner washing windshields for tips. I wanted my children to hate Nat's guts and love me completely. And I wanted my nice children to replace the aliens who had taken over their minds. How all these things would come to be remained a mystery, but there was no doubt that the thought of them made me hugely satisﬁed.
I thought I would have had trouble sleeping, but I guess the long drink of salt air had worked its charms. I slept more soundly than I had in weeks. Maybe, I told myself as I brushed my teeth in the morning, it was because a mission had materialized in addition to a plan. Revenge. Instead of dreading lunch, I couldn't wait to get there.
I dressed, wearing a pair of tan cotton pants and a lightweight blue sweater set and brown sandals. The weather report said it was going to be hot and steamy, and I thought, this is news? I blew out my hair and pulled it back in a clamp. I looked all business and not like someone trying to regain the affection of their estranged husband. No cologne. No makeup, except for lip gloss.
I went into the gallery, where Abigail and Huey were drinking Cokes. They were in Huey's ofﬁce but with his door opened wide, and even from where I was, I knew they were talking about me. Huey was gesturing like a trafﬁc cop at rush hour.
"Morning!" I said. "What are y'all talking about?"
Abigail turned to see me and said, "You, Rebecca! What else? Please tell Huey to relax."
"Now, Abigail, don't get me started," Huey said, adding, "Good morning, sweetheart. How did you sleep? Probably not at all. Heaven knows, I didn't."
God love Huey. Ever since he had taken me in, his nicknames for me became more familial with each day that passed. At this point I was practically his little sister.
"Actually," I said, "I slept like a bag of stones. I feel like a million dollars today."
"Well, our precious Baby Huey is a Nervous Nellie," Abigail said, smiling. "I think he needs an Ativan worse than he thought you might."
"Nellie indeed," Huey said to Abigail. "Pejorative remarks from you, missy, don't help a thing!" He turned back to me. "Are you really all right? My God, it's like David and Goliath! Have you got your slingshot?"
I went up to Huey, who was literally wringing his hands, got up on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek.
"Know what? When I ﬁrst met you, I thought how wonderful it would have been to have someone like you be my uncle or brother. But I think best friend of my entire life is accurate and true. You really are, Huey. Honest."
Abigail narrowed her eyes at me. "And? What am I? Chopped li-vah?"
"No! You're a hundred pounds of caviar!"
"Beluga?" Huey said. "God, I crave it! On little hot blinis with crème fraîche... what?"
We all laughed and hugged, and the conspiracy of three was ofﬁcial, the musketeer bond of legend was reborn and we realized how much we cared about each other. Victory was possible and more likely so because there was shared conviction, tenacity and enthusiasm. I hoped.
"So, who's watching the store today?" I said. "Can't close for two hours on a Saturday! Gosh! I didn't even think about it..."
"Not to worry!" Abigail said. "Miss Olivia and Byron. They should be here any minute."
Within the hour, they arrived and I was just about to receive some advice from Miss Olivia when Abigail launched into a discussion with Byron about getting some help with her house.
"What y'all think, Missis Abigail? Juss cause I be black dat I know all de housekeepers in de whole entire state ob Sout Ca-lina?" Byron did a little soft-shoe and began to sing "Ol' Man River" in his deepest baritone.
"I'll pay you a ﬁnder's fee," she said.
"I'd prefer a percentage of the ﬁrst year's salary," Bryon said without batting an eye.
"Fine. Whatever."
"Done," he said. They shook hands, leaving the details for later. "Give me a week."
I looked at Abigail and we just shook our heads, smiling. Byron was such a character.
"Come with me, dear," Miss Olivia said, taking my arm.
We walked over to the framing area. I didn't know how much she knew about my story, so I was on guard. She plopped her handbag on the table, perched herself on a stool and straightened herself as tall as she could.
"Now tell me," she said. "You're having lunch with your, your..."
"Nat," I said.
"Yes. With Nat?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"And what do you expect to come of it?" Although her blue eyes were faded with age, her ability to zone in on something was not.
"He has some mail from the children he promised to bring."
"Ah ha! Okay! And what does he want from you that Abigail cannot settle with his attorney?"
"Nothing." She had me.
"So then, he wants to see you face-to-face."
"I guess so."
"I see. And you want to see him?"
"Yes, ma'am, I guess I do."
She sighed and put her hand across her chest. "Lord, child, just don't go to meet him expecting much."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean just that. If you don't have big expectations, you can't be disappointed. So expect him to forget to bring the mail, expect him to be less appealing than you thought he would be and expect him to act ugly."
"You're right, of course."
"And Rebecca dear," she said and held up a ﬁnger in warning, "don't incite his temper because you don't want to be embarrassed in public. There's just nothing worse."
"You're right. Thank you, Miss Olivia. My own mother could never have given me such thoughtful advice."
I turned to see that Huey and Abigail were gone and Byron was tapping his wristwatch.
"You'd better hustle your bustle, Miss Rebecca, or you're gonna be late."
"Gosh! You're right!"
When I got to the porch of Louis's restaurant, Nat was already at his table. Ordinarily, I loved outdoor meals, but I had a lump in my throat the size of a walnut. I didn't know how I could eat at all.
Huey and Abigail were behind my seat, reading their menus, pretending not to notice me noticing them.
"Hi," I said.
Nat looked up to see me. He didn't stand to say hello. He looked irritated and we hadn't even said two words to each other yet.
"Hello, Becca," he said and managed to squeeze out a halfhearted smile. "Have you lost weight?"
"A little," I said.
"Sit down," he said. "This place looks like it's probably pretty good."
I sat, not waiting for him to have the manners to hold my chair. "It's Louis's. Remember him from Charleston?"
"Oh, yeah," he said, as his dim bulb went on. "That was a great restaurant!"
"Yeah. This is my favorite place."
"Come here with your boyfriend?"
"That is such a stupid thing for you to say, Nat."
He laughed his heh heh heh laugh and it made my skin crawl. I glanced over the menu. Things were not off to a good beginning.
The waiter appeared to take our orders.
"I'll have the Vidalia Vichyssoise and the Tuna Nicoise," I said.
"Whaddya fuckin' French now?"
He muttered this loud enough for the waiter to hear and then looked at him to see if he thought he was funny. The waiter did not think Nat was funny. My face got hot.
"I'll have the She-Crab Soup and the BBQ sandwich, but bring me a beer too, okay, pal? Whatever you got on tap is ﬁne."
"Sure thing, pal," the waiter said and looked back to me, rolling his eyes. "And a beverage for you, ma'am?"
"Iced tea, please, sweet."
I was mortiﬁed.
The waiter brought our drinks and put a breadbasket in between us. Nat dove in, taking a biscuit and slathering it with butter, shoved it in his mouth and continued talking, spitting crumbs at me. I wiped my face and pretended to listen, but for some reason I only heard every few words that he said. I was ﬁxated on his table manners and his lack of polish in general. Did he really think the waiter would like him using the F word? So far, he was acting like a coarse, ill-bred creep who didn't have a care in the world about anyone but himself.
Our soup arrived and I watched in amazement as he slurped and smacked the ﬁrst few bites. Did he always eat like a pig? No! Well, maybe he did.
"This is not half bad," he said. "So what do you think?"
"About what?"
"Aren't you listening, Becca?"
"Sorry, I was a little distracted, that's all. Tell me again what you said?"
"Jesus!" he hissed. "I said, some of the questions you want me to answer are messing with my reputation. Is that plain enough English for you?"
I pushed my soup away and looked at him evenly. "They're just questions, Nat."
"So! You and your lawyer wanna play hardball, huh? Is that it?"
He was hissing, and I could feel Huey's radar on the back of my head.
"No, that's not it. Here's what I want, Nat. I want fairness..."
Nat slammed his napkin on the table and leaned forward to me across the table and said, "Look, Becca. I could have you put in jail for the things you did to the children. And I might just still do it. You'll never know when, but one day you'll go back that slick little condo your friend loaned you and there will be a knock on your door. It will be a nice policeman ready to take you into custody for child abuse and..."
"You wouldn't do that to me and you know it," I said.
"Like hell I wouldn't!"
"Lower your voice, Nat. Please." How did he know where I lived? He was having me followed. Oh, ﬁne. I was very nervous then.
"You take all these questions off the papers and I'll consider your freedom."
"Nat!" I whispered as loudly as I could. "Please! Lower your voice."
"Get rid of the questions, Becca, and we'll talk about fairness."
The waiter removed our soup and put the entrees in front of us. Normally I think he would have asked if there was anything else he could get for us, but apparently he knew we were arguing and wanted to get away. I couldn't eat a bite.
All I knew is that the man opposite me was not the man I had loved. His whole face had changed. His jaw was tighter, his eyes were ﬁlled with hate and even his body language was different. He seemed more like an animal waiting to lunge for my throat---some horrible beast that killed without feelings for the victim.
"Did you bring the mail?"
"Don't change the subject, Becca. You always used to do that to try and run the show. It always annoyed me and it still does."
"Well, did you?"
"Will you dump the questions?"
"Nat, so far you have threatened me with jail and baited me with the mail from the children. I don't know which questions you want removed or why. All I want is a fair..."
"You stupid bitch! You want to ruin my name and my family's name? There is no way in hell you're going to get away with it, Becca."
"I'm not trying to get away with anything, Nat. I just want the truth to be known, that's all. In all fairness . . ." I stopped there because I knew I was wasting words.
Nat looked at me, leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. He was about to change his tactics, because the bullying wasn't as effective as he had hoped it would be.
"You don't ever lecture me about what's fair, okay? I already told you that I'll be fair with you. After all, you're entitled to something. I realize that."
"Something? Something?" I was on the verge of hyperventilating. I'll admit that. But now, on top of that, I was getting mad. Or going mad. I realized everyone around us could hear me and I didn't care. "How about you dressed up in your Clemson football jersey?"
I hadn't said it was all he was wearing, who he was with or what he was doing. But he knew exactly what kinky behavior my words implied.
Nat reached across the table and pushed my face, knocking me from my chair. The entire gathering of patrons on the porch of Louis's gasped, as though time was suspended for a brief moment, and seconds later there was insanity all around me. People were saying, Is she okay? I saw him push her! Let's get the check! Is she hurt? Someone call Louis!
A waiter helped me to my feet and led me over to the bar.
Huey jumped up and said, "See here! You, you brute!" Huey raised his ﬁsts, ready to take Nat on. "If you want to ﬁght, ﬁght with me!"
"Hold on, man!" Nat said, putting his hands in front of himself to keep Huey back. Huey was angry. He was determined to avenge my honor and actually had Nat cornered by the railing when Louis himself appeared.
"Do we have a problem here?" Louis said, with all the calm of a practiced rescue worker.
"Call the police!" someone said.
Louis looked at me for approval and I shook my head. "No police, thank you. Just get him out of here."
"Let's go, mister," Louis said, and took Nat by the elbow. Huey was still scowling and right behind Louis. Abigail was by my side. There was no way for them to avoid passing by me unless I ran inside, and I wasn't about to budge---not from bravery but from the shock of it all, I was rooted to the ﬂoor of the porch.
"You'll regret this, Becca," he said.
"I doubt it, Nat."
Abigail said, "No, Mr. Simms, she won't. But you will."
Nat shot Abigail a look and Abigail didn't ﬂinch.
"I'll be right back," Huey said and followed them down the ramp.
As Nat left, I went to the ladies' room with Abigail to wash my face.
"Good grief!" Abigail said. "That was insane! Thank God we were here!"
"Nat seems to have a little thing about pushing my face." I inspected myself in the mirror. "I'm okay."
"Oh, no. You go right to the dentist for x-rays. You may have a cracked jaw, a chipped tooth...who knows? We document this, Rebecca. We document everything. I'm going to ask for a restraining order ﬁrst thing Monday."
"Whatever. Let's get out of here," I said. "I left my handbag at the table."
When I returned, every eye was on me.
"Divorce!" I said, as gaily as I could. "He's a jerk!"
Everyone applauded and laughed a little and ﬁnally returned to their meals, giving me back what was left of my dignity.
The bill was on the table.
"He stuck me with the bill!" I said. "Perfect!"
"Oh, no he didn't!" Abigail said. "This goes straight to Harry Albright with a letter!"
"Nope!" Louis said, coming up behind us and snatching it from Abigail's hand. "This is on the house! Darlin'? I don't know you," he said to me, "but anytime you want to talk or have a quiet moment, you come on back here and see me. Now, how about some dessert?"
Huey said, "Thank God you're all right! Did y'all see the chocolate pecan pie?"
"Oh, Huey," Abigail said.
"What?"
She looked at me and then at him. "I adore you! That's all."
Twelve
ABIGAIL SAYS, TRUTH BE TOLD
s
I took myself down to Charleston for a number of reasons. One, my golf wardrobe was signiﬁcantly more up-to-date than my street clothes. Two, I had a ton of papers to pick up from Harry Albright's ofﬁce, which I could have had shipped or had sent by messenger to Pawleys but didn't because I wanted them in my hot little hands ASAP. And three, I had more business at the courthouse.
Mr. Albright had not been pleased to learn about Nat's outburst at Louis's or that I was ﬁling an order of protection, because that meant we would have to have a hearing. Or that it would be served to Nat at work, Saturday afternoon, his busiest day.
"See here now," he said, "do you really think Nat Simms is the kind of man who would hurt someone?"
"For a man who's been practicing law as long as you have, you don't know much about spousal abuse, do you Mr. Albright? You should see my client. Thankfully, her jaw wasn't broken, but she's very bruised. I have pictures and witness statements that I intend to use as evidence if we go to court. I still think the smart thing to do would be to tell your client that he may as well open his wallet and divide by two. There's nothing really spectacular about this divorce. You and I see this kind of thing every day. Just tell Mr. Simms to move out, return custody to my client and give her a fair settlement."
"We may come to some settlement, Ms. Thurmond, but your client is an abusive and negligent mother. No family court judge will ever allow her to do psychological damage to those children again. Or put them in harm's way. No, no. It's clearly in the best interest of the children that custody and possession of the home stands as it is."
"Your case is as thin and as shot full of holes as a piece of Swiss cheese, and you know it. But you want to rack up hours? Be my guest. I'm in no hurry. And the law, Mr. Albright, the law is on our side. By the way, we're having the house appraised this week. Thought you might want to inform your client."
I was never so glad of anything more than the fact that I had kept up to date with my CLE hours. Otherwise, they'd never let me in the courtroom. I still hoped it wouldn't come to a trial but if it did, I'd be ready.
It turned out that Harry Albright's ofﬁce was not actually a sewer, but it certainly was quiet. After all, let's be honest here, Harry's client pool was probably composed of Roman clergy and guys like Nat. Sure enough, his mother was at the reception desk working on a book of Find the Hidden Word puzzles. Immediately, my dislike of Harry Albright was transferred to her. It gave me pause to halt this intense intellectual pursuit, knowing that she may have harbored some secret desire for the international crown of Find the Hidden Word junkies, but I had a job to do.
"Ahem," I said.
She looked up with all the deliberateness of someone who had been watching me in her peripheral vision from the second I had opened the ofﬁce door. How dare I have
the audacity to interrupt her? Ooh, bad vibes abounded.
"And, you're...?" she said.
I felt like saying, Listen, you old witch, you're only supposed to work on October 31. But my inner pro whipped out my new business card and said, "I'm here to pick up the subpoenaed documents in the Simms case."
She gave me a long look, read my business card, rose from her ancient chair, embossed with the crest of a ﬁfth-rate undergraduate school, and picked up a cardboard box, holding it out toward me. "Running your own errands, are we?" She snickered.
This old goat actually snickered at me.
"Thank you," I said, taking the box from her. "And you're working for your son. At least his client got a job from his daddy. Have a nice day."
I didn't close the door behind me. Let the old bitch do it herself, I thought and smiled as wide as the Cooper River.
I threw the box in my trunk and zoomed off to the courthouse on Broad Street. I parked and was racing up the steps when I saw him. Julian Prescott was coming down the steps with someone. But I couldn't see his friend's face. My vision tightened on Julian's eyes like a hawk. He was beautiful. It was almost as though he could feel me there because he took a deep breath long before his face found mine.
"Abigail? Can it be you?"
"Yes. It's me. How are you, Julian?"
He hugged me, I smelled him and, oh, God, he smelled like heaven on this earth. I mean, what was this smell thing anyway? Why did it excite me that the son of a bitch who dumped me smelled good? Well, I'll have none of this again, I thought. I was ﬁne by myself and if I felt the need for a man it surely wouldn't be Julian Prescott.
"Well, I'm ﬁne! I am absolutely delighted to see you."
"You are?"
Every bit of shame and humiliation came rushing back.
"I'll see you tomorrow, Judge."
"Okay, yes, of course!"
Judge? Well, that was some fast-breaking news to me. "Judge?" I said, ﬁnding my voice.
"Yeah," he said, "after Lila left me for another lawyer . . ."
"She left you? You're divorced?"
Julian looked across the street trying to think of what he wanted to say. "Yes. I'm divorced. How do you like that? I mean, I could understand leaving me, but for another lawyer?"
I smiled at that. He was the same Julian, witty, handsome... single.
"You're right. Who would be crazy enough to choose two lawyers in one lifetime? Go ﬁnd a basketball player or some other, uh, what are you looking at?"
"I'm just looking at you, Abigail. How's John?"
"John passed away three years ago. Heart attack during knee surgery."
"Oh! God, I hadn't heard that. I'm so sorry."
I watched his mind move along and remember that he had heard about it---ﬁrst Ashley died, then John, then I dropped out of sight. Surely he remembered. It was the buzz of Columbia for a year or more. But it was such an awful story to even think about and he had trouble of his own at the time. Maybe he was just trying to be polite by feigning ignorance. Glossing things over so that we didn't relive our past right there on the steps of the courthouse. But the troubling point was that he knew and preferred not to acknowledge it.
"Hey!" I said, looking at my wristwatch. "I have a few minutes. Do you want to grab a cup of coffee? Catch up a little?"
"Maybe some other time. I've got to be somewhere right now. In fact, I'm already late." He looked at me for a few seconds, during which I remained cool and tried not to let my disappointment show. "But it is great to see you again, Abigail. You look wonderful!" He gave me a peck on my cheek and hurried down the steps, turning back to wave, knowing I was just standing there watching him like a schoolgirl. I was furious.
I listened to the click of my heels of the hard ﬂoor of the courthouse. I couldn't stop thinking about Julian and how embarrassed I was that he didn't even want to have coffee with me. I had not seen him in years! He couldn't deny that he was still attracted to me. Why didn't he say, Give me your phone number or Do you have a card or Are you practic ing law in Charleston now? No. He just said, see you around, great seeing you, girly girl, gotta go. He didn't ask for my phone number because he didn't want it. He was not interested in my marital status. He was not interested in me. Period. Screw him, I thought; he was probably shacking up with some stupid idiot twenty-year-old who had a daddy thing.
I ﬁled an answer and counterclaim on Rebecca's behalf to request full custody, ﬁfty percent of the assets and alimony and the order of protection, detailing Nat's behavior. Then I went to see the docketing clerk to see if there was a court date available near Labor Day. I wanted this disaster straightened out as soon as possible so that Rebecca could get her children home from camp, back in school and into some counseling, which I knew they desperately needed.
Still upset by my encounter with Julian, I did the only logical thing. I went to Saks to buy some "lawyer clothes." I looked in the mirror and decided I needed some "lawyer armor." This was a case for Armani. One black suit, one
navy suit, and three pairs of pumps later, I had a gaping wound in my wallet, but I was ready for battle. "How short do you want this skirt," the gal from alterations said.
"Shorter," I said. Let's see Judge Julian Prescott drool a river on Broad Street, I thought. In my war chest of depreciating assets, I still had great legs.
"Can you ship this to Pawleys?"
"Sure thing," Rosalie, the clerk, said. "As soon as the alterations are done, and that should be by about next Friday, we'll ship them right out."
"Any chance of getting them before then?" "Sure! If you need them, I'll put a rush on it." I gave her my card and said, "Could you call me when
they're ready?" "Sure." "Listen. I haven't bought clothes in a long time, so if
anything comes in that looks like it could do the job in a
courtroom, please call me." "Oh, are you a lawyer?" "Yes. Yes, I am." I thought about it for a minute. I liked
hearing myself say that I was a lawyer. I had missed it. "What kind of lawyer are you?" "An undertaker." We both laughed and she said, "I'll bet you are!" On the way back to Pawleys, I called Everett Presson. "Everett? Abigail here. Got a minute?" "Sure! How's it going?" "Slow but sure. Listen, what else have you got in your
bag of tricks?" "What do you mean? Like surveillance equipment?
New gadgets?" "Yeah, that and something else." "Like what?"
"I want Nat Simms's computer. If I include it in the request for production part of discovery, he's just gonna..."
"Erase the hard drive?"
"You got it."
"You want me to go get it?"
"Yep."
"Abigail! Are you asking me to actually go in this guy's . . ."
"I don't want to know how you do it. I just want the computer, and I don't want him to know we're coming to get it. Don't get caught!"
"Well, let me see what I can do. Anything else?"
"Yeah, it would be great if you could get an undercover cop to sell him some pot."
"That's a piece of cake. Maybe."
"And Everett? If there's a way for you to track his whereabouts..."
"Are you kidding? I have this new GPS deal. All I have to do is stick the button under his car and I can tell you how many times a week this bum goes to church. Hell, I even just bought myself a briefcase with a camera in it, and I can ﬁlm him having dinner in a restaurant."
"The Gadget King! That might come in handy," I said. "You wouldn't believe his table manners."
Everett had no idea what I was referring to, but he was astute enough to read between the lines. "You really want this guy, don't you?"
"I'm gonna nail his tail to the battery wall, Everett."
"And, I'm gonna help. Jesus, I hate guys like him."
"Me too."
We hung up, and all the way back to Pawleys I fantasized about what I would ﬁnd in Nat's papers. I walked in the house and dumped the box on the dining room table. The late afternoon light streamed in through the windows, highlighting a haze of millions of particles of dust.
Truly, something had to be done about the state of my house before I developed asthma or black lung disease.
I poured myself a glass of diet soda and began looking at the evidence. I don't know why I was so optimistic, because once I started sorting through everything, I saw I was missing months of MasterCard statements, phone bills and so on. But at least I knew what kind of charge cards he had and I would simply subpoena the records from the banks. It would take more time, but I would get the complete puzzle put together eventually. The missing statements were an annoyance because that would delay my readiness to take Nat's and Charlene's depositions. But I still had a few friends at the banks and maybe they could speed things along for me.
It was time somebody explained to Nat Simms that this was not a joke. When there was a request for production, you were legally responsible to comply.
I called Harry Albright's ofﬁce and spoke to his witch mother.
"Is Mr. Albright there?"
"No, I'm sorry," she snorted, in her ofﬁcious manner. "He's gone for the weekend."
I left my name and number and hung up, frustrated, knowing my frustration had just begun. That was the thing about practicing matrimonial law---the danger of losing was hidden in the cloak of tedium.
I could already predict the future of this investigation. I would ﬁnd the name of a cheap motel on his Visa card statement, one carelessly used early in the relationship, before the affair was fully ﬂedged.
I envisioned the whole revolting scene. Old Nat renting a room, desperate in a moment of passion. Charlene, a little sweaty from the humidity and reeking of some cheap cologne from the drugstore and the dry cleaning ﬂuid that stiffened her synthetic clothes, hiking up her skirt and rubbing Nat's pants leg right there in the reception area. The smells of curry and onions wafting all around them, coming from a hot plate in the back room. Pale thin children with wide dark eyes, peering through a ﬂowered curtain made from a bed sheet. A large picture of the Hindu deity Ganesha hung on the wall next to a calendar from a local bank. And the digniﬁed man from Pakistan or India or Nepal who takes the charge card, refusing eye contact with Nat and Charlene, embarrassed by the indignities of his immigration life, hating the fact that his livelihood depended on the continuing immorality of his new countrymen.
I could see the whole sordid business like a movie in my head.
Once I found the ﬁrst puzzle piece, I would subpoena the records of the hotel and ﬁnd Nat's name or Charlene's name and the room paid for that time on another credit card, probably from one of the banks in the photographs. I would subpoena the bank of that credit card and discover that the statements were being sent to a post ofﬁce box. Next, I would subpoena the post ofﬁce, only to have revealed that the box was rented in a ﬁctitious name. On and on it would go. One carefully hidden and then found piece of information would lead to another and another. I would need every shortcut I would ﬁnd to move this show down the road. Everything was on my side except time.
That was the sordid reality of divorce in these duplicitous times. My father used to say, Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when ﬁrst we practice to deceive. So did Sir Walter Scott. Neither one of them knew how dead on they were. It was my job to untangle Nat's web of deception and I would do it, one strand, one lie, one nasty little detail at a time.
I was startled by my cell phone. It was Byron.
"Hey, Miss Abigail. Do you have a minute?"
"Sure. What's going on?" I took the handful of envelopes I was holding and threw them back in the box.
"You sound aggravated. You okay?"
Well? It was nice of him to ask, wasn't it? "I'm ﬁne--- just doing paperwork."
"Oh, good. Well, I found you somebody to straighten out your house."
"Tell me about her. Or him."
"She's got a college degree in business, but she's got to save money to go to graduate school. She's a neat freak and she's a little hyper, but she's honest and works like a tornado."
"She sounds perfect. Neat freak is good and hyper doesn't bother me. Honesty is essential. Who is she?"
"My little sister, Daphne. She's a ball of ﬁre! Would you like to meet her?"
"Absolutely. Send her over. And Byron?"
"Yes'm?"
"Thanks."
I could feel him smiling through the phone. Byron knew he irked me sometimes, and he was pleased to have me even somewhat in his debt.
Thirty minutes later, I heard a rap on the screen door. I looked up to see a skinny-as-a-stick young girl of about ﬁfteen or sixteen standing there.
"Hello?" I said. "Can I help you?"
"No, ma'am! I'm Daphne and I'm the one who's gonna help you! Can I come in?"
"You are?" Gosh! She didn't look old enough to babysit, much less graduate from college! She couldn't have weighed one hundred pounds.
I held the door open, and Daphne walked straight into the middle of the living room. She stood there with her hands on her nonexistent hips and looked around. She ran her ﬁnger over the coffee table and an end table, grunting in disgust at the tip of her ﬁnger. Then she started talking.
"Byron say you live by yourself and that you are very smart."
"Yes, well, that's nice of him..."
"And he also say that you probably ain't much of a housekeeper..."
"Well, I have other priorities and..."
"Humph." Daphne walked up to me, wiped her hand on her skirt and extended her hand for me to shake it, and I did. "It's nice to meet you."
"It's nice to meet you too." I looked in her face for a glimmer of Byron's features. Her nose was small and narrow. Her cheekbones were high and pronounced. Her smile was wide open with the kind of authenticity that made you like and trust her immediately. In contrast to Byron's height and girth, all this tiny girl Daphne had in the way of family resemblance was attitude. "Do you want to look around?"
"May as well," she said, not waiting for my lead.
I explained to her that I wanted to convert my parents' bedroom to an ofﬁce, and she agreed that it would be the nicest place to work.
"You can watch the ocean while you ﬁgure things out," she said. "Byron said you're a lawyer?"
"Yep, that's right. With one client. But it's a good one."
Although Daphne probably had no earthly idea what I meant, from the condition of my house and having one client to claim, she surmised that I wasn't exactly wealthy.
"You sure you can afford me? My work is the best, but it ain't no bargain."
"I think so," I said and laughed. "I'd sell my jewelry to get help at this point!" She laughed with me, and over the next few minutes the deal was cut.
"Yeah, this is some mess you got here," she said. "I'll see you Monday morning."
I watched her walk away back to her little red car, and I couldn't help but chuckle to myself. She was a little ball of ﬁre all right and probably just what I needed to get my home and my business in order.
Thirteen
BURN THIS!
s
IT was about seven o'clock Saturday night when Everett called. I was so deep in thought and focused on preparing subpoenas that the ring of my cell phone scared me half to death.
"Everett?" "Got it!" "What? The computer?" "Yep!" "You're the best! Okay, so now we have to get it to a
technician who can copy the hard drive and tell us what's
on it!" "Already did that!" "And...?" "Pay dirt! The mother lode! Porn sites, teen chat
rooms, you name it, we got it!" "Oh, Everett! You're wonderful!" "All in the line of duty, Ms. Thurmond. And, I re

