Isle of Palms (2 page)

Gargantuan thanks to all the salon community, who perform miracles every day and who gave me great advice and stories to tell—Francis DuBose of London Hair in Mount Pleasant, the entire cast of characters from Salon and Company on the Isle of Palms, and last but not least, that fabulously talented and wickedly funny magician William Howe of the John Barrett Salon in New York.

Thanks to Bruce and all the guys at the Wine Connection in Pound Ridge, New York, for the correct vino to go with Anna and Jim’s dinner at High Cotton in Charleston, South Carolina. Think it’s easy to plan dinner, do you? Yeah, well, I hadda bring in some high-tone talent for that one!

Many thanks also to Marjory Wentworth for her friendship and support. Madge! Love you, girl! When are you coming up? Special thanks to Michael Uslan, my Hollywood producer friend of
Batman
and
Swamp Thing
fame, who believes my crazy books should be movies and keeps trying to move that along with ideas while he’s busy with ninety-two projects of his own. Michael, if a serious offer ever shows up, you know who I’m calling, don’t you? Good. Okay. That’s settled then. And thanks to Mary Jo McInerny for her love, vigilance, humor, and everything—she’s the greatest cousin and friend a girl could have. And we have to discuss my other cousin, Charles “Comar” Blanchard Jr. Thank you, thank you, thank you! Without this handsome, young, talented fellow, my family could never enjoy the inner coastal waterway or sleep as well as we do when we are there. And Dennis Craver of Beaufort—what a great friend you are too! Honey, this man can flat steam some oysters! Also thanks to Alex and Zoe Sanders. To Jonathan Green, for lifting us up to a higher place. Love you, man!

To Cassandra King, who is my writer buddy (and who wrote
The Sunday Wife
—go buy it!), for her friendship, advice, humor, support, and just for being such an inspiration to us all. And, okay, Pat Conroy, the Franks love you to pieces always and forever. You among all men we know have paid their lifetime dues with us. We will split the check where others go into comas. Come on back, anytime. Did y’all read his new book—
My Losing Season
? Everything he writes is fabulous. Gotcha, bubba!

To Robert and Susan Rosen of Charleston for their decades of amazing friendship and generous support of my new career—I can’t think of a soul who wouldn’t be thrilled and honored to call y’all their friends.

Special thanks to the township offices of the Isle of Palms and Mount Pleasant for providing me with statistical information and good humor.

And now for the big kahunas at Berkley Publishing. Gee whiz. Where do I start? For Norman Lidofsky and his crew of Houdinis, I offer my services to polish your shoes. Okay, maybe I didn’t mean that literally, but my gratitude isn’t fiction. But you know how indebted I am to all of you. As always to Joni Friedman, my art director, for her unsurpassed visions of great beauty and to Rich Hasselberger, for your extraordinary efforts on my behalf, please accept my most sincere thanks.

Obviously, I kiss the ground my magnificent and fearless publisher, Leslie Gelbman, walks on and thank her in all my prayers for her extreme patience, excellent guidance, and generous support. For Liz Perl and Hillary Schupf? Man! I love y’all so big time! Not only are you both brilliant but you make the hard parts of selling books such a breeze. Thank you, thank you. And so do you, Matthew Rich. Mr. Planet PR, I’ve got a place in my heart for you forever. And Buzzy Porter? Okay. Insider information: All southern writers, no, all writers on book tour should try to schedule a signing with Buzzy at B&N in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. It will blow your mind at how this man can organize an event. Needless to say, you’ll sell a whole lot of books. Besides all that, Buzzy is a doll baby to work with. Little Debbies and cappuccinos! Love you, Buzzy! Crazy name but a very sane and very wonderful man.

And I know she’s sick to death of plays on her name, but who wouldn’t want their editor to have Fortune for a last name? Gail Fortune is the extraordinary talent behind anything worth a rip that comes out of my work. Not only does she have the capacity to see from day one what I’m trying to accomplish with a story, but she’s got the tool chest to help me get the job done. Never unkind, never anxious, always available. Gail, it’s you and me, baby. Forever! And, thank you for everything over and over.

For my agent, Amy Berkower? Well, Amy? I never talk to you that I don’t learn something new about this crazy world. Thanks for understanding me and for all of your excellent help. Tell Al I still owe it all to his book—
Writing the Blockbuster Novel.

Finally, I’d like to say thank you to all the readers and booksellers. I’ve loved all the emails. I’ve loved being in your stores. Most of all I’ve loved connecting with you, especially when my stories inspire you to tell me yours. In a few short years you’ve shown me a truth that I suspected was there all along—that storytelling allows people to find common ground and better understand each other. In this very imperfect and uncertain world, a little more understanding and tolerance can only be a very good thing. Thank you and love you from the bottom of my heart, ’eah?

Prologue

OKAY. I had a dream about my mother last night and I always seem to dream of her when she has had a beyond-the-veilitch to scratch my back. She was waltzing with my father at an enormous celebration of some kind. They were smiling and having a wonderful time. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Doc so happy or Momma so beautiful. She never said a word. She just smiled at me. I had so many questions I wanted to ask her but for some reason, I couldn’t speak.

The next thing I knew, I could sense the light of morning growing all around me. I must have been born with the thinnest eyelids in the world. You know how that is? Well, I realized I was awake. But for a few moments I hung on to the fringes of sleep, trying to retain the details of everything I had seen. I wondered, like I always did, if there was a larger meaning to the dream. Half of my DNA is German, but it was the all-American Lowcountry remainder that wore itself out to a frazzle searching for cosmic explanations.

Maybe something
was
going to happen. Had we all been at a wedding? The old salts said that when you dreamed about weddings it meant the opposite, that something was coming to an end. More change? No, thanks.

That was when my feet hit the floor. There was no way another blessed change
could
happen without me pitching a hissy fit. Big time. We’d had enough change around here to choke a goat. We had made it through Thanksgiving and were now trying to focus on Christmas. Thanksgiving had been enough to make anybody’s head burst like an overripe melon. Like Bettina says all the time,
it’s enough already.
Bettina’s from New York. She’s our manicurist and you’ll love her when you meet her.

There’s so much to tell you about.

Anyway, next I got myself a cup of coffee—ground Colombian beans with a piece of split vanilla bean thrown in the filter—and went outside to get the paper and look at the sky. The first thing I noticed was that my blasted garden still continued to climb all over my trees and my house. Every night it took over a little more. Not that it wasn’t pretty. Hell, no! It was nothing less than a horticultural miracle. Jack’s beanstalk.

The sky looked fine, no storms coming or anything like that. In fact, it was going to be a beautiful day. I stood there watching the sun rise on the Isle of Palms. Right then and there, I decided that my dream had been a message that it was way past time to tell my story. So, here I am.

Now, you don’t know me yet, but by the time I’m all done working my jaw, you’re gonna see that I’m not one to blab. Even though I’ve heard more tales than every bartender in Ireland, I’ve always tried to keep my distance from trouble. Gossip was trouble and I gave it a wide berth. At least I had tried to. Not that I hadn’t had my share of tight spots. Lord! Jeesch! Man! There were days when I thought the devil himself was out to get me. Maybe he had been, but lately, I had been feeling like he thought he’d given me his pitchfork enough. Not that I’m suspicious, but don’t repeat that, okay? Saying things were going great might get his attention.

Here’s the thing that had landed me in trouble in the first place. Most of my years had been spent careening through life, keeping my plans on a back burner. I kept waiting to live. But wasn’t that what women did? Didn’t we always put duty to others before our own ambitions? Were we not the caretakers, the peacemakers, the homemakers, the ones who told our men and our children that we would always be behind them, no matter what? We told them that everything would be alright and that life was worth living.

Well, most of us tried to do these things. Not all women. Some women were so mean if you looked at them funny your hair could turn into snakes. But all they ever got themselves by being mean was older and more bitter. Ooh! I’d tolerated a few women like that for too long. Somebody better tell them to run and hide because Anna’s talking now. That’s me. Anna Lutz Abbot.

My professional life has earned me nothing but beat-up eardrums and a grossly underexercised tongue, mainly because I own a salon. I’ve been working in the salon world for getting on to twenty years. See, when my clients bared their souls, what I thought and what I said were very often two different things. Who in this world has the privilege to really speak their minds? The lunatics, honey, that’s who. Naked truth from my lips would have put me in the poorhouse long ago. Besides, isn’t it better to try to deal with people and all their problems with some little bit of sympathy? Of course it is. But, bottom line? I have heard it ALL!

Have I got a story to tell? Yeah, honey, let’s get you a glass of sweet tea and then plop yourself right down in my chair. I’m gonna tell you a lot of secrets, but if I hear them told, I’ll come after your tongue with my shears. Or worse, my hammer! Yes, I will. This entire tale is true to the very last word and all the names and places are real to expose the guilty.

I was telling Arthur the other day—Arthur is the man who drives me crazy with the shivers—that I had been thinking that maybe it was time to tell some people about how my whole world had changed in just a few months. If it could happen to me it could happen to anybody, right? He laughed so hard I thought he might up and die on me, so I said, Just what the hell is so funny, and he said, Since when
don’t
you talk? I was not amused. Not at all. No.

Besides my own discoveries, it had occurred to me that it would be très cool if people knew about another side of life in the Lowcountry and baby, there’s plenty to talk about. Every possible thing you needed to know about southern living was discussed under the roof of Anna’s Cabana—and don’t tell me, I know: Anna’s Cabana sounds like the name of a seedy juke joint on the back beaches of the Virgin Islands. It does! But, when you come to understand how it was given that name, you’ll see why I let it happen.

In any case, my crazy little salon is a gold mine in human behavior studies. When you take one part old salts, mix it up with gentrification and garnish it with tourists, you got yourself one mighty cocktail, ’eah? What happened here a few months ago literally turned the tide. It did. In any case, if I charged the same for listening as I charge for fixing hair, I would own the biggest house on this beach. No joke.

And this whole drama isn’t just about what I hear at work. No, no. There’s a whole universe here on this island. We say we are from Charleston, but we are really from East of the Cooper—Cooper River, that is. Around here you’re either from Charleston, East of the Cooper, West of the Ashley (that’s the other big river), or out by Awendaw. Maybe you lived in one of these weird developments that keep cropping up that look like a movie set of downtown or one of the islands you could only get to by boat. The point is that in this neck of the woods, you can better believe that where you hang your hat makes all the difference in how you tick. I am and have always been an island girl and there was nothing to be done about it.

My family hasn’t been in Charleston for a thousand years. We don’t have some grand family home, plantation or any silver we rescued from the Yankees by hiding it in the bricks of our chimney. In fact, I don’t own a lick of silver and it suits me fine. Polishing silver would not be the best use of my time. But we do love the history of the Lowcountry with a wild passion and we romanticize it all, telling ourselves we are anything except ordinary just because we can call this place home.

My momma and her people were from Beaufort and I guess the only thing unusual about my background is that my daddy immigrated here with his parents after World War II. They wound up in Estill and were peach farmers. That means my daddy and his daddy worked like coolies to get to where they got and what they got was a comfortable but unspectacular life with no frills.

I can tell you right now that I was never indulged, coddled, or overly nurtured. But that was probably because my daddy’s family had to fight for their very survival. Things were tough in the early days for them and for me too. For the longest time it seemed like my life would be an endless exercise of pushing big rocks up a hill. Take money. My daddy was the one who taught me the value of a dollar. Okay, he’s got a reputation for being a massive tightwad but he can’t help it. And, sometimes when I least expected it, his wallet would open, the moths would escape, and then the buckolas would start to flow. He’s full of contradictions, just like everybody else. Anyway, I learned from him that saving money and perseverance could get you something you wanted if you wanted it badly enough. And the only thing I ever really wanted was to get back to the Isle of Palms and live my life.

That took longer than it should have, to say the very least. But you see, nothing in my life ever happened quite the same way it did for the other people I knew. Everything happened in wild extremes, which made for a whole lot of hullabaloo and lessons in life. Frankly, I could do without more learning experiences for a while. (Lord, I hope You heard that.) The most important thing I learned is that to be truly happy, you’ve got to pay attention to that stupid little inner voice we all have. It knows what you need and will drive you shit crazy until you listen to it. Guaranteed. My New Age clients—and I know them on sight because they wear crystals to which they have attached human names—call it
connecting with the universe.
Like my daughter says, whatever. I’ll just stick with my own name for it, thanks. Now, that inner voice thing sounds simple but you wouldn’t believe how many people I know who are stuck in the rut they dug for themselves. And the good Lord didn’t mean for so many people to be so unbelievably dissatisfied with their lives. I’m pretty sure about that.