Isle of Palms (46 page)

“It’s all about the dirt,” I said.

“Sure.”

“Let me help you,” I said.

“Here,” she said, “I’ll go get the salad.”

“Okay, we’re out back.” I went inside and out through the kitchen to the backyard.

I had a cooler in the backyard filled with beer and a few bottles of opened white wine. Emily was spreading a sheet over the table—pink and gray plaid, which actually looked pretty good next to the gray-and-white-striped seat cushions around my new table.

“Yeah, first I grabbed a contour sheet,” she said, “figures. But you have to say this looks, like, completely perfect.”

Lucy was unwrapping the plastic tumblers, plates, and paper napkins and, when Daddy arrived, the blender started to hum. The new grill, which we rolled over to the folding table, was fired up, and soon the ribs were spread across the grate filling the air with the scent of Stubb’s barbecue sauce and pork fat. There was nothing to compare with the smell of melting brown sugar, mustard, and meat cooking.

Trixie strolled in with preruffled feathers and Daddy immediately went to her side and was the consummate diplomat. Finally, she spoke to Emily.

“There now! Don’t you look nice?”

“Thanks, Gram,” Emily said. “I decided blond hair was better for the summer. I was gonna put some blue streaks in, but I didn’t have time.”

“I heard that,” I said to her, grabbing her arm as she tried to escape. “Was that necessary?”

“Yes,” she said, “good one, huh?”

“You’re my girl and don’t ever forget it,” I said to her in a low voice.

“Learned at the knee of the master!” she shot back and took off in the direction of David, who Lucy had breaking up ice in the cooler.

I turned back to see Trixie holding her bosom and Daddy shaking his head.

Then I heard him say to Trixie, “You know, these young people always want to get our goat, don’t they?”

“Ah imagine so,” she said, with her chin raised and her lips pursed as tight as a cheap perm.

Daddy took her arm and led her to Lucy, who was mixing rum drinks and fruit in her blender, which was attached to my kitchen by the longest orange extension cord I had ever seen.
Just give her one of your frozen bombs, Lucy. Set her mind right!

Bettina had her music blasting from her boom box and was dancing with Bobby, who was a dead ringer for John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever
, the way he moved. Good Lord, I thought, this is not your typical Lowcountry party. No one was wearing Weejuns or Pappagallos and there wasn’t a stitch of Lilly Pulitzer in sight, except for Trixie, who was fully swaddled in a watermelon print with a matching green sweater set. I realized that times had changed. The rest of us looked like we could have been from anywhere in the country. The Lowcountry had been invaded once again by Yankee apparel chain stores. We were in danger of losing our fashion identity. Then I giggled because I would rather have gone naked—
and I had done that, hadn’t I
—than look like Trixie.

By the time Jim arrived, there was a party in full swing.

“Surprise!” everyone said.

“Have y’all gone completely mad? Where did all this furniture come from?”

“Where do you think?” I said, taking his arm and bringing him to the gathering little crowd that we were.

“Girl! You shop Lowe’s like other girls shop Saks!”

“Ah was beginning to think you weren’t coming,” Trixie said.

“Hi, Mother!” He kissed her cheek. “You look like a picture of summer!”

Trixie smiled and twisted her pearls.

Jim was delighted. Everyone came up to Jim to wish him well on his trip, to tell him what a marvel he was, to say that they would miss him, and to ask when he was coming back. He spotted Emily with her new hair and smiled, obviously liking what he saw.

“You look beautiful, Emily,” he said, then turned to David, who had his arm around her shoulder. “Watch yourself with your arm, young man. That’s my only child in your possessive clutch. I can always come back here and—”

“Oh, Daddy,” Emily said.

All she had to do was say
Daddy
and Jim dissolved into a sputtering mush ball.

“Well, there’s a hand attached to it.” He took her by both shoulders and said, “Oh, Emily, I’ll miss you, sweetheart.” He threw his arms around her and hugged her until I thought she would wind up with cracked ribs. “You know my cell number, right?”

“By heart,” she said.

“Use it, okay? Call me if you need anything—especially if you’re thinking of doing something
stupid.”
He shot David a look that said it all.

“We’re not doing anything stupid, sir,” David said, blushing deep red.

Emily took David’s hand, and they walked away.

I lifted the last of the ribs from the grill, put them on a platter, and placed them on the table, thinking it would be a thousand years before I ever got the grill clean.

“Smells good,” said a familiar voice.

I looked around to see my oldest girlfriend.

“Frannie! You made it!”

“I wouldn’t have missed the chance to see all this! Wow! You have a house and a yard and everything! Saints preserve us! How’d you do it without me?”

“I had Jim.”

“Where is that old dog I dragged my behind all over hell’s half acre to see?”

“He’s here and he’s gonna faint when he sees you! Oh! I’m so thrilled to see you, you just don’t know. Where’s the other half of you? How much weight have you lost?”

“A billion pounds! Stress, a new man, and Weight Watchers. But you are not half as thrilled as I am! I can’t believe I’m here!”

I hugged her so hard I gave myself a chiropractic adjustment. “Is he single, I hope?”

“No, but getting separated. . . .”

I looked at her with disapproval and she gathered up one side of her mouth.

“Well, this one is actually
seriously
in the process. . . . You know, in Washington, they’re all a bunch of liars. It’s not so easy at our age. You just hope for the best and tell yourself it’s their mortal sin and not yours, right?”

“I don’t know, Frannie. Dating stinks. Let’s get you a drink and go find Jim.”

“Is that Frannie?” Daddy said, coming through the crowd with Lucy’s arm intertwined around his. “Well! What a nice surprise!”

“Yes, sir, Dr. Lutz. Great to see you again!”

They shook hands and by the look on Frannie’s face, it was clear she was amused by Daddy’s proximity to Lucy. It didn’t take long for Lucy to clarify.

“Hey, I’m Lucy, Frannie,” she said, “I live next door and Dougle Darlin’ is my sweetie-pie.”

“Well! That’s great! Really!” Frannie said and, turning to me, mouthed
Whoa!
“About that drink?”

Jim was at the cooler, pulling out a beer.

“Hey, ugly,” she said, tapping his shoulder. “What’s this I hear about you abandoning the East?”

“Oh, ho! Look who’s
here!
And, who
you
calling ugly, ugly? Give me a meaningful hug!”

“Look at you with all this nasty gel in your hair! Go take a bath!”

“What? Look at all your hair! Ain’t you never heard of a beauty parlor?”

“Bump you!”

“Yeah? Well, bump you!”

This continued as I knew it would until they decided to really talk to each other. They were teasing and laughing like they were ten years old again. Same old tune, new lyrics. I was so excited to have a night with them and suddenly wished everyone else would leave. However, I had to feed the crowd.

I needn’t have worried about moving things along because as soon as they saw the platter of ribs, everyone fixed themselves a plate. Some people sat at the table and others stood by the buffet, laughing and talking. Trixie was thoroughly entertained by Daddy and Lucy, and of course, Jim spent some time with her. Soothing Trixie and her cat fits were requiring more effort than I thought she was worth. If Jim wanted to suck up to his mother, I understood because after all, she was his mother. But I, perched on my high moral ground, would have no part of it. Anyone who abused my child was dead in my heart.

And then I thought about Daddy. Soothing his cat fits would probably have looked like more effort than he was worth to Jim. Funny how we excused our own relatives everything and our in-laws had to twist any sort of forgiveness out of us like they were asking for a kidney. But maybe it was because they set the tone for vengeance the first moment they laid eyes on us and continued for years to be suspicious over whether we were good enough for their children? Ring a bell? Yeah, like freaking Big Ben.

I looked around to see where Emily was. David was in the hammock and she was pushing it. They were talking and laughing—probably about what a bunch of old geezers we were—but they seemed to be having a good time. He was a nice young man and I thought a pretty good influence.

Finally, around eleven, everyone went home until it was just Jim and Frannie in the kitchen, taking over the clean-up mission, and Lucy and I in the yard. Daddy had left first to follow Trixie over the Cooper River Bridge. She announced that she would feel safer driving by the drunken scum who convened nightly at the foot of the bridge on the Charleston side if she had a charming escort. Emily and David had disappeared. If I had to guess I would say that they had stolen a six-pack and had run to the beach as fast as they could. Just a guess, you understand. Brigitte, Bettina, and Bobby all left together, but not before they gave Jim a gift.

“Open it!” they said.

Bobby rolled his eyes and said, “I ain’t had nothing to do with this. Nothing.”

It was a T-shirt with our logo on the back and on the front, on the breast pocket, was printed in one-inch pink letters: BIG JIM, HEAD BANANA.

“Do you realize what this will do for my social life in San Francisco?” he said good-naturedly.

“Oh, ma
Gaaad!”
Bettina said. “I didn’t think of that! I sware ta
Gaaad,
you guys!”

“You’re just a scandal, Jim,” Brigitte said. “Come on. We all gotta work tomorrow.”

“Y’all, thanks for coming,” I said to them out front by their cars, “I think this meant a lot to Jim.”

We all stood there in the moonlight feeling pretty good about ourselves. More than that, we had established ourselves as our own little tribe. We belonged to each other and we belonged together. Even Lucy. Emily. Jim.
Anna’s Cabana
had bonded some unlikely characters. If I had known that independence could cause this kind of adrenaline rush, I probably would’ve tried to strike out long ago.

An hour later, Lucy was still hanging around, drinking wine with us. I thought that maybe she didn’t see that I wanted my old friends to myself and so at first, I was a little annoyed that she didn’t leave when everyone else did. I helped myself to a beer from the refrigerator, my first of the night, and went out to the backyard where she was with Jim and Frannie. It was so nice to see them around my new table, relaxed and talking, but they seemed serious. Too serious.

“What’s going on? Did somebody die or what?” I said.

“No,” Frannie said, “but you might when you hear what Lucy just told us.”

“What? Emily?”

“Emily’s fine. Sit,” Jim said, “I don’t feel like picking you up off the ground.”

I looked from face to face. The news was obviously horrible—too horrible for Jim or Frannie to tell me.

“What happened, Lucy?”

“Anna? You ain’t gonna believe this.”

“Okay, what?”

“On my life, Anna, I never meant to interfere in your business.”

“Get to the point, okay?”

“Well, remember how I told you that I used the Internet to search for my parents?”

“You found them? Why that’s wonder . . .”

“No, I didn’t find my momma and daddy. I found Everett Fairchild.”

“All I did was go to Google and type in his name. He’s a Sea Pro dealer in Clearwater, Florida.”

It
was
a good thing I was sitting down. I could barely breathe.

“Guess what else?” Lucy said.

“You’re not gonna like this,” Jim said.

“No kidding,” Frannie said.

I waited.

“He’s the regional sales manager and he’s coming here in August for a sales meeting at Wild Dunes. It’s all on his website.”

“You
will
both be back in August?” I said to Frannie and Jim.

“Nah. Too hot here in August,” Jim said.

“He’s screwing with you, Anna. Of course we’ll be back. But we need to talk this through and then we need a plan.” She was the same Frannie—capable and in charge.

“Holy Mother. What were the odds on this?” I took a long drink of the beer. “I’ve got some serious thinking to do. Lucy, did you tell Daddy?”

“Hell no!” She rolled her eyes all over her head. “I’ve been sweating all night debating how to tell you this anyway! I wouldn’t tell him!”

“Good. Please don’t. For the moment, I think it’s best if we just keep this to ourselves. This is my issue and I have to think it through. I knew this would happen one day.”

“That’s not all,” Lucy said. “I found the card that came with the plant. It must’ve fallen out and slipped under my desk.”

“Well?” I said, waiting for what couldn’t be any more unnerving that what she had just told me.

“Well, it was weird to me. It was from some guy named Jack Taylor. It said,
‘I loved meeting you, Sheena. Let’s be friends. Jack Taylor.’
Who the hell is Jack Taylor?”

“He’s the boyfriend of one of my clients. Good grief. What’s that about?”

Plan for the Mother Lode

WHEN Lucy finally wandered back through the yard to call it a night, it was after eleven. Jim, Frannie, and I—the Unholy Triumvirate—were left at the outdoor table to assess the night, the bomb Lucy had dropped, and to generally try and make some sense of life. Jim poured himself a glass of Chablis, draining the bottle he had kept for himself on the side. Frannie pulled out a pack of Parliaments from the folds of her linen pants and lit one with a Bic lighter.