Plantation (45 page)

I would have to ask Mother if she could put her hand on my great-great-grandmother’s diaries. Maybe I was finally old enough or wise enough to have patience for them.

In New York, I had opted for meals of convenience for too long, at least when Richard was present. His dinners consisted of grilled something, salad bar, and a starch of some kind. Fast everything. And while I truly had learned to enjoy cooking, our lifestyles had shortened time spent in the kitchen and time spent together at a table, so much so, that food had become little more than fuel. All the romance of cooking had been lost along the way.

At home here in the Lowcountry, I had a new vision of the possibilities of food and cooking. Eric would catch fish and clean it. He would bring it to me to cook. I would marinade it, or brush it with different types of oil and herbs. Its flavor would come to life like it was supposed to, unlike the bland fish I bought at Food Emporium in New York—fish that had been on ice for maybe two weeks! No, food would bring us closer together—the act of a shared meal would resurrect itself as an intimate family experience.

It made me laugh a little to think of all the unnecessary pomp that accompanied Mother’s table. I would not teach Eric that I reigned P l a n t a t i o n

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as queen, but that together we had made the meal and that’s how it would be remembered—that we owned those moments together.

Finally, the kitchen door swung open and there was Josh.

“Morning!” I said, calling out in a low voice, so that no one would hear me but him. “You ready for a little breakfast?”

He wore only a white T-shirt and khakis. Bare feet, bare arms.

Jesus, he was flammable. He walked toward me. Those peaceful and happy brown eyes of his were a mirror of his disposition.

“Morning!” he said, and kissed me on the cheeks. “Rest well?”

“Yeah. You know that I just realized that inside of twenty-four hours, the entire faculty I engaged to educate my son is in one way or another entangled with a member of my immediate family. I got up and did the only thing a southern girl can do in this situation.”

“What’s that?” He was laughing at me with his mind. I could almost hear him.

“I put ‘Ironic’ on the CD player, lip gloss on my lips, and I made biscuits! You have any other advice?” I pulled the baking sheet from the oven and rested it on the countertop. “I’m starving.

Impending crises make me hungry.”

“You shouldn’t worry so much. Let’s eat; it smells like heaven in here.”

Indeed, the sweet air of melted butter and cooking bread satu-rated the room until my mouth watered. The compulsion to scrape the bottom of a hot biscuit from the baking pan with my fingers and pop it in my mouth was more powerful than the thought of blistering my fingers and mouth. Josh scooped up two biscuits with the spatula, spread them with butter and a dollop of Miss Sweetie’s TBDJOTP Strawberry, and plopped them in our mouths. We rolled our eyes and licked our fingers, steam escaping with groans of delight. Face it; there’s nothing like a hot biscuit.

At around eight, we put the dishes in the dishwasher and I said good-bye to him on the front steps. I was relieved to see him leave and to know that nothing had changed between us. We had an easy 3 6 2

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k rapport. For right then, I imagined, a part-time friend was all I needed or could handle.

I had half expected Trip to show up to put the boat in the river, but he was nowhere to be seen. I guessed he was trying to figure out what to say to me when we would meet and still hadn’t decided. I knew I was right because only something as potentially damning as being caught as he had been could keep him from the Edisto.

It certainly would be interesting to see how our team of tutors interacted on Monday when they would begin their work with Eric. I would see what I would see. I was thinking of all these things when the phone rang. I leaped to answer it, not wanting it to wake Mother or Eric. It was Trip.

“You up?” he said.

“Been up since six. What’s going on?” I wrapped the spiral phone cord around my finger, suppressing a snicker the size of Oregon.

“You alone?”

“Yes! Eric and Mother are still sacked out. Hot Lips went home.”

Silence from his end.

“Trip, for God’s sake! Quit acting like the Fugitive! You want my opinion? Of last night, I mean.” Was I really going to tell him what I thought?

“Do I have to buy your silence, Caroline?”

“I’d cut out my own tongue before I’d tell on you.”

“No, I mean, if Frances Mae knew that I had dinner with Rusty, she’d do to me what I do for my clients.”

“Trip? Why don’t you come over and let’s go out in the boat.

We need to talk.”

Thirty minutes later, Trip lumbered into the kitchen, sheepish and nervous. I poured him a coffee in a Starbucks traveler and reheated a few biscuits.

“Well?” he said.

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I put his breakfast in a paper towel and looked at him.

“I’d like to initiate this meeting with a general statement,” I said, pulling on my denim jacket.

“What’s that?”

“That everyone in this family is severely screwed up. Let’s go scare the alligators.”

I grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and went out the back door, hoping he would realize that I was more his sister than he had probably thought.

The engine turned over easily and the smell of diesel gasoline came over us in a breeze. What should have smelled like toxin registered like perfume. Trip stuffed his mouth with the biscuits and chugged his coffee while tossing the loops of rope from the cleats.

I pushed off dockside with the heel of my sneakers and put the engine into reverse.

“I’m driving! Let’s ride over to the Ashepoo,” I said, “I wanna see what’s going on.”

“Plenty’s going on.”

They were ominous words. I waited for him to tell me and he waited for me to ask. I slowed the boat down and turned to face him.

“Okay, Trip, spill it.”

“I have a question.”

“Sure,” I said, “fire away.”

“Do you intend to stay here on the plantation or do you think you and Eric will move down to Charleston?”

“Why? I mean, I don’t know yet. I just left my husband and my head’s still kind of spinning from that. I was hoping to just take the summer to think it all through, you know?”

“Eric’s a great kid.”

I ran my hand through the water and shook it off, wiping it on my jeans. “Thanks,” I said, wondering where this was leading.

“I’ve been approached by some developers,” he said, “real estate guys. They want to buy a thousand acres and turn it into a 3 6 4

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k housing community—you know, like those gated plantations on Hilton Head?”

“Mother would never agree to that. This land is hers.”

“Yeah, but we’re gonna inherit it and this would be a great windfall for us.”

I looked at him and narrowed my eyes, trying to read his mind.

I had sensed some urgency about him earlier on the phone but this was something larger. I didn’t want to pry, but maybe, I thought, I could wiggle it out of him.

“Trip. What’s going on? This land is Mother’s to do with whatever she wants. She might leave it to us; she might give it to the Nature Conservancy. She’s pretty involved with that, you know. I wouldn’t count on anything except the fact that she has taken her responsibility to hold this land together in one piece very seriously for the better part of her entire life. Did you tell her about this?”

“No, I wanted to talk to you first. It could be worth as much as four million dollars, Caroline, depending on how much river-front we gave them. That’s a lot of money. Two for you, two for me. Think about it.”

I let go a long low whistle. It
was
a fortune. Ten years ago I wouldn’t have thought the plantation was worth anything much.

But, real estate had escalated for a variety of reasons—more people working from home, baby boomers taking early retirement—all sorts of things. He was right about that but missed the greater point. It wasn’t our call to make—it was Mother’s.

“Move over,” he said, “I want to drive.”

I gave him the wheel. “Still, Trip, this is so out of character for you. Since when have you been so desperate for money that you’d try to talk Mother into a scheme like this?”

He speeded up the boat and now we were heading full throttle down the Edisto.

“I can’t talk about it.”

“Slow down, Hoss, you’re gonna get us killed!”

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He cut the gas and we slowed down abruptly, rocking in our own wake. “I might get killed anyway,” he said. When he looked at me, I saw a look of terror on his face I had never seen before.

“Trip! If you’re in trouble, you have to tell me!”

“It might be better if I let them just put a bullet in my head.

I’ve thought about killing myself a lot lately.” He reached over to his cooler and took out a Heineken, draining about half of it before he took a breath.

I thought about his liver and that he was killing himself slowly.

It was finally dawning on me that he was deadly serious. What had my brother done?

“How deep is the hole, Trip, just tell me that, okay?”

He looked out at the river, probably debating whether or not to tell me. The birds swooped and squawked and Trip listened and watched as though it would be his last chance—a condemned man, trying to memorize the thing he cherished most. In my fear I began to cry. What in the world had he done?

“The hole’s deep. I racked up almost five hundred thousand dollars of bad gambling debt and I’m afraid of getting killed. And, while I was pondering my probable shortened life span, I finally admitted to myself that I hate my wife’s guts.”

“Jesus Christ! What are you telling me?” Gambling? We’d get to Frances Mae in a moment, but gambling? My brother, the hot-shit lawyer, a gambler?

“You know the poker machines at the gas stations?”

“No. I mean, it’s not something I would notice.”

“Yeah, well, I never noticed that I had this addictive personality either. First, it was football. Hell, everybody bets on football.”

Not in
my
world, but that wasn’t the time to point that out.

“You couldn’t stop, right?”

“Right. Some weekends I’d win thirty thousand dollars! I mean, it’s a great feeling! You know?”

“I think that’s what junkies say, Trip.”

“Thanks, Caroline. Thanks a lot!”

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D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k

“Hey, stupid! Somehow I’m gonna help you figure this out, okay? But don’t expect my approval. Now, about Frances Mae . . .”

“Yeah, Frances Mae. Okay—consider my options. A gal like Rusty Perretti—gorgeous, sexy, smart as a whip, cultured . . .”

I reached out and put my hand on his arm and said, “Trip?

God forgive me for this, as much as I hate infidelity and believe it’s sleazy, I don’t think there’s anyone on earth who would blame you.

Whatever you decide to do, I’ll support you. But don’t run around on Frances Mae indefinitely. It’s gross and Rusty’s too nice a gal to drag her into some triangle deal, you know?”

“You’re right, but it seems that I’m already addicted to Rusty.”

“Give it a rest, bubba. Frances Mae catches you? She’ll clean your clock.”

Thirty-six

Holy Moly

}

RIP and I rode the river for almost an hour before returning home to drop me off at the dock. He all but T chewed the ears off the side of my head with the details of his situation before bringing me back.

I had decided to work in the garden before it got too hot. I could think things through when I worked in a garden. While I walked to Mr. Jenkins’s toolshed, I couldn’t take my mind from Trip’s
situation
. He was in damn serious trouble. He told me that he had used the interest from his portfolio at first, then the principal to cover his debts. Wisely, he had not fully apprised Frances Mae of this. I didn’t blame him for that. He was broke and half a million in the hole. He didn’t need her hysterics on top of his debt. He needed a solution. One thing we were in agreement on was that a solution wouldn’t come from Frances Mae. And I thought I had problems?

From the neatly lined shelves of garden supplies, I grabbed a 3 6 8

D o r o t h e a B e n t o n F r a n k pair of gloves, a paper bag for cuttings, a water bucket for cut blooms, and a pair of clippers and walked across the damp grass to Mother’s rose garden. The bushes were filled with buds. I started pinching them off with a fury and tried to think Trip’s problem through. He didn’t have a lot of choices.

Apparently the fellows who ran the receivables department for the organization that collected debt and paid winnings were a humorless but diversified lot. Their other businesses were drugs and murder. They had been prudent to cut him off from sporting events. If he couldn’t come up with fifty thousand dollars in one week, they said they were going to hurt him. Not good. I had to help him.

Even if I had five hundred thousand dollars to give him, which I didn’t, would it really solve his problem? No, it would not, I decided. This was larger than my resources and frightening. Damn frightening.
I’ll think of something,
I’d said to him when I jumped off the boat. This was not going away—it had to be solved. Fast.

I must have removed a hundred buds and cut fifty flowers to take into the house before I was aware that someone was standing behind me, watching. I turned to see Millie, standing under a live oak. What was she doing?

“Millie!” I called out to her. “Good morning!”

She started toward me and when she reached my side, she said,

“You tell me. Is it a good morning?” She stared at me with eyes that held a thousand years of worry. “You want to tell me?”

Although I doubted she would have anything in her repertoire to solve this and even though I had sworn silence to Trip, I took a deep breath and told her everything I knew. She would have seen it in her tea leaves anyway. And, she was outraged.

“What kind of crazy damn fool is my boy messing with? Gambling? I got a mind to beat his behind! Switch him till he can’t sit!”