Pawleys Island

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “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 squir
med 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 Geographic 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.

  TEN

  REBECCA TAKES THE CALL

  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.