Pawleys Island

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  I rang Rebecca’s doorbell, and she answered it, looking absolutely dreadful.

  “I hate his guts,” she said. “And his lawyer’s guts too.”

  “That’s the spirit! So do I. Go wash your face,” I said, “and let’s get out of here.”

  “Fine.”

  While I waited, I looked around. There were watercolors in various stages of completion spread all over her table. I stared at them in disbelief. Even though they were drawings and paintings of children’s toys, they were startling in a way I had never seen. I was certainly no art critic, but any simpleton could see that these images took Rebecca’s work out of the world of commercial decorative art and into another realm.

  “Rebecca?”

  She came out of her bedroom and down the hall, turning out lights behind her.

  “Oh!” she said and began scooping them up to put away from prying eyes like mine. “What do you think?”

  “I think they’re pretty stunning. You know, we should ask Huey of course, but I think we should show them to someone at the Gibbes, girl.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, I do. I mean, doesn’t South Carolina have a watercolor society?”

  “Gosh, I don’t even know. Probably.”

  “Wait! Yes, they do! You should join it. They have shows all over the place and awards that come in the form of cash.” We looked at each other, and Rebecca threw her hands in the air as if to say, Why not? “Come on. My car is probably reeking of pepperoni.”

  On the way to my house, I explained to Rebecca that Harry Albright and Nat Simms had no authority whatsoever to stop her from talking to her children.

  “First of all, I’m not playing tiddlywinks here with Nat and his Mr. Albright. That Nat was granted temporary custody and the house is a bullshit deal, which will be corrected by the courts. He got his order of protection today, so at least you don’t have to worry about Nat bothering you in person for a while. And I think it’s time for me to rattle his cage about his answer to our interrogatory.”

  I told her that I had filed the answer and counterclaim and that we were looking at the week before Labor Day as a court date. Of course, even in a best-case scenario, it could still take a while for it all to be final. She just listened and didn’t say much at all. Maybe I was waiting to be thanked? How silly of me.

  We pulled up in the yard and got out. Miss Salt Air had almost every single light on. It surprised me how alive and welcoming my house was. It was a monument to my family’s history, and while it had always been a vacation home, now it was something else. My permanent residence and a place of refuge. It welcomed Rebecca the same way it did me.

  “What a great house,” she said, echoing my feelings.

  After all, some houses had personalities that bordered on human.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Been in the family for a jillion years.”

  We climbed the stairs and went in through the kitchen door. I put the pizza on the counter and set the oven temperature to warm.

  “I love funky old houses,” she said. “You’re on the ocean, right?”

  “Yep.”

  As though she was invisibly summoned, she was already moving toward the front porch. I knew Rebecca was about to fall under the spell of Pawleys Island’s wizardry.

  I put two slices of pizza on plates, grabbed two diet sodas from the refrigerator and slid the pizza box into the oven. “Wanna eat on the porch?” I called out.

  There was no answer, so I went through the living room and opened the screen door. There was Rebecca, leaning over the banister, watching the ocean recede with its musical pattern of swooshing the shore with silver and foam and then whispering good-bye as it pulled away for the night. Inch by inch, the beach widened. There was the beginning of a moonrise. It was going to be a beautiful night.

  “Wanna eat out here?”

  “Absolutely! This is fabulous!”

  She followed me to the kitchen and then back outside. The porch had no table, so we pulled two rockers up to the rails and put our feet up, balancing our plates and drinks the best we could. These minor inconveniences were well worth it, just to have the time to sit in the evening breeze, watch the day slip away as the skies grew dark and listen to the movement of the tide. I thought for a moment that a table would be awfully nice to have out here and made a note to be on the lookout for something suitable. But who would come and sit at it besides me? Rebecca? Huey? God, the population of my world has shrunk to the size of a peanut, I thought.

  I took a bite of the pizza and wiped the grease from my mouth with a paper towel.

  “Not exactly like dinner with Huey, huh?”

  “No, but this is great too,” she said.

  “Yeah, every summer of my life was spent on this porch.”

  “Must’ve been wonderful.”

  “It was.” That was all it took to send me down memory lane. “But things have changed here. When I was a teenager, there was a pavilion where we would all go to dance and listen to music. I’ll never forget the summer I learned to shag. We were always sunburned…”

  “Yeah, you’re from the baby oil and iodine generation.”

  “Go easy now,” I said. “And all the girls wore these liberty print shirtwaist dresses made by Ladybug. Or David Ferguson Bermudas with starched shirts all tucked in. We all smelled like Noxzema and Youth Dew.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind, you’re too young to appreciate the fine details of life before ceramic hair straighteners.”

  “No, I’m not—I’ve heard about orange juice cans and Dippity-Do!”

  “Yeah, probably in an anthropology class! Come on, you want another slice?”

  “No, I’m stuffed, thanks.”

  I took the plates back to the kitchen, put them in the sink and turned off the oven. I didn’t feel like eating either. The whole thing with Nat and Rebecca’s kids made my stomach tighten, and the yet-to-be-seen information on his computer’s hard drive was another bomb. I had to tell Rebecca about it, and I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  I put on a pot of decaffeinated coffee and went back outside, turning off the overhead porch lights, leaving the fans turning just enough to stir the air.

  “So, Rebecca? We have to talk about something.”

  “Sure, what?” She sat back in her rocker and put her feet back up on the rail.

  As the sun sank behind us, I was quiet for a few moments. The blue dark of night produced the atmosphere of a confessional. It was easier to mount the courage to say the difficult things when you could barely see the other person’s face.

  “I have a copy of the hard drive of Nat’s computer.” There. It was said.

  “How in the world did you get that?”

  “You don’t want to know. But let me just tell you…”

  “No! I do want to know! How did you get it?”

  “I had someone go in the house and take it, have it copied and replace it to its original spot.” I wasn’t going to lie. Ever.

  “Oh! That’s nice! Breaking and entering? Stealing? Are you trying to send me to jail or what?”

  “Of course not! It’s done all the time, Rebecca. Wake up! Normally I would have the wife copy it. But in this case, since you’re not living there, I took care of it. Look, if I had tried to subpoena it, he would have erased everything.”

  Rebecca sighed so hard I could see her chest expand and collapse. “So what’s on it? Love letters to his whore?”

  “I wish. Unfortunately, Nat’s been visiting a lot of porn sites and posing as a teenage boy in chat rooms.”

  “What?”

  “Yep.” I babbled on as though I was discussing the weather. “And plenty of trash a family court judge wouldn’t like. I say we just sit on it and only use it if we have to, because…”

  “Wait a minute! Just wait a minute! What are you saying?” Rebecca jumped up from her rocker and began pacing the floor. “Porn sites? Teenage chat rooms? Who is this man? This is not the man I married
! This man stole my house! He turned my children against me and twisted their minds until they were monsters! He’s running around with a trashy slut all over town? Porn sites? How sick is he? Who is he? That’s it! I’ve had it! Let him keep the house and the kids! They don’t want to talk to me? They hate me? Fine! He thinks it’s okay to push me off my chair in a restaurant? I quit! I’m staying right here! Screw all of them!”

  “Rebecca! Calm down! You couldn’t possibly mean what you’re saying! Look, you don’t want the house? Fine! But the kids? Can’t you see what you’ve got to do here?”

  “Yeah! I see fine! They can all go to hell!”

  “Rebecca! You’re upset and I don’t blame you. But believe me, you’ve got to rescue your children from him! He’s sick!”

  “No! I am never going to live with anybody who hates me ever again!”

  I could hardly believe my ears. I had a very good grasp of what she had been through. But this was beyond my comprehension. What mother would choose to leave her children with someone like Nat?

  “Let’s not go there just yet. If your children stay with Nat, they will be living in a very unhealthy environment. And, understand this, Rebecca, if we use what I’ve found as evidence in court, Nat will definitely not be able to retain custody. He’ll be lucky to have supervised visitation. So it’s a bargaining chit for when we begin to negotiate a settlement. And if you really and truly don’t want your children, they could become wards of the state and go into foster care.”

  “Foster care?”

  “Yes, ma’am. That’s the law.”

  “Foster care?”

  That pretty much knocked the wind out of Rebecca. She sat down again and even in the darkness I could see her almost dissolve into the slats of the chair. She was very quiet for a few minutes and then began to shake her head back and forth, disagreeing with her own internal argument. She stood and began pacing the floor.

  “Look, you don’t understand, Abigail.”

  “Okay, tell me what I don’t know.” I didn’t move. I was going to sit there and listen to her rant like a fool. Let’s just get it all out right now. And I was becoming very angry.

  “Look,” she said again, “my own children hate me. Nat hates me. Everybody in Charleston knows about Nat and how he is. Why would I want to go back to that?”

  “Um, because another woman, one who is as common a whore that ever walked the docks, will be raising your children? She’ll be enjoying your home, your bed? And if Nat marries her, your name? That her surgically improved behind will be in your chair at your children’s graduations, weddings, baptisms, Christmas dinners and every celebration that happens for the rest of your life? Have you thought about that?”

  “No,” she said in the meekest voice I had yet to hear her use. “But every time I think about going back to Charleston and confronting them, I feel ill. They’re not going to listen to me, no matter what. Too much has happened. It’s too late, Abigail. My children will never love me again. They think I’m nothing but a nag.”

  “I don’t doubt that you’re not anxious to go back to Charleston, but, Rebecca, think about this. You need to be seriously deprogrammed and so do your children. You know how people who join cults get brainwashed? They hear a thing over and over, and no matter how crazy it is, after a while they believe the craziness is true! Remember Jonestown? That’s what’s happened here. For whatever reason, Nat has made you and your children believe that they are better off with him, and it’s just absolutely not so.”

  “Well, Nat sure did a good job convincing everybody.”

  “Listen to me. You don’t know what it’s like to be without your children. You don’t want that, Rebecca. And you really don’t want to be the one who put them in harm’s way. Every night I struggle to sleep. All I can see is my beautiful boy Ashley’s face, and I weep for him every single day.”

  “How did you put your son in harm’s way? It was an accident, wasn’t it?”

  I took a deep breath and told her the story that even Huey didn’t know. “I was driving the car, Rebecca. I had been drinking some wine. I was yelling at him; it was raining and a sixteen-wheeler blew a tire and skidded into us, and I lost control of the car. If I had been completely sober, or if I hadn’t been yelling at him, maybe I could have controlled the car…”

  “Oh, my God, Abigail, I didn’t know. But you can’t blame yourself! It was still an accident!”

  “Oh, I blame myself plenty. I sat there in the pouring rain, with his head in my hands, begging him to take a breath, his blood all over me and his eyes vacant…He was gone. Just like that. Gone forever.” I began to cry. “What will you tell yourself if something happens to your children because Nat is negligent? Will you blame him? No. You will blame yourself, Rebecca. Believe me, you will blame yourself.”

  At that point tears were streaming down my face and hers. There was terrible gulping and gasping as we cried together in separate rocking chairs. We became quiet, sniffed loudly and looked at each other like survivors of a catastrophic event, stunned by the damage but determined to pick up the pieces and go on.

  “How am I going to get through this, Abigail?”

  “With me and Huey and the family court right by your side.”

  “I’m so sorry that I said what I did, Abigail. You must think I’m horrible.”

  “Forget it, Rebecca.”

  “You’re right. If something ever happened to Sami or Evan I couldn’t live with myself.”

  “Every mother has her moments. Lord knows, parenting children is the hardest thing in the world to do. Especially with a hostile spouse. You’ve stood enough. But it’s long past time for somebody here to be the grown-up and make things right.”

  “And that’s me, right?”

  “Yep. That’s you. I’m sorry.”

  FOURTEEN

  TIGHTEN UP

  IT was eight-thirty Monday morning and I heard noises. How had I slept so late? Then I remembered that I had been up until the wee hours, preparing to do battle with Harry Albright. I threw back the bed sheets and stumbled out to the porch. There was Daphne with a broom, sweeping with a vengeance.

  “Good morning!” I said, squinting hard in the blaze of the climbing sun.

  “Good morning to you too,” she said. “I said to myself, Girl? You’re gonna need every speck of daylight the sun throws on us today to get Miss Abigail’s house clean. And Lord knows, I was sure right about that! When’s the last time these steps got a good sweeping?”

  How about never? Sweep the steps? Isn’t that what ocean breezes were for? I must have appeared confused. Daphne shook her head.

  “Here’s your delivery,” Daphne said.

  “Thanks!” It was the hard drive from Everett.

  “Go on and get your coffee,” she said. “I got a million questions for you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Just give me ten minutes.”

  “Take your time.” But I heard her mutter under her breath, “Humph, she bess be drinking two cups!”

  There was another recognition of Byron’s gene pool—his little sister was a wise guy too. Ah well, a dose of dry levity now and then might be good.

  I took a fast shower and reemerged with wet hair, shorts, a polo shirt and flip-flops. I hooked up Nat’s computer and did a fast check of his favorite places and screen names at AOL. I was shocked. Nat was a very bad customer.

  The coffee was brewing and I was cutting half a banana into my shredded wheat, preparing to begin the day with yet another culinary marvel from my repertoire. Daphne stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

  “Want coffee?” I said.

  “No, uh uh, too hot for coffee. I’m gonna just get a glass of ice water, if that’s okay.”

  “There’s bottled water in the fridge.”

  “Humph. That stuff is a waste of money if you ask me.”

  Waste of money, indeed. She opened the refrigerator and scrutinized the contents. There were two liters of Evian, several cans of Diet Coke, a half ga
llon container of skim milk and various bottles of salad dressing and condiments of every description whose freshness dates defied my memory. She poured herself a glass of Evian.

  “Just to try it,” she said. “See if it’s different.” She took a sip, then a long drink, draining the glass and refilling it.

  Evian had gained another convert and I would be the benefactress of her newly acquired habit. Oh, so what.

  “Good, huh?”

  “Yeah, um,” and she continued in a very Caucasian Madison Avenue accent, “actually it has a clean finish and it’s light, much like the new Beaujolais.” Then she giggled, covering her mouth with her hand.

  “You’re a stitch,” I said. “Just like your crazy brother.”

  “Humph! That fool? Listen, Miss Abigail, just to let you know, when I was in college? Every Halloween I would dress up in a pleated skirt and a blazer with pearls and speak very correctly. Guess what I was?”

  “God help us! A white girl?”

  “Worse. A Tri Delt!”

  I started laughing, and she started laughing, and then she became suddenly serious.

  “What?”

  “Okay, I been thinking about this here house all weekend and this is what I came to decide. That bedroom? The front bedroom? If that’s gonna be your office, it can’t have no bed in it. I’m calling Byron to get his bony behind over here and we’re moving it all to the back room. And I’m thinking that you got all kinda things going on and you needed an office last week, so here’s what I want you to do.” Her emphatic words came flying from her mouth without so much as a breath in between sentences.

  “What?”

  “Go shopping. Go down to Charleston and buy a desk. And a chair—no, two chairs and a sofa and some bookcases too. If you need to work, you can use the dining room table for today, but if you want people to come here and respect you, you can’t take them in the bedroom that belonged to your parents a hundred years ago with that beat-up old bed and them faded-out chairs.”