Pawleys Island

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  “Thanks, sweetheart. Oh, Lord! I wish Claudia would call us! What time is it?”

  Finally, the quiet exploded with the ring of my telephone. It was Claudia. I put her on speakerphone so Huey and I could listen together.

  “Claudia! We’re pacing the floor like expectant grandparents! Tell us what happened!”

  “No,” said Huey. “We’re bingeing on some of the best caviar and pâté I’ve ever had! Not to mention swilling down some very excellent champagne! But do hurry, Claudia! Tell us!”

  “Listen,” she said, “what’s the biggest tearjerker movie you ever saw?”

  “An Affair to Remember,” I said. “Or maybe Imitation of Life.”

  “Beaches,” Huey said. “Or maybe Bambi. I cried all through grammar school after that one.”

  “He’s shitting me, right?” Claudia said.

  “Probably not. Come on! Tell us!”

  “Okay, I went back to the hotel and by the time I packed up all her stuff, my stuff, got it all in the car, checked out and got back to her house, the kids were there. It was intense. First they were around the kitchen table crying, all of them sobbing. I put a box of Kleenex in the middle of them and went upstairs to put Rebecca’s stuff away. When I got back downstairs, they were drinking milk and eating brownies.”

  “Were they still crying?”

  “Evan wasn’t, but Sami was still very upset. I have to give Rebecca a lot of credit. She said, Look, I’m not going to say ugly things about your daddy. Not today and not ever. He’s your father, you love him and you should. But your father had some very peculiar ideas about how people can behave and the judge didn’t agree with him. Neither did I, neither did your grandfather and neither does society in general. Now we have to start acting like a family again. Then Sami threw a little fit.”

  “What did she say?” I said.

  “She said something like, Well, Daddy promised me certain things and I’m going to get them and you can’t tell me what to do either! Rebecca said, Sami? From this moment forward, we’re going to speak to each other in a loving and respectful way. I’m not sure what your father promised you, but we can talk about it. If it’s reasonable and appropriate for you. You should’ve seen the look on Sami’s face. Sami knew Rebecca was fully informed about the promised breast augmentation just by the way Sami cowered. It was priceless.”

  “So little Sami isn’t going to get big breasts quite yet?” I said.

  “You got it,” Claudia said. “Anyway, Rebecca was great. She went on to say, We’re going to take care of each other and we are going to work everything out, one issue at a time. Then she told them about the therapist that the court had ordered and they talked about Nat’s visitation and so forth. Oh! And did I tell you about the flowers?”

  “What flowers? The ones we bought?”

  “No. The ones that arrived from Jeff Mahoney with a note saying congratulations and welcome home.”

  “Whoo hoo!” Huey said. “I knew that man had his eye on Rebecca! I liked him. Did y’all like him?”

  “Sure, he’s okay,” I said, “but no rocket scientist. But a sweet guy.”

  “Yeah, he’s a nice man. A very nice man. But then the doorbell rings and guess who’s there?”

  “Charlene with an apology?” I said.

  “Jeff Mahoney in a raincoat?” Huey said and laughed.

  “No, you pervert! It was the old man, Tisdale, with an armload of probably a hundred pink lilies for Rebecca and cell phones for the kids with his number programmed in. I swear to God, y’all, I almost started crying.”

  I looked around to see Huey dabbing the corners of his eyes. I pulled a tissue from my pocket and passed it to him.

  “That’s pretty powerful,” I said.

  “It was. So I slipped out of there. They didn’t need an audience.”

  “You did the right thing, Claudia,” I said.

  “Well, it seemed like the thing to do. The days ahead of them are going to be pretty bumpy. Have you had the television on?”

  “No, why?”

  “You’d better check out CNN. After they tried to terrorize the entire southeast over the next hurricane—this one’s Gaston, just for the record—they ran the footage of Rebecca and you taking off y’all’s makeup. Oh, and they included your infamous quotes of the day. I’m looking to see if she has another wet wipe! God, Abigail, you crack me up!”

  “Oh, my God,” I said in disbelief.

  “Wait! So then, Paula Zahn whips out a cosmetic wet wipe and tells Aaron Brown that the wet wipe she’s holding is a weapon of mass destruction. This, she says, is a weapon of mass destruction! So she removes her mascara on only one eye, pretty messy actually, and she poses this question. What would happen if all the women in America took off their makeup for a day? Would the floozies go out of business? If they did it for a week or a month, would the stock market drop? I say bravo to Rebecca Simms and Abigail Thurmond!”

  “What?” I was so startled that I had to sit down.

  “Oh, Abigail!” Huey said. “You’re famous! Oh! And I knew her when…”

  “Abigail? You should know that Aaron Brown thought it was a pretty cool thing y’all did too. Anyway, you know that Sami’s and Evan’s friends will be blabbing all over school tomorrow. It’s going to be pretty embarrassing for them. I mean, the headlines from this morning will be all over every dinner table in Charleston tonight.”

  “Oh, my!” Huey said, “I hadn’t even thought about that!”

  I hadn’t either. But I knew that people were vicious and that although Rebecca had won the battle to regain her home and children, she may have lost her family’s good name because of Nat and Charlene. As much as I wanted to, I decided not to call her that night. She needed the time alone.

  After everyone left and I had thanked them for all their support, I walked out to my porch to look at the ocean. It was a beautiful night and so hard to believe that another hurricane was on its way. I sat at my new table and thought of Julian. How thoughtful to buy a table with just two chairs for us! I wondered how long we would last and I realized that the relationship we had, just as we were, was really all I wanted. I was in no hurry to live with him or get married. But I adored him. That much was certain.

  I wondered about my career. Was I retired? Was it over? When Judge Shelby read her decision, I felt such a rush of adrenaline. Did I really want to walk away from that? I said to myself, Look at the change in Rebecca’s life because you got involved. A mother was reunited with her children! Well, to be honest, it wasn’t perfect without a loving father in the home, but then there was no such thing as happily ever after, was there? I hoped Rebecca would fall back in love with her children and I hoped they would love her again too. But even if none of them did ever really hit family stride again, putting Rebecca back in the home and moving Nat out was absolutely in the best interest of the children. At least the children would have the benefit of a kind and levelheaded mother who, underneath it all, loved them very much.

  Maybe I would put the word out that if there was another case like Rebecca’s I might be interested in handling it. If I took one or two cases a year it would keep my intellectual life interesting and maybe I could do someone some good.

  I looked all around the empty beach. No Gray Man. No storm on the horizon. Just the graceful water washing the shore and a sky filled with stars. I thought about Ashley and John, and for the very first time since their deaths I could feel their love around me. Be happy, they seemed to be saying. Everything’s going to be all right.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  REBECCA AND GASTON WOULD LIKE TO CHAT

  THE next morning I got up early. I wanted to make a big breakfast for the children and get them off to school feeling like somebody loved them. I purposely did not turn on the news or open the newspaper because I was afraid of what I might see or hear. Sami and Evan had been traumatized enough. I went to wake them, first to Sami’s room and then to Evan’s, and before I shook their shoulders I stopped to look at t
hem, still asleep. You could not find a trace of worry or stress on their faces. It was my responsibility to prepare them well so that the rest of their day would go smoothly. But I couldn’t control what saucy chatter their friends had heard from their parents.

  Over pancakes and sausage, juice and milk, I began the morning’s conversation.

  “How’s breakfast, Sami?”

  “Good, thanks, Mom.”

  She was cutting her pancakes carefully and making a point of her excellent table manners with each bite. Evan, on the other hand, was eating like a starving animal. I thought I might have to hold his ears back out of the plate.

  “Yeah,” Evan said, “we haven’t had anything but cereal and Pop-Tarts since we got back from camp. This is real good.”

  I knew that, of course, by the number and variety of boxes in the pantry—if it was coated in sugar, we had a box of it.

  “Thanks, son. Listen, I need to talk to y’all about something and I’m not quite sure how to begin.” They looked up at me, sitting in my old spot. It was a curious feeling to resume my authority at the breakfast table. I put my coffee mug down and said, “Look, I’m just going to spill it, okay? I can’t send you off to school not knowing what was in the papers and on the news last night.”

  “What? Is Dad okay?” Evan said.

  “Oh! I’m sure he’s just fine. No, this is about Charlene. Remember her?”

  “God! Do we ever! She was disgusting!” Sami said and rolled her eyes. “So what happened? Did her boobs burst?”

  Peals of laughter filled the air and my concerns evaporated. I even chuckled with them.

  “No, her boobs didn’t burst, as you so delicately put it, but they almost got repossessed.” I thought, let that sink in her precocious mind and see what comes back.

  “Repossessed? What do you mean? That means taken back!” Evan said.

  “No, duh, dumb-ass!”

  “Sami! Please don’t use that kind of language, and your brother’s not a dumb-a-s-s.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “So what happened?”

  I was about to take away their childhoods. I didn’t want to tell them. But I didn’t want them to hear it from a bunch of kids and have the truth made to be more grotesque than it was, if that was possible.

  “Look,” I said, “Daddy didn’t always use his best judgment in certain cases. And in the case of Charlene, he bought those big bosoms for Charlene and paid for them too. And several other surgical procedures as well. All cosmetic. All intended to make Charlene more attractive to him and to make Charlene happier about her appearance.”

  “That’s awful! Daddy made her get operated on?” Sami said. “I don’t believe it! You’re lying!”

  “Wait a second, young lady. I never said Daddy made her do anything. I am saying that she wanted it done, Daddy supported it and, in fact, he paid for it. There’s a huge difference.”

  “So what do we care about that?” Sami had a very bad attitude with me.

  “Do you remember last night that I said we were all going to speak to each other in a loving way?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Okay, then let’s not make me the bad guy here. Let me finish telling you the facts and then you can draw your own conclusions, although the judge did that yesterday.”

  “What did the judge say?” Evan asked and drained his orange juice. “More?”

  “Sure, sweetheart.” I poured out another glass for him from the container. “The judge said that the money Daddy spent on Charlene was an extraordinary amount and that fifty percent of it should be returned to me. You see, what they do in family court is add up everything a couple has and divide it in half. The wife gets half and if there are children, she gets a little more to help support them.”

  “So what else is new?” Sami said sarcastically. I shot her a look and she said, “Sorry, I just meant that even I know that.”

  “What’s new is that the newspapers picked it up and made a big deal out of it. I got interviewed by the media and said some things that you might hear about today. I just didn’t want you to walk into school and get blindsided. I thought you should know that the media has made a fuss about it.”

  “Why did they do that?” Evan said.

  “Because the amount of money Daddy spent on Charlene was so much. That’s why. I mean, it was a lot.”

  They quietly stared at my face, looking for clues of what it all meant.

  After a few minutes, Sami said, “You’re ashamed of what Daddy did, aren’t you?”

  “It’s pretty embarrassing,” I said. “But what can I do?”

  “If my husband did that, I’d kill him,” Sami said.

  “The thought crossed my mind, but look, we’re not here to bash Daddy over the breakfast table. I just didn’t want y’all to hear about what Daddy and Charlene did from someone else. And if someone gives you a hard time, you just say, look, I didn’t have anything to do with it, okay? Try not to get sucked into some long conversation about it. Come on, you’re gonna be late. Y’all got lunch money?”

  That was how the day started. I made breakfast for them as I always had. I drove them to school. I told them I loved them and I hoped for the best.

  When I got home the phone was ringing.

  “Hello?”

  “Rebecca Simms?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please hold for Katie Couric of the Today Show.”

  Maybe it was a joke. There was a short pause, and then Katie Couric, or someone who sounded just like her, came on the line. Before I could panic and hang up, she started talking.

  “Rebecca?”

  “Yes?” I recognized her voice. It was her! Holy shit.

  “Rebecca? This is Katie Couric calling.”

  “Yes?” Quit saying yes! Say something reasonably intelligent. “Is this being taped?”

  “What? Oh, no! Goodness, no! But I would like to have you on the show tomorrow morning. Would you like to do that?”

  “No. I mean, no, thank you.”

  “Why not? Listen, you don’t have to fly to New York. Our folks down there can come to you and we can do a remote interview. You’ve seen those, right?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s just that I don’t want any more publicity, that’s all. But I appreciate the offer.”

  “Wait a minute! Haven’t you had your television on? You got every single female anchor across this country to wash off their makeup this morning in support of you! Even the nitwits on the Weather Channel! Even me! And, lemme tell you, Matt almost fainted when he saw me without makeup! He and Al were doing Halloween screams and the whole thing—it was crazy!”

  “I don’t know, Ms. Couric, I just…”

  “Hang on, girlfriend. If I can get a colonoscopy on television, you can do this, right? Come on! Say yes!”

  She had a very good point. Oh, what the hell, I thought. Why not? But it seemed so ridiculous.

  “Can I have my lawyer with me?”

  “Abigail Thurmond? You bet! I was gonna call her next. You South Carolina girls are something else! Listen, thanks. I know it’s an intrusion, but I promise to make it as dignified and fun as we can.”

  She said the producer would call and set up a time. After that, I couldn’t tell you what she said, I was so nervous. I called Abigail and told her.

  “I saw it! Did you see Paula Zahn last night? It was wild! And Rebecca, how did last night go?”

  Abigail listened as I recounted the night, telling her about Tisdale showing up and how sweet he was. The only real news of the night was that Tisdale told me privately he was throwing Nat out of the business. He said he couldn’t stand the sight of him after the shame he had brought his to his name.

  “Of course, I said to him, Well, how do you think I feel? And the children?”

  “And how are the children? Were they good to you?”

  “They were okay—Evan was easier than Sami. Evan’s a boy, you know? They’re easier to deal with all around. Mainly, they aren’t sure how their life
has changed yet. I’m not expecting any apologies for their lousy behavior in the past and not to mention their lack of loyalty to me. I’m just encouraging them to change their behavior as of now. Their loyalty can be regained as we go through each day.”

  “Well, that’s smart. Did they say anything about the house being all clean and about dinner and all the things you did—um, we did?”

  “Not one word. But I don’t think they didn’t notice. I just think they decided to go along and see what happens. But I told them about the newspapers and all, just so they would be aware in case the other kids teased them. So what are we doing about Katie Couric and that whole thing?”

  “I’m coming to Charleston and I’m sleeping in your guest room. We can figure it out tonight. And you can tell me about Jeff Mahoney! Don’t you know that you’re supposed to tell me everything?”

  “Oh, right! Yeah, he sent flowers. Look, I think they were guilt flowers, don’t you? I mean, he sure did make scrambled eggs out of my life and then you came along…”

  “That may be, but I think that man has plans for you.”

  “Really?”

  After we said good-bye, I went upstairs to shower and dress and took a long look at myself naked in the mirrored sliding glass door of my dressing room. I didn’t look like Jennifer Aniston but I wasn’t completely drooping yet either. I didn’t have the slightest interest in Jeff Mahoney, but now that I thought he might have been interested in me, I felt this surge of, well, maybe it was desire? I grappled with the notion of being pursued and stood up straight, holding in my stomach. My thighs needed work. They were flabby. Whose weren’t? Maybe I would join a gym. But first, I needed to work in my yard.

  How stupid of me! I was going to shower and dress and then work in the yard? Hello! Okay. Here’s the part where you discover that I’m a little bit neurotic. I threw on clean underwear because I couldn’t stand to wear the ones I had worn yesterday, even though I was going to get dirty and sweaty in the garden. I don’t think that’s strange, because if I passed out in the yard and someone walking by saw me and called EMS, the forensics department at the hospital would know that my underwear was recently changed. I mean, let’s get our priorities straight.