by Karen White
Maggie sent her sister a warning look. “I would love to. I just need to arrange for someone to stay with Lulu. What time were you thinking?”
“Seven o’clock?”
“I close up here at five, so that should give me plenty of time.”
“Wonderful. And since you’re a local, I’ll have you suggest a place.”
Everything Cat had ever taught her about playing hard to get or never giving away how she really felt by her facial expressions evaporated from all conscious thought. Without even trying to hide her enthusiasm, she said, “Do you like fried shrimp? Best place around here is Andre’s. It’s nothing special, just an old frame house, but you can’t beat the food. It’s close to the riverbank, so it’s rather lovely around sunset—although the sun sets around five o’clock this time of year.”
The door opened, and Cat stood in the entranceway with her cheeks pinkened by the return of a chilly January wind, her green eyes sparkling against her wool coat, which was nearly the same shade. Maggie saw instead her own brown hair and her pale gray eyes, which weren’t dark enough to be called blue, and she felt the familiar disappointment squeezing her heart. She turned away to straighten the cigarette boxes and to avoid watching Peter’s face as he noticed Cat.
Cat spotted Peter right away and her smile broadened. Slowly closing the door behind her, she leaned against it, her posture jutting out her chest. “Well, hello. I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure of being introduced.”
Maggie wanted to blurt out that they had looked for her on the pier the previous evening so she could introduce them then, but couldn’t find her, and that she’d lain awake until three o’clock waiting until she heard Cat’s footsteps on the bare wood of the risers as she climbed the steps to her bedroom. But then Maggie would have to tell her that she had worried about her, and that would have been a lie. Because all Maggie could think about as she’d lain awake was how alive she’d felt for the first time in a long while, and how warm Peter’s hand on her waist had felt as they’d danced. And how maybe Lulu had been right about her bottle tree, and that bad news was finally finished with them.
Keeping her eyes on Cat, Maggie made the introduction. “Cat, this is Peter Nowak, a businessman from Iowa. Peter, this is my cousin, Catherine Brier, otherwise known as Cat.”
“It’s a pleasure meeting you, Mrs. Brier,” he said.
Maggie forced her gaze back to Peter when she noticed that he hadn’t moved to take Cat’s hand. He was simply smiling as if he met beautiful women every day and had somehow become immune to them. His hands remained clasped behind his back as he bowed his head slightly.
“And now, if you ladies will excuse me, I have business to attend to. Margaret, I’ll see you at seven?”
Maggie nodded and watched Cat as she waited until the last moment to move away from the door, brushing herself against Peter’s arm. He pretended not to notice as he turned the doorknob and opened the door. Facing them once more, he slid on his hat, winked at Lulu, and said good-bye again before closing the door softly behind him.
Maggie’s feeling of satisfaction faded quickly as she caught the look on Cat’s face, her expression like that of an osprey sighting its prey. The three of them turned toward the window to watch Peter striding away to a car parked on the street. And when Maggie turned back from the window, she saw Lulu carefully tying the crème lace ribbon from Belgium in her hair.
AS SOON AS MAGGIE LET her leave, Lulu ran home as fast as she could. Martha, the housekeeper, was there mopping the kitchen floor when Lulu rushed in the back door, tracking footsteps on the damp linoleum floor.
Seeing Martha’s arms on her hips, Lulu did an abrupt about-face to toss her shoes onto the back steps before racing past Martha again with a hurriedly shouted “Good afternoon.”
Lulu ran up the stairs, her sock-clad feet slipping on the risers; then she raced into her bedroom, slamming the door behind her. She quickly opened it, yelled downstairs, “Sorry, Martha,” then closed the door more gently.
After leaning against the door to find her breath, she hurried to the window to draw the drapes, then moved to the opposite wall before kneeling in front of the chifforobe. Even though she’d given up her room to Cat, her clothes had remained in the chifforobe because Cat had claimed the downstairs hallway closet as her own.
From the bottom drawer, on the right-hand side underneath her petticoats and nightgowns, Lulu pulled out the small jewelry box that had once been her mother’s. It was made of dark, shiny wood with small metal hinges and had come from a place in Italy where her mama and daddy had gone on their honeymoon. She didn’t remember her mama, but she did remember going to her mama’s room in the house on Broad Street in Charleston and sitting on the bed when nobody was looking just so she could see if any part of her mother was still left.
The empty jewelry box had sat on her mama’s dressing table, and after Lulu found the guts to open it, she’d seen a dark stain on the bottom. She’d pressed her nose into the box, and it made her cry since it smelled so much like her mother. She’d forgotten the sound of her mother’s voice, and the feel of her hair, but Lulu still remembered what she’d smelled like. It wasn’t until Lulu was older that she realized that her mama must have spilled some perfume into the box, but it didn’t matter. It was still a part of her mama that belonged to her.
Carefully taking the box from its hiding place, Lulu placed it on the braided rug between the twin beds and opened the lid. The smell of perfume was hardly there anymore, only a whiff of memory, but it still made Lulu’s eyes tear. She tilted the box to see all the treasures she’d collected since she was old enough to collect things, all the things that meant the most to her. Briefly she touched the penny that her father had given her, minted the year of her birth in 1933, and a pair of earrings with tiny sand dollars dangling from them that Lulu had found in the bottom of the chifforobe and liked to think had once belonged to her mother. She spotted the tortoiseshell barrette Cat had given her but Lulu didn’t wear because an old boyfriend had given it to Cat. That meant it wasn’t a true gift from the heart, but because it was so beautiful, she kept it and sometimes wore it when she was alone in her bedroom. Cat never asked her about it, and Lulu knew it was because she’d forgotten about giving her the barrette as soon as it was out of her hand.
Using her index finger to sift through the items, Lulu found the most precious treasure of all: a roller-skate key. She picked it up and held it in her hand, then closed her eyes and smiled. It was the key to the roller skates she’d been wearing the night she’d twisted her ankle and Jim had saved her. He’d carried her home and made her feel better with his smile and his laugh. It was the only time in her whole life when she’d wished she was older because she’d decided right then and there that she wanted to marry Jim and she would wait for him for as long as it took for him to look at her the way he looked at Cat.
Slowly, she untied the ribbon in her hair and wound it around her hand until it was as small as her fist. She picked up the barrette and used it to keep the ribbon from unraveling and then placed both in the jewelry box next to the skate key.
She wasn’t putting the ribbon in the box because she liked Peter Nowak so much. She wasn’t sure she even liked him at all yet, although she liked the way her sister blushed when he was near and how her eyes darkened so that she looked almost as pretty as Cat. No, her reason for saving the ribbon in her special box had less to do with her sister and more to do with the fact that it would always remind her of the first time Cat had ever lost. She’d been waiting for Peter to ask Cat to join him and Maggie for dinner, and when he didn’t, Lulu had found something to like about the stranger that his accent and gifts hadn’t done.
Lulu had just finished placing the box back in its hiding place when she heard Martha calling up the stairs. “Miss Lulu, you get yourself down here right now!”
Lulu jumped up and ran to the door, flinging it open so hard that it hit the wall behind it. Lulu knew better than to disobey Martha; M
aggie had given the older woman permission to use the switch on Lulu’s behind if she felt Lulu needed it, and more often than not, Lulu apparently did.
The back door stood open and Lulu ran though it, almost running into Martha’s broad back, her dark skin gleaming in the winter sun like an omen. The laundry had been taken down from the lines, making the bottle tree a beacon in the backyard like the Morris Island lighthouse.
Lulu tucked her chin into her neck and clutched her hands behind her to make her look sorry. “Yes, ma’am?”
“I don’t need to be asking who put that thing up there in the yard. Miss Maggie works too hard and Miss Cat’s too lazy to make time for something like that.”
Lulu felt a finger on her chin raising her head so she could meet Martha’s troubled eyes. “We don’t mess with things we don’t understand, you hear? You don’t know what things you’re letting into your soul when you fool around with this bad stuff. It ain’t Christian, and it don’t belong here.”
Lulu made her lower lip tremble. “But it’s only bad if you think of it that way. I just see something pretty. And . . .” She hesitated long enough to make Martha start worrying.
“And what, sugar?”
“And mostly it reminds me of Jim. He told me how they had the bottle trees in Louisiana where he was from. It makes me think that he’s nearby, and it makes me happy again.”
“Oh, child,” said Martha with a voice that didn’t sound so angry anymore. She wrapped her arms around Lulu and squeezed. “Jim was a good man, and I know you miss him. But you shouldn’t use something evil to remember him by.”
Lulu rested her chin on the mound of Martha’s stomach and looked up at the dark face of the woman who’d known her since she was born. “This is the one thing I have left of him, Martha. Please don’t take it away. I don’t think I could stand to lose one more thing.”
Martha’s eyes softened and Lulu knew she’d won. “And I promise to make two of the branches into a cross as a more fitting memorial to Jim, if that would make you feel any better.”
Lulu felt Martha’s hands loosening around her. “Well, I figure if you do that, it should be all right. You just do it right away, you hear? Before anybody else sees it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lulu said solemnly before walking out into the backyard, being careful to keep her head down. A small smile appeared on her lips as she thought how easy that had been. She turned her head back to Martha, unable to hide her grin, but her smile dimmed on her lips as she saw that Martha wasn’t smiling, too. The older woman was looking at her with narrowed eyes and tight lips, shaking her head.
Lulu reached the tree and knelt in front of it, wishing very hard that it did have magical powers despite what she’d just told Martha. They all needed a little magic in their lives right now. Everything seemed so off-balance, like being on the Ferris wheel and getting stuck at the top, the sickly-scary feeling you got in the bottom of your stomach when you knew what was going to happen but you couldn’t stop it.
She felt that way now, and all the praying in church hadn’t made it go away. But her bottle tree, with its colored glass and breathless sound, comforted her as no one could, making her believe in things you couldn’t see. She’d change it if that was what Martha wanted her to do, but she wouldn’t stop believing. Sitting back on her heels, she closed her eyes and listened to the winter wind sing inside the mouths of the bottles and tried to remember what Jim looked like when he smiled.
CHAPTER 4
FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA
July 2009
The interstates between Indiana and South Carolina had been laid out in the 1950s at the direction of President Eisenhower as part of a national defense system for the entire country. Emmy knew this from the hours of meticulously poring over the atlases she’d found in her mother’s store, her fingers pressed to the spidery veins of roads and byways, through places that sounded familiar and others, like Enka Village and South Congaree, that seemed as if they belonged in an entirely different part of the world.
By mapping out every turn of her journey, Emmy felt more in control of the whole process instead of the more familiar feeling of being like a marble dropped on the floor, rolling in whatever direction offered the least resistance.
Her parents had helped her pack her car—Ben’s Ford Explorer—and after kissing her forehead, her father had reached in to latch her seat belt as if by doing so he could protect her from every danger down the road.
“I want you to stop every couple of hours and give us a call on your cell phone. You’ve got your phone charger, right? And an extra battery just in case?”
“Yes, Dad. And I’ve got cash hidden in three different spots, bottled water, and my Mace.”
“You got a full tank of gas, too. I filled it up this morning.”
“Thanks, Dad. I appreciate it.”
He leaned in again and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Don’t forget to call.”
He stepped back and Paige filled the space inside the open door but she didn’t lean in. “You got all those books from Folly’s Finds?”
Emmy patted the box sitting on the passenger seat next to her, feeling almost as if they were old friends. “Yes, thanks. And I wish you’d let me pay you for them.”
Paige smiled. “I figure you need them more than I do. Consider them a gift.” She looked away for a moment, the blue sky reflected in her eyes. “You felt something when you touched them, didn’t you? I’m glad. Because I don’t think I could have convinced you to go on my own.”
Paige stepped back and shut the door with a solid thud, more final than any parting words could have been.
Emmy swallowed twice before she could find her voice. “I left your jar of sand on the desk in the office. Guess I won’t be needing it where I’m heading.” She tried to smile but it faltered when her lips began to tremble. “Mama—” she began but Paige cut her off by placing both of her hands on the open window.
“Don’t forget to call or your daddy won’t be able to sleep. Be careful.”
Before Paige could pull her hands away, Emmy grabbed them and squeezed. “Good-bye, Mama.”
Paige squeezed back, then let go, and Emmy’s hands fell useless to her lap. “Good-bye, Emmy.”
Emmy started the engine and raised the window before following the long gravel-and-dirt drive that led away from her parents’ house, watching her father wave to her in the rearview window until the cloud of dust obscured them. Focusing on the road ahead, she flipped the radio on and turned up the air conditioner, listening to the tires roll over the road and trying not to think about how long her journey was going to be.
THE SUNSET SKY BLUSHED IN reds and purples by the time Emmy drove through Charleston nearly thirteen hours later. She was hungry and tired, and her jaw hurt from clenching her teeth so tightly, but she wasn’t ready to stop yet. She was so close and she couldn’t help but feel that if she stopped she might not find the courage to continue.
Crossing over the Ashley River Bridge, with the pastel Charleston skyline punctuated by church steeples behind her, she turned the radio off and rolled her window down. She breathed in the scented air that smelled green and wet to her; a smell as foreign to her as a stranger’s kiss. The road hummed beneath her tires and she found herself tightening her jaws to the rhythm of the road.
Feeling anxious now, she flipped the radio back on, then fiddled with the dial on the old car radio before stopping on the first clear station. It was an oldies station playing music from the big-band era, and Emmy found herself relaxing. Although her parents were from the hippie generation, they loved to dance to the old music and had a cabinet full of records they’d take out from time to time and slow dance to in the living room. They’d been doing that ever since Emmy could remember, usually after she’d been sent to bed. But as soon as she’d hear the trumpets sing and the softer wail of the saxophone, she’d crawl to the top of the stairs and watch as her parents held each other tight, kissed, and spoke softly, reminding Emm
y that there had once been a them before there’d been an us.
She’d watch for a short while, and when she returned to her bed, she’d lie on her pillow with a lump in her throat, wondering if it was from resentment that she wasn’t the center of their world or from a distant hope that one day she would find someone who liked to dance in the living room and who would look at her as if she was loved best.
Emmy flipped the radio off again as the silent fist of her grief squeezed her heart. She marveled that the entire time she’d been in the car, she hadn’t thought of Ben. She was angry with herself yet relieved, too, thinking this might be part of the recovery everybody had been promising her yet had remained as elusive as catching sand in the wind.
She glanced down at her lap to the map her father had drawn for her and took a left on Folly Road, the long, straight road that would take her over two small bridges before spilling her out on the little knife shape of land her father had labeled Folly Beach. Her car passed churches, strip malls filled with nail salons and realty offices, and a large Piggly Wiggly. Emmy hesitated only a moment before bypassing the entrance to the parking lot of the grocery store. If she didn’t have food and supplies, it would be that much easier to turn around and head back to Indiana if what she found on Folly wasn’t what she was looking for. Whatever that was.
She was nearly lulled to sleep by the heat of the sun through the window until her attention was caught by a brightly painted wooden boat off to the right of the road with The Luv Guv and Don’t cry for me, Argentina spray-painted in white against a spatter of bright colors splayed over every flat surface.
Emmy nearly ran off the road as she craned her neck to get a better look at the locals’ attempt at a billboard commentary about the South Carolina governor’s extramarital exploits recently making the national news. She wasn’t sure if she liked it or not, but it sounded just like what she’d heard about the people of Folly Beach, whose physical exertions and attitudes were directly related to the intensity of the heat from the Southern sun.
