Return to Sullivan's Island

by Dorothea Benton Frank

  When they were out, Chief Howard slammed the door and went around to the driver’s side of the car.

  “Good night, Chief. And thank you,” Henry said.

  “Yes,” Grant said. “Thank you very much.”

  Chief Howard saluted Henry and Grant in that friendly but official way in which manly men acknowledged one another’s departure.

  Bucky, Phillip, and Blake stood around waiting for Henry or Grant to kill them.

  Henry’s cool demeanor evaporated. Through gritted teeth he said to Phillip and Blake, “Let’s go inside for a minute. I want to have a word with both of you.”

  Beth and Mike would have sworn on a Bible that there was a trace of steam around Henry’s head. Phillip and Blake looked terrified as they followed their father up the back steps. Henry had more than a little of his father’s well-known temper.

  Then Grant, who seemed to be struggling to restore even breathing, turned to Bucky, drawing back, inhaling deeply.

  “So what do you have to say for yourself?”

  “I’m a dumbass.”

  “Yeah, we could start with that. You know, here’s what disturbs me, son.” He pointed his finger into Bucky’s chest, which was something Grant rarely did. “You’re the older one, right? The role model? You got your two cousins in some very hot water when it wasn’t necessary. Why did you do it? Explain this to me because I don’t get it.”

  “We were bored, I guess. You know how it is. It didn’t seem like such a big deal, Dad. I mean, it was just beer.”

  “Just beer. And probably a five-hundred-dollar fine. Pretty expensive beer, don’t you think?”

  “I guess.” Bucky was staring at the ground. “It’s not like half the world doesn’t ride around the island with something in a cup.”

  Mike and Beth looked at each other as if to say, Why is he digging himself this hole? But Grant was leading the questioning around to impose his own measure of justice.

  “Perhaps they do, but you got caught. Didn’t you? You had a can of beer, logo showing for anyone to see, a blatant violation of the law, and you knew it, right?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Did you say yeah?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Beth and Mike looked at each other because every person on earth knew that saying yeah in this situation was basically suicidal. Besides they could both see Grant’s temple twitch, which was his renowned telltale clue of extreme frustration.

  “That’s better. So, just how do you propose to make things right?”

  “Pay the fine? Not let it happen again?”

  “That’s a start. You may have five hundred dollars in the bank, but do you think your cousins do?”

  “They probably have like a zillion dollars in the bank.”

  “Is that the point?”

  “No sir. It’s not. Should I offer to pay their fines too?”

  “There you go. I like it when I see you take responsibility for your actions, son. Now let’s go back and rejoin the party without announcing this idiotic episode to everyone, okay? This is your aunt’s party, not yours.”

  Until that moment Grant and Bucky had not noticed that Beth and Mike were still planted there like cornstalks with, well, ears.

  “Way to go, dude,” Mike said to Bucky as he and Beth followed him back to the party. Beth skipped ahead and looped her arm over Bucky’s shoulder in a gesture of solidarity.

  “That’s Dr. Dude to you, asshole. I just got hosed for like, I don’t know, probably a thousand? Shit.”

  “Boys, boys…potty mouth!” Beth said. “Let’s go find Blake and Phillip to see if they need to go to the ER. Big Henry was seriously pissed.”

  But Bucky and Mike broke away from Beth when they saw the boys on the porch and Beth decided to let them get the lowdown on their own. After all, they had all the time in the world to discuss it. This story was already page one million and seventeen in the family’s history book. She spotted her mother.

  “Okay,” Susan said, walking toward her, “what happened?”

  “Boys are stupid,” Beth said. “Always pushing the limits.”

  “You know it, sugar. Golf cart?”

  “Yeah, and a few other details like open container, underage—”

  “Nice.”

  “Uncle Grant is making Bucky pay the fines for all of them.”

  “You don’t learn anything if it doesn’t hurt a little.”

  “Mom! That’s pretty cold!”

  Susan looked at Beth and fell in love with her daughter for the trillionth time.

  “Maybe. But it’s true. Speaking of money, we have to talk about the nasty stuff.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m totally broke. How am I supposed to live? I mean, you know, like what if I have to go to the doctor or what if your hunk-of-junk car breaks down?”

  “That car is a classic and it has four brand-new tires, all in your honor. But if something happens, put it on your credit card and call Simon. He’ll pay you back right away. Anyway, I am putting three hundred a month in your checking account to cover food and gas and stuff like that, but I strongly recommend you get a job.”

  “A job. Right. Doing what?”

  She had toyed with the idea, even spoken about it, but what was she going to do for gainful employment in Charleston with a degree in English literature? Teach? She didn’t even like children! She realized she was going to starve. Beth felt a panic coming on. Three hundred a month. It was a lot of money for house-sitting for her own family, she supposed, but she could see herself spending it all on food alone.

  “So, whatever you don’t spend is yours to keep! How’s that? What’s wrong, honey?”

  “I don’t know, it’s just, well, what am I going to do?”

  “Did you eat yet? I want you to get something before it’s all gone. The food’s fabulous.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Mom. I’ll eat later. What am I going to do?”

  “Why don’t you check out the restaurants? You could wait tables? Tend bar?”

  “That would be better than nothing, I suppose.”

  “Well, excuse me but you can earn a pretty penny bartending on this island. People drink like fish.”

  It was true enough that the sultry island breezes seemed to put people in the mood to overindulge, and she thought maybe that could lead to overtipping. The commute would certainly be easy. Suddenly that three hundred dollars a month stipend seemed generous. Then Beth felt guilty about complaining. Here was her mother leaving for the dream of her life and she was moaning like a spoiled child.

  “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll work it out. I’ll just be gathering a plot for my first novel or something.”

  Susan looked at Beth’s face, searching for any signs of insecurity and, seeing none, she relaxed.

  “That’s my girl,” she said. “Try to look at this time as some kind of reward for busting your butt for the last four years. Relax! Enjoy it! Believe me, in the blink of an eye you’ll be an old goat like me!”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say that you’re old, Mom. You seem like you’re my age.”

  “Sweetheart, that’s very nice, but we need to face the facts here.” Susan stopped then, thinking that the year away from Beth was going to break her heart. She would miss her something terrible. “Hey, do you promise to email and text me every day? Promise me you’ll be inconsolable, longing for me like mad?”

  “Yes ma’am. I will miss you every minute of every day and I will email and text you like crazy. Don’t worry so much, okay? I’m an adult and I can handle this. I swear.”

  “Don’t swear, honey, unless you’re taking high office. It’s common.”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  Susan put her empty goblet down on a table and pulled Beth into a long hug. Then she pushed a stray tendril away from Beth’s face. Tears began to bubble over Susan’s eyelids.

  “Momma! Don’t cry! Come on now! Everything is fine.”

  Susan wiped her face with the back of her hands and began to stut
ter.

  “I know, I know, it’s just, oh my, well, what if something happened to you? I just couldn’t stand it, that’s all. I love you so much, you just don’t know, more than, well, anyone. Just please promise me you’ll be careful? Lock the doors at night? Check the stove? Look under the beds? Don’t let anyone smoke in the house? All that stuff?”

  Maggie had spotted them and made her way over, waving a napkin, offering it to Susan.

  “Girl? Dry your eyes and come try the shrimp! I swanny, those little boogers were swimming this afternoon. They’re so sweet!”

  Susan blew her nose and Maggie leaned into Beth for a whisper that Susan definitely heard.

  “Tell your momma to compose herself. Her estrogen is obviously running low again.” Then Maggie walked away.

  Beth giggled and said, “She’s got like radar or something. I mean, how does she know what’s happening with everyone at once?”

  “She’s the omniscient goddess. I’m used to it. Sometimes it’s just awful.”

  Beth put her arm around her mother and gave her a squeeze. “Well, the witch is right. We’re having a party here, not a wake. Let’s go do tequila shots together or something like that, you know, have a mother-daughter bonding experience?”

  Susan laughed then and gave Beth a kiss on the cheek.

  “Bad idea, but I do love you, you know?”

  “And I love you too! You’re my favorite person in the entire universe and all I want to do is make you proud of me.”

  “I am so proud of you I could just burst. Do you know that?”

  “Yes ma’am. I do.” Even Beth, who was not prone to weak moments of sentimental emotion, felt like crying for the second time in forty-eight hours, something she rarely did.

  Later that night, after everyone had said goodbye, after Cecily, Beth, Maggie, and Susan had restored order to the house, Cecily said good night and left. Maggie and Grant, Susan and Simon, Timmy, Henry, and Sophie and Beth all gathered on the porch for a postmortem discussion of the evening. They occupied the length of it in rockers and most of them had their feet up on the banisters. Then there was the late arrival of Mary Jo and Teensy, who had taken Mary Jo’s girls to the other house and had stopped to buy milk, but whose hands had not been sullied by a sponge or a paper towel all night, which had infuriated Maggie, annoyed Susan, and amused Beth.

  “This house has more rockers than a Cracker Barrel,” Teensy said.

  Despite the population you could hear Maggie and Susan suck their teeth, making a sound like snnkk.

  “Meanwhile, every one of them is being put to good use,” Timmy said.

  “Good thing this porch can’t talk,” Henry said.

  “You can say that again,” Maggie said.

  “What happened here?” Grant said. “Anything I should know about?”

  “Maggie wore the lips off of Lucius Pettigrew,” Susan said.

  Maggie burst out laughing. “Susan! Hush your mouth! Oh my! Luscious Lucius! I haven’t thought about him in a million years.”

  “Lucius Pettigrew? What kind of a sissy name is that?” Grant said.

  “Maybe he’s bald,” Henry said. “I heard he was a bazillionaire.”

  “Screw him,” Grant said.

  “Life is so unfair,” Teensy said.

  “Lucky you never got caught by the Invisible Sheriff,” Henry said.

  Beth said, “Who’s the Invisible Sheriff? Another ghost like the Gray Man on Pawleys Island?”

  “Henry? Don’t go packing my child’s head with all that old bullshit,” Susan said.

  “Do you eat with that same mouth, sweetheart?” Simon said.

  “Listen, Dr. Heartbreaker, you’d better behave yourself in California or I’ll send the Invisible Sheriff to get you, okay?” Susan pointed her finger at Simon and he threw his arms up in surrender.

  “For Pete’s sake!” Beth said. “Will somebody tell me the flipping story?”

  “All right, all right, but honey, don’t say flipping. It sounds like you really mean to use—”

  “The F word. I would, except that you and Aunt Maggie would beat the stuffings out of me.”

  “You are correct,” Maggie said. “We don’t use that kind of language in our family.”

  “Okay, girls!” Henry said. “Here’s the skinny. When we were really little, little kids, way before Sophie and Allison were born, this island was still pretty untamed. I mean, we had roads, but mostly they were paved with oyster shells. Dogs ran around, people had chickens, and there was this wild horse who just sort of roamed the beach and the streets. Somebody must have fed him, I don’t remember who.”

  “Momma always said it was Pell Pozaro,” Timmy said.

  “Maybe,” Henry said. “Anyway, our parents would tell us to stop our foolishness or the Invisible Sheriff would come get us and lock us up in the pokey. And brother, we’d stop. We’d see that horse coming and we would take off, running like all forty.”

  “Oh,” Beth said, “that’s it? What’s all forty?”

  “Forty-Mule Team Borax,” Maggie said. “Maybe it was actually twenty?”

  “That’s the whole story,” Timmy said. “Hey! Y’all remember Marvin Struthers?”

  “I remember the time he pulled my big head out of the ventilation duct on the Thompson Battery,” Henry said.

  “During a hurricane, no less,” Maggie said.

  “What?” Beth said.

  “Yeah,” Timmy said, “your Uncle Henry was quite the hellion in his day.”

  “I could have died. I can still taste the motor oil. Blechh!”

  “Why do I get the feeling that y’all have a secret history?” Beth said.

  “Would you want the whole world to know your brothers were like animals?” Sophie said. “Although they’re so much older than me, they’re like from another generation.” She gave Henry a good-natured punch in the arm.

  “Stop, you big Amazon!” Henry said. “You could hurt somebody!”

  “Yeah, right. The boys were terrible, Beth, right, Maggie?” Susan said. “Remember the bicycle wars?”

  “Oh Lord, not that story again,” Timmy said.

  “Come on, tell me!” Beth said, thinking this was definitely the best part of the night.

  “Well, when I was a lad—” Henry said in a deep baritone.

  “A lad? A lad? How was it growing up in Victorian England? You pompous ass,” Timmy said, laughing. “Look, Beth, here’s how it was.”

  “Shut up,” Henry said.

  “No, you shut up. I’m talking to my niece! Okay. When we were kids, it was a big deal to have a bicycle. Nobody had a lot of money back then and getting up enough cash for all of us to have our own bikes probably put our parents on a short list for the poor house. But the old man understood what it meant to us and so somehow, he managed to give us all bikes.”

  “Why do you always bring up the nice things about that son of a bitch?” Henry said.

  “Because I spent twenty years in therapy to earn the right to forgive him. Move on, Henry. Hatred is a cancer, you know.”

  “Oh, up yours, Freud. It is my childlike hatred of that masochistic bastard that springboarded me to all I am today.”

  “I’m gagging over here,” Susan said.

  “Me too,” Timmy said. “Anyway, Beth, in those days, the island was divided into territories. All us Catholic kids owned this end of the island. If any of the Protestant kids came down here on their bikes, we would chase them off. We had guards on every corner and our war plans were very elaborate, given our resources.”

  “We would engage after supper and before dark,” Henry said.

  “Did you have actual fights? Like hitting each other?”

  “Uh, yeah. We kicked their bony little asses all the time,” Henry said, and flexed his muscles.

  “That’s absolutely true,” Timmy said, and high-fived Henry.

  Maggie said, “So why don’t one of you big muchachos tell your niece what happened when you went into their territory?”
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  “That? Well, basically, they kicked ours,” Henry said.

  “Yep. They killed us all the time.”

  “Sounds stupid to me,” Beth said. “My mother would’ve put me on restriction for a year if I did anything like that.”

  “Sure would have,” Susan said.

  “As well she should have,” Maggie said. “Ladies of this family do not involve themselves in street fights.”

  The Christmas lights twinkled in the landscape, the last remaining evidence that something festive had taken place that evening. The dunes stood in their snowy mounds, festooned with goldenrod and clumps of beach grass that waved in the breeze. The ocean murmured as the incoming tide gently lapped against the shore. And the beams from the lighthouse washed everything before them in steady intervals of gossamer light. They rocked quietly until Simon spoke.

  “What a great party, Maggie. Thanks for everything. You sure gave Susan one helluva bon voyage.”

  “Amazing weekend,” Susan said.

  “Yes, it was lovely,” Teensy said, drawling on luuuvley.

  “Shucks, ’twern’t nothing,” Maggie said in her best hillbilly accent, slipping it a little to Teensy.

  “Right,” Henry said, and laughed. “Just your basic royal wedding. No big deal.”

  Timmy and Grant said a few things about the antics of their sons and Susan threw in, “They’re just boys.”

  Exhaustion was hiding in the shadows, preparing to claim them for the night as the older members of the family fell silent again.

  “Somebody’s gonna be smelling croissants and chocolate in two days,” Beth said. “You getting excited? I know I’m getting excited for you. Ooh la la!”

  Everyone was keenly aware that Beth felt great distress over having her feet nailed to the floor for the forthcoming year. But when she expressed her support and indeed delight for her mother’s adventure, you could hear a collective sigh of relief. Even in the dark, Beth could feel their unanimous approval and it felt really good. She felt like an adult then. Did the converse hold true? At that moment the world came together for Beth. She had been disagreeable, even belligerent, she had been a burden at times and a renegade too many others. She had fought battles unworthy of the effort they took, and so many times had looked at the world only through her eyes. But not that night. This was what acting as a family felt like and it was a wonderful thing. Now she understood the old saying We all rise together. And she had a better handle on her aunts and uncles than ever before.