“I’ve never heard of that railroad, and I’ve lived in Savannah as long as you have,” Daniel said.
“They closed it down in the late fifties or early sixties. I think they got bought out by one of the bigger railroads. So that’s what makes anything with the C of G mark so collectible. Railroad buffs love this stuff.”
He nodded. “So, if I had silverware with the same mark—that would be good?”
“You’re kidding me. C of G silver? Let me see.”
He dragged another box over to the edge of the truck’s tailgate. I sat down and reached into the box. Came up with a fistful of gleaming silver-plated flatware.
I turned a hefty serving spoon over, but I didn’t really need to check for the hallmark. I’d seen two or three pieces of Coastal’s distinctive serving pieces, at antique shows. The handle was narrow at the neck, fanning out at the end to form a stylized palm frond with the C of G monogram marked on the back. The pieces were quadruple silver plated, and altogether a design triumph.
“How much of this did you buy?”
“All of it,” he said matter-of-factly. “Maybe…what? Four or five dozen place settings. Plus a slew of serving pieces. I even got fish forks and salad tongs and all kinds of wacky serving pieces.”
“And for how much?”
“Fifty bucks.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Fifty bucks a place setting?”
He shook his head. “For all of it. What’s wrong? Did I pay too much?”
“No,” I said, laughing. “As my daddy says, even a blind hog finds an acorn now and again. You fell into it, Danny. It’s the deal of the day. I’d have to check, but the latest book value I know of for this stuff is seventy-five—for a single place setting.”
“For real?”
He jammed his hands in the hip pockets of his jeans, and the boyish grin lit up his deeply tanned face.
“For real,” I assured him.
“Well, damn, Sam. I just wanted something cheap to eat off of.”
I ran my hand through my sweat-soaked hair. What a morning.
“Looks like you scooped up all the really good deals of the day,” I said ruefully. “While I dragged around feeling sorry for myself.”
He nudged me. “Don’t beat yourself up. You’ve had a bad couple of days.”
“Right,” I said briskly, fighting off the urge to wallow a little longer in my own self-pity. “What else did you get? There’s still a lot of other stuff in this truck.”
“Aw, nothing much.”
“Come on,” I said, nudging him back. “Show me. I mean if you want to. So far I’m really impressed. I never expected a straight guy to be this interested in antiques.”
He bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh stop it,” I said. “We both know you’re straight.”
“Damn straight,” he said. “And don’t you forget it.”
“As if you’d let me. So show me, OK?”
The rest of Daniel’s haul was decent, but not remarkable. It looked like he’d cleaned out the school’s kitchen—heavy cast-iron skillets, commercial-sized five-and ten-gallon kettles, saucepans, even a wooden box that held two gross of white votive candles.
“What are you going to do with all of this?” I asked. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s great, but why does a single guy, living alone, need all this china and silver and candles—not to mention a ten-gallon soup kettle?”
He looked uneasy. “If I tell you, you’ll keep it to yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“And not even tell BeBe? She’s my boss, don’t forget.”
“I don’t tell her everything.”
“Well,” he said eagerly, “some of it’s for the Tybee house. But the rest, I guess, you know, every chef wants to open his own restaurant.”
“Including you?”
“Sure,” he said. “I mean, Guale is great. BeBe’s kind of a flake when you first meet her, but she’s fantastic in the front of the house. People love being around her. But it’s just…I want my own place. Does that make sense to you?”
It made perfect sense to me. My whole life I’d gone along with somebody else’s plans. Not wanting to rock the boat and put myself first. After all, most of the time I didn’t know what my own plans were. But the need for my own dream was screaming to get out of me.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling up at him. “Your own restaurant. Your own menu. Your own place. Makes a lot of sense.”
We were in the truck, back on Skidaway Road, when he made an elaborate show of looking at his watch. “It’s almost two. Way past lunch. You hungry?”
My first impulse was to say no. After all, this was Danny Stipanek. Icky Danny Stipanek. Take me home, I thought.
“I’m starved,” I said. “Where should we go? Carey Hilliard’s is probably still serving lunch.”
“I know a better place,” Daniel said, glancing over at me.
“OK,” I said. “Where is it?”
“Tybee,” he said. “My place.”
He saw the hesitation on my face.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “The food’s great, and you can’t beat the price. And I swear—no humping.”
“As if,” I said, trying to sound haughty.
Chapter 22
Daniel had the radio in his truck turned to a station I’d never listened to before—an all-oldies station called SURF-101.
I’d never heard this particular song before either, but it was obviously a favorite of his. He sang along with gusto, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, not the least bit shy about singing in front of me—although his voice was awful, loud, off-key, nowhere close to being able to hit any of the high notes.
The whole song was full of sexual innuendo, sixty minutes of teasing and sixty minutes of pleasing, etc. I looked out the window and tried to act like I was somewhere else.
When the song was over, he nodded his head in appreciation.
“Want some free advice?” I asked.
“Depends.”
“Don’t quit your day job,” I said.
“You don’t like Boxcar Willy?” He looked hurt.
“I never heard of Boxcar Willy.”
“Man,” he said. “I guess that means you’re not a beach music fan, huh?”
“You mean, like, the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean? That kind of thing? I guess they’re all right, just not really my generation. Not yours either, come to think of it.”
“I’m not talking about the Beach Boys,” Daniel said. “Although I like their early stuff. No, I mean real beach music, you know, the Drifters, the Tams, the Platters, the Swinging Medallions. Some people call it Carolina beach music, some people call it shag music, ’cause it’s music you can shag to.”
By now we were on Highway 80, crossing the last bridge over Lazaretto Creek before you came onto Tybee Island proper. The water below was calm, and half a dozen shrimp boats were dotted about the surface.
“Oldies,” I said, wrinkling my nose a little. I liked classic rock, myself. “Aren’t you a little young for sixties music?”
“Never,” he said. “My older brother, Richard, he’s the one who turned me onto beach music. He had a hell of a record collection. Still got it too. Vintage vinyl. Beach music is young music, you know, ‘be young, be foolish, be happy.’ That kind of stuff.”
“Well, I like that one,” I said. When was the last time somebody had urged me to be foolish, let alone happy?
Traffic was backed up on the other side of the bridge, a line of cars making the right-hand turn into Chu’s convenience store. It was Monday, but still, the traffic was heavy. Tybee gets like that in the summer, when all of south Georgia shows up for a day at the beach.
“Look at that,” Daniel said, shaking his head and pointing to a billboard on the right side of the street.
“Coming Soon—Exclusive Community of Riverfront Townhomes. From the $200s.”
“You should see those things,” he said, disgust dripping from his voice
. “Prefab shoe boxes, crowded right up on the edge of the marsh, all of ’em painted a different color. Really fruity looking.”
“With striped awnings over the front doors, and lots of tacky pseudo-Victorian gingerbread trim,” I added.
“You’ve seen ’em?” he asked. “Don’t tell me you’re looking to buy one of those pieces of crap.”
I laughed. “Not hardly. My ex designed them.” And I pointed back at the sign, at the bottom, where it said: “Designed by Evans & Associates, Architects.”
“Sorry,” Daniel said.
“Don’t be. They are pieces of crap. There was a time when Tal would have laughed at anybody who’d suggest he’d design something like those. But after the divorce, he needed money. Caroline is—I mean—was pretty high maintenance. The firm took one of the end units in trade, instead of a fee. I think he and Caroline planned to make it their little beach love nest. Until…”
I looked away.
“You want to talk about it?” Daniel asked. “I, uh, I’m really not a blabbermouth, despite what I said to you before, about knowing about your divorce and all.”
“I believe you,” I said. “I am just really sick of talking about this right now. No offense. OK?”
“OK.”
He drove down Butler Avenue to the far end, past Tybee City Hall and the new DeSoto Motel, a drab concrete cartoon that came nowhere near the funky grace of the place that had been bulldozed for its successor, and then he made a left onto Delores Street, and another quick left onto Gladys.
Cars were double-parked all along the street, most of the tags from out of town, beachgoers too cheap to feed the meters in the public lots.
Half a block down, he pulled into a yard that was more sand than weeds.
He cut the truck’s engine. “Here it is. The tiltin’ Hilton.”
Daniel had called the house a cottage, but it was, to be accurate, more a shack on steroids. It had probably been painted once, but time had combined with windblown sand and salt to scrape away all but the faintest vestiges of pale blue paint.
Low-slung and single story at the front, with a two-story wing at the back, it was built of cedar shingles, with a tattered screened porch that appeared to run all the way around the house. No two windows in the front were of the same size or configuration, and the porch’s brick underpinnings had a definite sag.
The yard was littered with the markings of a total remodel—rusted-out harvest gold refrigerator, stacks of cheap fiberboard paneling, a pile of moldy gold shag carpeting, and stacks of lumber, new brick, even a small cement mixer.
“That carpet’s the first thing I tore up,” Daniel said, climbing out of the truck. “And right after that, the paneling came out.”
“Good move,” I said. Cheap paneling was the bane of my existence. I had torn a mountain of it out of the Charlton Street house.
“Is it safe to go inside?” I asked. The front door, with three or four jalousies missing, was standing ajar.
“It’s OK,” Daniel said, walking in ahead of me. “My brother Derek was out here this morning. He’s a plumber. He put in a new water heater for me.”
“You’ve got a brother who’s a plumber?” I was pea green with envy. Tal was a whiz with plans and design, but anything like plumbing, and especially wiring, he considered beneath him. I had mastered the basics of electricity, but I was absolutely helpless when it came to plumbing.
Daniel took my question all wrong. Like it was an insult.
“Yeah, I got a brother who’s a plumber. And I’m a cook, and Richard drives a long-haul truck. Is that a problem for you? Do you have a problem with decent, hardworking people who maybe don’t wear a pin-striped suit and call their stockbroker from their cell phone?”
“No,” I said, trying to unscramble things. “Daniel, I didn’t mean it like that.”
He stood in the doorway, his face hard. “Sure sounded like you meant it that way. You know what I think, Eloise Foley? I think you’re a fuckin’ snob. Who thinks maybe you’re just a little bit better than everybody else.”
“No,” I said, my voice weak. “Really.”
“Really what?”
The sun was beating down on my neck, and I could feel my pale freckled skin sizzle, feel the blisters starting to form.
“God,” I moaned. “I didn’t mean that at all. What I meant was, a plumber? You’ve got a brother who can install a hot-water heater? Can I adopt him? Borrow him, is he married?”
Daniel’s eyes crinkled a little bit. The blue was so bright against his dark skin. I found myself wondering if he worked outside a lot. If he took his shirt off, if he was that tan all over. And what would he look like without a shirt? The gangly teenager I remembered was long gone. Daniel was maybe a foot taller than I was, but he was compact, muscular, with arms that looked like they could easily heft a stack of lumber. His threadbare jeans were baggy, except in the seat. And what a sweet seat he had, I thought, remembering BeBe’s praise of Daniel’s behind. God, what was wrong with me?
“Richard would like you,” Daniel was saying. “But he’s big-time married. And Rochelle would tear you a new asshole if you as much as looked at her husband.”
“I won’t. I swear,” I said. “So, are we all right?”
He sighed. “Yeah. You know, this isn’t going like I planned it.”
That stopped me dead in my tracks. “Wait a minute. Oh shit. Oh no. I’m gonna kill BeBe. I swear to God, she is a dead woman. Could you please take me home?”
Daniel was shaking his head, back and forth. “Damn. Damn. Damn.”
“A setup,” I said. “A stinking setup. And she swore it was all an accident, us meeting at the sale. Just an innocent coincidence.”
“Hey,” he said, grabbing my arm. “That part of it was just a coincidence.”
I jerked my arm away. “Right. Like I’m going to believe you.”
“I had no idea you were going to be there,” Daniel said, tight-lipped. “First I knew of it was when I ran into BeBe. She was paying for her stuff, and she told me you were there too.”
“And that’s when you set it up.”
“Christ, Weezie,” Daniel pleaded. “It’s hot as hell out here. Will you just come inside and we can talk about this without making a scene for the whole neighborhood?”
“And then you’ll take me home?”
“I’ll call you a cab,” he muttered. “What a pain in the ass you are.”
It was twenty degrees cooler on the porch of the house.
“In here,” he said stiffly, opening the door into the house proper.
The inside looked like a big blank box, but had a smell I adored: sawdust. And fresh nails. And paint. I inhaled deeply and sat down on a pile of two-by-fours.
“Tell me about your plan,” I said.
“I just wanted to show you the house,” he said, pleading. “Maybe fix you some lunch. Let you see I’m not a horny teenager looking to climb your frame. Is that a federal crime?”
“Not if you tell me that’s the plan,” I said.
“I told you I wanted to fix you lunch and show you the house.”
“You told me BeBe had to go to the restaurant because there was an emergency,” I corrected him.
“It was an emergency,” Daniel said. “There was no other way I could get you to give me the time of day. So we fibbed a little. Is that so awful?”
“Whose idea was it to have BeBe take the truck and leave me stranded?”
“Hers,” he admitted. “You know how she is.”
“I know.”
He stared down at his shoes for a while. Tattered, paint-splattered black high-tops. “You want lunch?”
“All right.”
He gave me a hand up and took me on a quick tour of the house. “We tore down most of the interior walls,” he said. “There were about a dozen tiny rooms in here. I’m just gonna have a few. The living and dining room, the kitchen, my bedroom and bath, and in the second floor, at the back, eventually I’ll have a couple guest b
edrooms and a bath.”
“Nice floors,” I said, looking down at the stripped floorboards.
“Heart pine,” he said proudly. “I must have pulled about a million carpet tacks out of ’em. I’ve still gotta do a final sand yet.”
The living and dining room consisted of a big rectangle. New windows, with the manufacturer’s label still attached, made up the back wall of the room.
“Can you believe it?” he asked. “This wall was solid, except for one little dinky window. Derek and I put in these windows ourselves. Got ’em at a salvage yard on the Westside, and I bet they still cost more than this whole house cost in sixty-eight when my uncles built the place.”
“Wow,” I said, looking out the windows. Through the screened porch, which was currently minus screens, you could see two huge sand dunes, and in a valley between the dunes, an emerald slice of Atlantic.
“And this,” he said, pointing to the left, toward the entrance into the two-story wing of the house, “is gonna be my favorite spot in the whole house. My kitchen. Or, it will be when it’s done.”
Right now his kitchen seemed to consist of a bronze Hotpoint range sitting beside an old round-shouldered Frigidaire refrigerator. He’d fashioned a counter from an old door laid across a couple of sawhorses, and an unpainted pegboard on a back wall bristled with cooking utensils.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked, running my hand over the 1940s fridge.
“It was out in the shed,” he said, liking that I liked it. “My uncle used it to keep crab bait and beer. Still works great too, although I have to defrost the freezer if I ever want to use it for more than a couple trays of ice.”
“It’s adorable,” I said, and he winced.
“Handsome,” I corrected myself. I opened the door, expecting to see typical bachelor fare, beer, maybe some hot dogs. Instead, the thing was packed. Fresh fruit, white wine, vegetables, half a dozen kinds of mustard, neatly labeled plastic containers, and a six-pack of beer, yes, but imported beer.
Savannah Blues Page 14
